CPA – Website – Workshop – Model Introduction
Your guests are arriving in two hours and you are in a panic. You had planned to make your special chocolate pound cake recipe, but you are out of butter. As you shove your car keys across the counter and plead for a quick rescue run from your less than helpful sister, she bids you to “sit down and chill”. After a quick peek in the refrigerator, she heads out back and returns with the remnants of the garden that the birds had overlooked. And within fifteen minutes, she has created individual fruit and yogurt parfaits in your unused wine goblets, too beautiful to eat.
Are you a cook or a chef in the kitchen? A cook follows a recipe, while a chef can fashion a meal from whatever is available. A chef is attuned to possibilities rather than stymied by limitations.
There is no one right recipe for parenting. If you have two kids, you know how different they are. And you are certainly not a cookie cutter copy of that sibling of yours.
This workshop is not a recipe for how to parent. It is intended to help you think more deeply about parenting.
The more attuned you are to your child’s interests, abilities, temperament, and developmental progress, the more possibilities you can see for them, the more directions they can take, and the less directing, planning, or controlling you need to do.
With a clear understanding of what characterizes healthy adulthood, we can work backwards to recognize the developmental growth necessary to get there. And the further along that developmental work has progressed, the easier the transition to adolescence. For example children who develop internal discipline are not battling with parents about rules and privileges as adolescents because they recognize that they can earn those privileges through self-discipline and self-reliance. And as young adults, they are supporting themselves and not still living in your basement.
Internal discipline is an essential area of development and it can be mindfully fostered throughout childhood in any context regardless of your child’s interests, abilities, or chosen pursuits. You have infinite opportunities to foster movement in the direction of internal control vs. dependence on external control.
Child: “Are we there yet? How much longer is it going to take?”
Dad: “I’ll bet you can figure that out.”
Child: “How?”
Dad: “Here’s a hint. We live close to mile marker 187.”
Child: “Wouldn’t it just be easier to tell me, Dad?”
Dad: “Depends on how often you ask, I guess.”
How do we know what progress our kids are making developmentally? Attunement means knowing the course of development and being able to assess your child’s progress in those areas. But sometimes the process just falls into your lap, like the kid who wants to know how much longer the trip will take. If the parent knows that the child can multiply and divide two and three digit numbers, then figuring the time is a reasonable challenge. Instead of just readily doing the calculation for the child, the parent encourages the child to take it on. In the end, there’s just one little piece of growth and one less little piece of unnecessary dependence. Unless, of course, you just want him to shut up and go back to sleep.
Where growth is needed, opportunities will also just fall into your lap if you are patient. Patient and thoughtful.
Within the next hour or two, your child will do something that elicits a correction or punishment from you. Before you respond, ask yourself, what functional purpose your child’s behavior served. What emotion or issue were they trying to manage? Then ask yourself whether your quick response would have addressed that issue or helped them find a better way to handle it in the future. Our goal for our kids is to get them to analyze before they act. My goal for you is for you to learn to do that first. More likely than not, the issue that was not well understood or handled is a guide to a piece of developmental work the child needs to do.
So, let’s start with the end in mind – healthy adulthood. Work backwards to what development needs to begin in childhood to ease the transition to adolescence and deliver our kids to adulthood. And then we can explore ways to assess developmental progress and how to promote it.