Children need you to pay attention and listen carefully to the whispers of behaviors and attitudes that reveal unloving patterns that always lead to greater unhappiness.
Timestamps:
00:00 The consequences of not paying attention to a maintenance schedule or a squeak or a rattle.
01:55 Parents need to pay attention to the signs of unloving patterns that always lead to unhappiness.
02:35 Story of Emily acting entitled and angry.
04:22 Guidance taken in how to loveandteach her.
06:01 Consequence for bad behavior and helping her remember.
09:18 Positive results
11:33 Persist until they get it.
12:46 How to listen for the signs.
Transcript:
As I work in my backyard, I pay nearly constant attention to my surroundings. Sometimes I just feel grateful and enjoy what I see, hear, touch, and smell.
The Consequences of not Paying Attention
On other occasions, I perceive the early signs of impending problems. If there’s a wet spot in the lawn, I know I need to dig up the sprinkler system to fix the leak before it’s serious.
If I see more than a few wasps in an area, I look for their nest in a tree or in the ground, so I can eliminate an infestation that could be dangerous to the people who pass by.
If I see a puddle near the elevated lake, I look for the leak that could signal a hole in the dam that could become much bigger and cause a loss of the entire lake.
It’s not more work to pay attention, just a matter of focus, an awareness of what’s happening around me. A lack of vigilant awareness causes a lot of problems in the world around us.
Not paying attention to a maintenance schedule, or to a squeak or rattle, can bring down a commercial jet.
Failure to simply inspect electrical lines led to the Camp Fire in California in 2018, where 153,336 acres burned, killing 85 people and destroying 20,000 structures.
Parents Need to Pay Attention to the Little Signs
Just as in the world, we parents have to LOOK for these early whispers of potentially serious underlying and future problems. We tend to wait, ignoring the signs until a child is in serious trouble, drowning in pain that we could have so easily prevented.
By the time a child is angry or withdrawing or addicted to screen, they’ve been whispering the signs of unhappiness for years.
A Mother Pays Attention to Daughter’s Attitude
A mother called me about her teenage daughter, Emily. Mom said, “I’m trying to love and teach her, but something is just . . . off.”
I said, “Describe an incident from the last twenty-four hours where you wondered about her behavior in any way.”
Mom didn’t have to think long: “Last evening Emily came home from volleyball practice at school, and she marched straight to the kitchen where her sister Sonja was preparing dinner. She said, ‘So, how much longer will it be before we eat?’ Part of me thought it was a reasonable request—she must have been hungry after her workout—but I also thought there was something about her question that wasn’t quite right.”
“Think about it for a second,” I said. “Was she asking a genuine question—like, ‘Is it supposed to rain tomorrow?’—or did she have a tone of impatience, like, ‘How much longer will I—the only person who matters right now—have to wait on you because you didn’t start preparing this meal sooner”?
Mom sighed. “She was definitely impatient.”
Me: Knowing a fair bit about Emily, I’m sure you’re right. From the time she was a small child, she learned that if she demonstrated impatience, or whined, or complained, or got angry, she tended to get what she wanted more often and sooner. So she has continued that practice, and she’s gotten more entitled and more clever about expressing it—to the point where she often fools you, as she did here.”
Mom said, “That’s kind of embarrassing that I haven’t noticed.”
How to Pay Attention, then Love and Teach
“Maybe so, or you could just see it as information to guide how you love and teach her now.” Then I gave her some suggestions about what she could do, because she really didn’t know the next step.
That afternoon, Mom asked Emily to describe the interaction she’d had with Sonja the evening before. Emily acted like she didn’t even know what Mom was talking about.
Now, is it possible that Emily didn’t remember the event? No, not really. It was a very direct confrontation of her sister—it was memorable—but when she was questioned about it, Emily didn’t WANT to remember it. She somehow knew—deep down—her attitude at the time.
Mom said, “I think you know exactly what you said to your sister, and I’ll help you remember. Until you can tell me what you said, and what it MEANT, you’ll be skipping dinner this evening.”
Suddenly, like a miracle, Emily DID remember the conversation and recalled the words she spoke almost exactly—proving, of course, that she had lied about not remembering the event.
Mom said, “Consider your words: ‘So, how much longer will it be before we eat?’ And throw in how you felt when you said those words. What were you really communicating?”
Emily truly appeared to be dumbfounded by the complexity or stupidity of Mom’s question. Children can turn on the “I don’t know” look like a switch. Dinner time was approaching, and Mom wondered whether her consequence of no meal was too severe. She called and asked me.
“Emily has been entitled for so long,” I said, “that usually she does not see it. She really believes that her demands and impatience—cloaked in the ‘right’ words—are acceptable. So, before you make her miss dinner, you might give her a clue or two about what she did.”
“How?”
“You might have her write out the words she spoke and see if she can spot what she was doing. If that doesn’t work—and it might not—you can really clue her in by asking her to imagine the scene happening again, but this time she’s WATCHING an interaction between YOU, Mom, and Sonja.
"You describe arriving home brimming with gratitude for Sonja cooking the meal—for being responsible, for freeing you up to do other things—and you speak to her with that grateful attitude. Give Emily an example of a couple of things you might have said to Sonja. THEN require that Emily write out what she learned from the whole experience with Sonja and with you—before dinner.”
Mom did what I suggested, and within twenty minutes, Emily reappeared with a smile and a printed page, which said this:
“I really didn’t see what I was doing, but you helped me to get the point. I was so selfish. I can hardly believe it. I didn’t respect Sonja’s work at all. I was only thinking of myself. Sonja was making a meal for ME, and I ignored that.
"But it was worse. I pushed her about when she’d be done, as though somehow she was my slave and should hurry up for me. I can see that I act entitled and bratty a lot. I’m not being grateful for all the little things, which really aren’t that little. So I think everything should happen for my benefit, and right now! It’s embarrassing.
"I’ve heard you say that if we’re grateful, we can’t be unhappy, but I didn’t get it until now. If I HAD been grateful, I would have kissed Sonja on the cheek and thanked her for fixing dinner. I wasn’t even close to doing that. Thanks for teaching me.”
Pay Attention to Help Them Change
No, children don’t always respond with this degree of insight or change of attitude, but I can promise you that such changes never occur spontaneously. Children need to be loved and taught before they can feel loved and be wise enough to see their unloving behaviors and change them. They need you to listen carefully to the whispers of behaviors and attitudes that reveal unloving patterns that always lead to greater unhappiness.
We parents can learn to listen much better to the whispers: to the whining that accompanies requests, to the difference between requests and demands, to the hesitation we see before instructions are followed, to the reluctant tone in a voice. Every one of these whispers matters.
Don’t wait for the obvious problems that will be much harder to address. We can learn to feel the tremors before the earthquake, smell the smoke before the forest fire consumes us, and see the trickles of water before the dam breaks and drowns our families.
We begin today.
