All over the world kids behave in ways that are dramatic, harmful and heart-wrenching. These actions are not baffling. Each is a cry of emotional pain.
Timestamps:
00:00 Newspaper article about a son killing his parents.
01:30 Need to recognize the hundreds of less obvious cries of pain long before a crisis.
Transcript:
Recently I read a newspaper article about a 26-year-old man who had just killed both of his parents with an ax. He didn’t have a job, had always lived with his parents, and was described as having “mental health” problems.
Cries of Pain Unheard
I don’t know this young man, nor do I claim to know his history. I do know that every day, all over the world, kids behave in ways that are dramatic and harmful: school shootings, parents murdered, drug addiction, addiction to phones and video games, suicide, and on and on.
Such conditions and events can be unspeakably heart-wrenching. And when they happen—when a child gets angrily defiant, when a phone becomes an extension of their arm, when they threaten suicide, when there’s a school shooting, everybody throws up their hands and cries out, Why? How could this happen? We’re all surprised, mystified, baffled.
But none of these behaviors is a mystery. Every one of them is a cry of emotional pain—sometimes a cry for help, but always a cry of pain.
After listening to thousands of agonizing stories about children and adults, I can tell you with certainty that in every single case, LONG BEFORE the big problems developed—the ones that finally catch our attention but seem to confuse us—there were hundreds and hundreds of less obvious cries of pain, all warning signs of what was coming.
We must learn to recognize the early cries of pain, instead of ignoring them while they get worse and worse. Often we WANT to ignore the early symptoms, because dealing with the problems can be very, very difficult, especially without guidance. I offer the hope that we can learn to see and smell the smoke before the fire is beyond control.
The sheriff of the county where the ax murder occurred said, “We have had some domestic situations at that location in the past. We’re still working on that.” It’s a little late to “work on that” now, and it’s a guarantee that those “domestic situations” were dismissed each time as manageable by neglect. We have to do better.
That is the purpose of the Ridiculously Effective Parenting training, along with the conference calls, video answers, and blogs—like this one. We want to do far better than simply manage crises or bury bodies. We must learn to love and teach our children, which will cause the “big” events to markedly diminish, if not disappear entirely.
