Coaching for Relational Parents | Miki Dedijer
By Miki Dedijer
You don’t have to be the consequence visited upon your child’s choices.
Let winter teach her what it’s like to rush out without putting on that extra pair of warm socks.
Let molten wax on the knuckle of her pinkie teach her about a burning candle.
The most loving way to parent can be to get out of the way so your child learns through considered consequence.
Then be there whenever needed as a gentle guide for the teaching to take root.
By Miki Dedijer
Coming out of our house, I see my youngest son peeing all over our new patio. I’m incredulous, and tell him to get a bucket and wash the stones.
Later I ask how come he peed there. And here’s what he tells me–he was competing with his brother to see who could pee the farthest into the bushes. He was backing away while peeing to see how far it would go, and as he ran out of pee, it splattered on the stones.
We had a good laugh about that (along with my pang of paternal guilt). Then we agreed that the next peeing competition will be held on the lawn, well away from the patio.
It’s tempting to stop our child in his tracks when he screams in the car, throws a pine cone at his sister, turns his plate full of food onto the floor.
Sometimes you might have to–if whatever is happening is truly dangerous. Fortunately, it so rarely is.
Still, you might feel an irrisistible urge to master a situation. When you do–when you forcefully intervene–you’re placing control before connection.
Your relationship with your child–as any relationship–asks that your child feels safe with you, seen, respected, understood, no matter how odd the behavior might seem to you.
To paraphrase Alfie Kohn–assume your child’s best motives consistent with the facts.
When my son was peeing on the patio, I could have assumed he was playing, and just asked what was going on. To be honest, a bit of pee never hurt a patio.
All to say, there’s a good lesson here for the relational parent–connect with your child before you direct his behavior.
By Miki Dedijer
We all have a fire to tend. It burns inside of us.
A good fire is welcoming. It draws people in to hear your stories, or enjoy the comfort of your good company.
Sometimes your fire burns too strong. On days like that, your family doesn’t know whether to approach you at all. You’re giving off such impressive though forbidding heat.
On other days you just can’t seem to get it started. There’s something about the weather that makes it hard for you to kindle the ember of life into a heart-warming flame. You have no warmth at your core. You freeze and might have to ask for help to bring your hearth back to life.
One busy day you might carelessly put a wet log onto the embers. A thick smoke blows in all directions. Nobody around that fire can sit still for very long. Some want to stay, but have to hide their faces in their hands to keep from tearing up.
Your child also has a fire within–she looks to you to teach her the art of tending it well. At the end of every day, you could ask her, “Honey, how is your fire burning? What has made it smoky today? When has it burned well?”
With time and experience, she will learn to take responsability for her own hearth. She’ll be able to tell good wood from bad, and how to stay warm under any condition.
By Miki Dedijer
“It’s only a mistake if you don’t learn from it.”
My son spoke this sentence today. We were stuck with the car in an icy ditch. Foolishly, I had tried to reverse uphill on a crust of compacted snow and rain. There was a lot for me to learn here (and model too!).
He’s heard me speak that exact sentence a dozen if not hundreds of times in his little life. It’s a one-liner we often use in our family.
You’ll have some one-liners yourself, I’m sure. Take a moment to think about a few. What do you say again and again in certain situations?
Here are a few common ones: “Practice makes perfect”; “Don’t cry over spilled milk”; “Easy come, easy go.”
You may or may not agree with these. Perhaps they underscore values that are different from yours. But whatever you consider an essential teaching for your child, make sure you can boil it down to a single sentence. With a handful of one-liners, you can then drip-feed your core family teachings throughout childhood.
Redundancy emphasizes importance.
By Miki Dedijer
The world is new to a child, so many things encountered and sensed for the first time, so many transitions from comfort into the unknown.
Being born from the coziness of the womb into the harsh light of day.
The slow descent of the sun and the onset of the dark night and dreamland of sleep.
The sudden awakening in the morning and the rush of being readied for the day.
The fading of the early years and the onset of the individuation of middle childhood.
The hormonal bath of the early teenage years, and witnessing the world’s bewildering vastness.
Through all of these transitions (and there are of course untold others), your child is in need of your guidance. He needs to be oriented by you as his compass. He needs to know that you recognize the passage too, and that you’re there to escort him into the new land which he knows so little about.
Take a moment to think of what transitions your child has gone through in his short life. Ask yourself which transitions he lives through daily, from waking, to leaving home, to eating, to falling asleep.
Then see if you can find a way to shine some light on the transitions yet to come, and prepare yourself to guide him well as they draw near.
By Miki Dedijer
Discipline is teaching, and teaching works best when there’s a relationship of trust with your child.
We build trustful relationships over time. It requires consistency and clarity and good role modelling.
If like many parents you’re unsure how to discipline your child, start by getting clear on what your core values are.
Your values are who you are right now, not in an imaginary future. To understand the values you’re teaching your child, have a look at your day-to-day behavior. These questions from the late pioneer of family therapy Virginia Satir are a good start:
Take an evening with your partner to explore these questions and find some common ground. Then see how you can find a way to consistently model and communicate your shared values.
As you do, your family culture becomes a teaching environment for your child. Here discipline–teaching your child how to build and sustain healthy relationships–becomes a daily practice of shared growth, rather than strenous and random efforts to control your child.
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