Q. My 3-1/2 year-old has started waking every night around the same time, and screaming. I think he’s in the middle of a nightmare. He’s really frightened, and I don’t really know what to do. Not much seems to help—often, I’ll bring him in bed with me, but that doesn’t change the situation long-range. He keeps waking up really scared. Is there any way to help him get through this?

All of us experienced nightmares at some point in our childhood. Usually, nightmares are an occasional thing. Your son probably is experiencing what they call “night terrors,” which go on night after night for a period of time, and usually entail a recurrent dream, or at least, recurrent feelings of fear.

Here’s my picture of what happens to cause nightmares, and night terrors. Your child has an acutely sensitive internal monitoring system that signals strong emotional and physical alarm at the slightest hint of danger, injury, or threat. And because little children don’t understand yet how the world works, their minds register many situations as threatening. Their emotional alarms can go off daily. For instance, a baby might feel afraid while sitting facing the rear in her car seat, because she can’t see anyone there. More challenging situations—going through a struggle at birth, facing a long separation from a parent, or having a scary accident—register deeper fears.

When an experience has caused fear, a child will either go very quiet and lock down his emotional system until it seems safe again, or will scream and cry with all his might. That screaming and crying serves an important purpose! If an adult can come close, hold the child, and let him know that he’s safe now, the child will cry and thrash and keep expressing fear until the fear has been fully expressed. At that point, a child’s system is able too understand that the threat is over. He doesn’t remain afraid.

Many times, at least some of that feeling of fear stays stuck in the child’s emotional memory. The feeling lasts because at the moment the child is frightened, there isn’t the time or the support for the child to really finish expressing how frightened he became. Parents who want to help him will try to hush his expression of fear, because we’ve all been taught that the parent is supposed to hush crying and talk (or threaten) a child out of expressing his feelings. So the feelings of fear that the child didn’t finish expressing are stashed, uncomfortably, in memory.

These emotional memories don’t just sit there. They cause trouble. A child’s stored moments of fear can be kicked into play by little everyday things. A child can become afraid of having his teeth brushed, afraid to wash his hair, or afraid to go into a room by himself, as a way of signaling that he still carries fear within him.

When children are awake, they can stay one step ahead of the feelings of fear they still harbor by being active. Children who harbor big fears tend to be very active—constant activity distracts their minds from the feelings that linger under the surface. But things like the start of school, a parent taking a business trip, a thunder storm, or a tense time in the family can easily trip the stored feelings of fear. The child distracts himself during the day, but in sleep, there’s no escaping the fact that feelings are rankling inside. The mind portrays the fear in the form of a nightmare. It weaves a story or an image with the feelings that were embedded some time ago.

When a child wakes crying and screaming, he’s doing exactly what he needs to do to offload his stored feelings. Crying, trembling, perspiring, and thrashing wildly are the way children dispel the power that fear exerts in their minds. They need to scream. They need to thrash. They need to show you how desperate and terrified they feel. And they need a parent to be close to them, to hold them, and to keep them safe while they get rid of those awful fears.

Your job, as parent, is to hold the child and be his emotional anchor. Make sure a bit of light is in the room so he can see you if and when he opens his eyes. Put your arms around him, pull him onto your lap, or sit very close and keep him right with you. Let him move. Try to tune in to the deep feeling he is expressing, but don’t panic yourself. He needs you to know that he’s in the middle of an emotional bad dream, and to love him and trust that the bad dream will pass. Pour your love and your confidence that all is well into him.

Here are the kinds of things you can say while he’s wild with upset:

“I’m right here, and I’ll keep you safe.”

“Nothing is going to happen to you. I have you in my arms. You are OK.”

“Whatever frightened you is over. It’s never going to happen again.”

“I’ll stay with you until you can tell you’re safe.”

“I am protecting you. I’m watching over you every minute.”

“If you look into my eyes, you will see that I am right here. If you can, take a look.”

Be patient. Working through a big chunk of fear takes time. The kinder and more confident you are, the harder he will cry and thrash, but then, eventually, he’ll feel OK. The bad dream will lift. He’ll be glad to go back to sleep again. And he’ll wake up bright and cheerful in the morning.

Night terrors happen when the fear a child is trying to offload is not a small one. So the child’s mind cooks up a frightening image night after night to set up a chance to work through and be finally rid of the fear that sits so uncomfortably in his memory. Children who have spent time in neonatal intensive care, who have had accidents, or who have been through other overwhelming experiences often have night terrors. Their instinct is to heal fully from frightening experiences, and night terrors help a child to do this difficult but liberating emotional work.

You have great power to assist your child’s emergence from old fearful experiences if you stay, listen, and guide their emotional release process. We call this kind of help Staylistening. If it’s difficult for you to do, because your child seems so distraught, then it’s smart to find a listening partner. Our booklet, Listening Partnerships for Parents, outlines how you can arrange an exchange of listening time with a friend or another interested parent. We parents are, understandably, saddened and sometimes frightened by our children’s raw moments. We love them so much, and, by and large, we haven’t ever taken on the job of helping someone while they face their worst fears. It’s difficult. But a listening partnership can give a parent the emotional wherewithal to help a child heal fully from the fearful experiences he’s had.

Here’s how it can work:

My son had an accident that split his hand open when he was just a year old. We rushed him to the emergency room. My husband and I were frightened and shocked, and I’m sure seeing us so stricken added to his fear in the situation. In the emergency room, they drugged him, strapped him to a board, and stitched him up. I was with him every moment, but the whole experience was not what you would wish for a twelve-month-old child! He cried a few times in the next few days, but he didn’t have a huge emotional reaction to the incident at the time.

When he was three years old, he began to have night terrors. For several months, he would wake screaming and fearful every single night at about 10:30 pm. I figured that he was probably finally tackling the fear from his accident, but there was no way to know for sure why he kept working so hard on fear. He couldn’t really tell me anything while he was screaming, fighting, sweating and trembling. And when he would finish, the fear banished for the night, he would just cuddle a bit and go back to sleep. One night, he screamed so loudly that the neighbors over the back fence knocked on our door to make sure everyone was OK.

Every night, I reassured him, held him, and told him that whatever had scared him was over and it would never happen again. He would thrash and scream. It was as if he couldn’t hear or process any of the reassurance I was offering, but I knew that it was important to be his anchor, to supply a steady counterweight to his fears with my confidence that he was OK. He was fine in the mornings—the emotional episodes didn’t seem to leave any residue to taint the next day.

During this time, he had the same wildly fearful response to any tiny physical injury—any scuff on his knee, or bump on his head. When I could, I did the same, holding him and offering him a safe, close place and time to process his emotional memories of that earlier accident.

He had his terrors every night, like clockwork, until his mind finally was rid of the fear, and didn’t send up any more bad dreams. And throughout this period, a deep seriousness and watchfulness that seemed to be his personality gave way to more laughter, more sparkle, and more appetite for adventure and humor. He began to play with more abandon, and to seek out more daring adventures. Being held and reassured through his night terrors was lifting the heavy weight of caution, and allowing him to see the world as a safer place.

Hand in Hand is a parent education non-profit that has been helping families to build the super-protective factor of parent-child connectedness for twenty years.  You can learn more by reading the Listening to Children booklet series by Patty Wipfler or by signing up for our free monthly newsletter, Connecting! . Or follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ListenToKids .

 Q. It seems to me that children aren’t playing with each other the way they used to. Sometimes, it looks to me like they hardly play with each other at all–they act out imaginary scripts, and they’re each in their own little worlds, next to each other. What can I do to get them really playing again?

I have to agree! Something important has happened gradually over the past 20 years to children’s play. The play in schoolyards and preschools has slid toward more scripted acting, and in many places has moved away from flexibility and from the inclusion of whoever wants to participate.  In spite of this trend, there are simple things parents can do to help their children retain their ability to play flexibly and cooperatively.

Children Are Interested in Each Other from Infancy Onward

Having worked with infants, toddlers and preschool children for many years, I think that children’s inherent ability to notice each other and to care about each other is great, from their early months onward. Very young children may not express themselves in words, but they show that they are highly interested in other children. Through their body language and the expression of feelings, they show acute sensitivity to what happens between themselves and other children. 

Many used to believe that children only do “parallel play,” and don’t really respond to each other fully until they are past 2 years old.  If you look closely, however, you will see that very young children can acknowledge each other, can be thoughtful of each other, and can respond to each other’s initiatives much earlier than two years old, as long as those children have themselves been treated as though they are intelligent, thoughtful people. I remember one 13-month old child in the infant-toddler center I ran who showed a special interest in one of the younger infants there. When her parents took her on a 3-week trip, she called his name every day. She missed him and remembered him often.

Building Empathy and Flexibility in Play

There are two major factors that enhance a child’s ability to show empathy and sensitivity toward other children in play: respect and freedom from canned media input.

Respect

One of the foundations of empathy and connectivity in play is the parent’s ability to honor the child’s intelligence. For instance, with a three-month-old, a parent might say, “OK, Tammy, we’re going to change your diaper now. It will only take a minute,” or, “Tammy, it’s time for me to leave. I’m going to work. I’m going to say good-bye now, and I’ll see you tonight. I love you, I love being your Daddy.” The parent makes the assumption that a 3-month old can make sense of his tone, his words, and the situation. From the moment a parent starts this kind of respectful treatment, his child’s ability to feel trust in others grows. That respect and the confidence it builds promotes language development and allows the child to feel safe enough to show compassion and interest in others.

Part of honoring a child’s intelligence is learning to respond to a child’s crying or tantrums with a willingness to listen. Rather than saying, “Oh dear! What’s the matter now! Can’t you see I have to strap you in the car seat!?” and assuming that the child’s crying is nothing more than a nuisance, the parent would respond with, “I’m here. I know you hate the car seat. I need to buckle you in, but I’m here. You can tell me how hard it is.” The parent would honor the child’s need to express her feelings fully, even if those feelings include wild protest.

We call this Staylistening. It’s very simple, but it’s hard to do. We want to solve our children’s upsets immediately. We don’t want to look like “bad” parents with a “spoiled” child. And if we feel rushed and pressured, we have a hard time slowing down to listen to feeling. Our schedules feel much more important than taking time to honor our child’s upset. However, all good children need to have frequent good cries and healthy tantrums. It’s the way they clear ordinary, everyday bad feelings out of their systems. It’s the way they dissolve the issues that bother them, so they have the emotional capacity to take interest in their parents, their siblings, and in other children. When an adult warmly listens to their big feelings, they make gains in their ability to respond flexibly to other children in play, and to cooperate with the adult more fully in everyday interactions.

TV- and Video-Free Environment

A second important determinant of a child’s empathy and flexibility in play is how much TV and video programming he is exposed to. TV and videos offer free “baby sitting” for harried parents who are overburdened with work and the stresses of parenting. But the breather the parents get is a very mixed blessing indeed.

The price exacted by TV and video programming, even programming “designed for children,” is that it wraps the child’s mind in one-dimensional experience. Children are built to learn by using their bodies and all their senses. They need to experiment, make thousands of necessary mistakes, and try out all the ideas they have in a safe environment. TV fascinates children, but it glues their attention to a flat screen experience that has little to do with real people or real life.

Children see cartoon characters being chased, caught, bopped on the head, or plunged into flaming crashes. They see appealing little creatures threatened by forces much greater than they can handle. And if they watch sports with Daddy, they see highly sexualized adult interaction during the beer commercials or scenes of horror when the latest movie release is advertised. These create scenarios in their minds that can’t be processed, because they are not congruent with the safe, emotionally warm, protective environment their minds need in order to function. The images keep popping back into the child’s consciousness as their minds try to work out what they mean, and their play becomes a repeated effort to crack the meaning of the violence, the threat, the interactions contain no love or respect.

The TV or video experience tends to isolate the child. As he plays, his attention is on the images in his mind, not on the child next to him. When that child doesn’t play according to the script, the child with the mental TV script has big feelings. When a whole roomful of children have TV scripts driving their play, the play is between many separate children each alone with their invisible script, rather than many children creating something together, and flexing with each other’s ideas. 

The eruption of feelings in play is fine, if an adult nearby understands that the upset is rooted in the vivid media experience that’s stuck in the child’s mind. As he cries about the non-cooperation of his playmate, or the fact that his mighty sword (just like the one on the video!) broke, his attachment to those rigid scenarios begins to melt.  He sobs that life isn’t like the video, and with your closeness to support him, he recovers from the isolation that those scenarios enforced. When he is finished, he’ll be able to notice other children much more fully, and will be able to respond to them, rather than to the canned experience that had a hold on his mind.

It may sound radical in the electronic age, but I urge parents to set the policy that they watch TV only when the children are not present, and keep their children away from TV and videos until they are well into elementary school. By that age, children have developed strong interests and talents, built good friendships, and have learned to read and to tell their own stories in writing and art. They are in a much better position to manage the slippery understanding that programs and videos are not the real world. However, even pre-teens can be adversely affected by movies and video games that offer harsh, violent, or highly sexualized content.

TV saps parents’ power to connect, too. When our children see us watching TV, they see the parents they love temporarily unable to engage with them. TV flips off the big switch of connectedness: when it’s on, we lose the feel of our connections to each other. This is hard for young children to understand–why are their beautiful Mommy and adored Daddy so unresponsive? Why are the games or the news or the soap operas more important than anything else?

We parents do need time to take care of ourselves. We do need relief from the pressures and from the emotional currents of the day, which can toss and turn us until we’re exhausted. Sometimes, we seek refuge by turning on the TV and tuning out an unpredictable and demanding world around us.

There are a few decent videos and a few decent TV programs for young children. Look for the real-world based videos, and for Mr. Rogers, Reading Rainbow, and Sesame Street. Beware of Disney fantasies, as these always portray good and evil in ways that are frightening to young children. 

Experiment with turning off the TV, or unplugging it entirely, as did the mother in the story below. Staylisten as your children go through “withdrawal” and regain their capacity to connect with you and play flexibly with each other. Seeing the “before” and “after” difference will help you figure out the policy on TV and video that works best for your family.

Parent Success Story: No TV for a week!

I’ve been sick for over a week, and feeling distraught over stressful events on holiday with my parents and siblings. It was simply a time where I didn’t have much attention for playing with my kids.  Due to my feeling bad and a broken lock on the TV cabinet, they’d gotten to watch a lot of PBS kid’s programs.  And on vacation our host had purchased some really good kids’ videos, and they had spent a lot of time watching them on TV in our hotel room. 

I believe the studies that suggest that TV isn’t really helpful for children because such passivity occurs for the viewer. Yet, I’d let the viewing get out of hand during a difficult few weeks.

So, even though I wasn’t over my cold yet, I had a good Listening Exchange, in which my listening partner reminded me that I’m a good mom, and I had a chance to release some of my many upsets.  I took courage and asked my husband to fix the cabinet lock for me. The next morning when the kids asked for TV I said lightly, “We’re taking a break from TV!”  For a while we just snuggled but within 20 minutes my 4 1/2 -year- old son was sobbing on the floor about not getting to watch TV.  This was interesting since his first response to things unpleasant during the heavy TV period was to get angry and loud.  Now, with no TV, his sadness was instant.

I took heart, held him, and wondered what the day would be like since it had been an unusually long stretch that we’d watched a lot of videos in our house. I wondered what feelings might have been kept in check due to that distraction.

Within minutes the kids initiated a discussion on what there was to do.  And they asked why we were taking a break from TV. I said (as has been discussed between us before) “when we’re watching TV we aren’t really playing, or learning by noticing the world around us. Today we could draw, cut things out of paper, look out the window, or play in the sandbox outside.  We could eat breakfast, play–so MANY things!”

They both decided they wanted BIG teddy bear pancakes for breakfast and they both wanted to help. It was fun stirring the batter together. I realized the weeks with TV had halted their usual cooking-with-me time we’d had before.  At breakfast my son began crying hard again about “pretexts” such as his pancake wasn’t big enough and then I put his milk in the wrong cup.  Previously he had several minutes on the floor crying hard because I chose the wrong pants for him to wear.

I had a few concerns about whether I’d have enough attention for them particularly with my cough and headache–but I was able to kindly say, “I hear you, honey” or even get close for a few moments and put my warm hand on his shoulder. Then my 2 1/2-year-old daughter started in too. She began crying hard because she wanted to “win” at getting to the bathroom door first.

“Oh boy,” I thought, “This is gonna be a day!”  But I managed to just be there and not be impatient. I was just thinking to myself that I had a lot of courage to turn off the TV when I’m sick, when to my surprise, my son broke out in song.  This is what he sang, complete with hand motions and dance steps–a song from his preschool which he told me later he’d never sung all by himself before.  It’s such a beautiful song with these words:

 “Let all the children waken, The sun is in the sky,
Awaken! Awaken!  And hear the Cuckoo cry.
Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
Wake up! Be Happy! Wake up Mr. Sun,
The night has gone, The day has begun! ”

Tears came to my eyes and I was so GLAD that I cared enough about my kids to turn off that TV.  My daughter then stood in front of the mirror and practiced opening one eye while closing the other.  By having time together, feelings and all, rather than virtual time my children had already showed me the interesting ways their minds work.  I wasn’t right at their side all day, either.  Here is a list of a few of the things they spontaneously did together while I cleaned, wrote, answered the phone and made tea.  They made letter shapes out of bead strings, played hide and seek, laughed and hugged, played by the back door, called hello to neighbors…

 Turning off the TV and allowing and supporting their feelings (even if not perfectly) immediately opened up possibilities–and the reality of their creativity, intelligence and hopefulness about the day. (Mine too!)

–a mother in Portland, Oregon

Q. My daughter insists she wants to play with the two girls who live next door but she comes home every time highly emotional and upset. I watch them without her around and the older one is extremely mean to the younger one. I am not sure how to avoid this situation, or what to say to my daughter. I don’t understand why she wants to play with kids who are clearly mean and not willing to play reciprocally. She has reported that other kids at school don’t want to play with her. I think she might be bullying at school, having learned this behavior from the neighborhood kids.

A. Bullying is a highly contagious behavior that transmits immediately from child to child, like the flu. The behavior can start with an adult bullying, threatening, demeaning, or harshly excluding a child. Some parents do this as a matter of course: it is accepted in many families as rightful discipline. But disrespect and intimidation set a behavior example that children absorb in full. When a child has been treated badly, or has witnessed harshness, the behavior enters the child’s experience, but her mind can’t process it. Children simply do not understand meanness or harshness. It always hurts, even when they are not the direct target.

The words said, the facial expressions a child sees, the body language of the aggressor are all recorded in a child’s mind, much like a movie. And whatever feelings the child has—fear, helplessness, shame, confusion, perhaps anger—are stored in the child’s emotional memory, mixed in with this indigestible incident.

Children’s minds don’t naturally accept these wads of unloving experience. The way children try to get help with unloving experience is to display it openly—that is, to say the kind of thing that was said to them, to exclude another child the way they were excluded, to call someone a name they heard called on the playground. They do this when they feel upset, tight with fear, or far from the feel of love.

Being far from the feel of love is an emotional emergency for a child. The lack of a warm connection means that the child can’t be generous toward others, can’t be flexible, and must have things her way and her way only. Children display the worst of what they’ve seen in relationships when it’s been too long since their last cuddle, their last relaxed chuckle. Children need to see the love light in their parents’ eyes, and need to hear interest and consideration in the voices of their teachers, to function well.

The most vital thing you do as a parent is to connect. Children need their parents to take the time to make warm eye contact, to cuddle, to wrestle, to play, to hang out, to be available, and to offer limits when their children’s behavior turns sour. And children need their parents to listen to their feelings when they’re having a sad or a frustrating time of it. But parents are overburdened with work and the pressures that parenting create. So even when they do know something about the importance of connecting with their children, and allowing for emotional moments, they can have a hard time doing it.

When your daughter comes home from playing with the neighbors, she probably has witnessed what we call “off-track behavior.” It has upset her, and she’s signaling to you, with her own version of off-track behavior, that she’s in trouble. So when she gets upset at you, move close, put your arms around her, and tell her that you won’t let her say those things to you. Because you are close, and kind, emotions will heat up. She’ll spray more cutting words around, and she’ll show you her meanest faces. You won’t see her face. You’ll see a reasonable facsimile of what she witnessed next door or on the playground. To help her, accept her outpouring of upset, and guide her gently.

Say things like, “Sweetie, I’m your Mommy. I’m not going to let you talk to me that way. And no matter what you say, I’m going to be here with you.” Or say, “Something hard must have happened to make you say that. What happened, honey?” Don’t expect her to tell you. Your interest and warmth will help her feel the awful emotions that have collected. She will want to get away, will use more harsh language, and she may even start to try to hit or hurt. Gently but firmly keep her from hitting you or hurting you, but do let her have the feelings and the struggles that fuel this behavior.

You might also offer your daughter the reassurance that she is a good person and a good friend, and that anyone who gets to know her will see how special she is. If she “hates” you saying those things, back down a bit, but not entirely. Protest might mean that you’ve struck a chord of hurt, and that she needs this kind of reassurance, though it makes her cry harder and fight harder at the moment.

When she begins to cry or tantrum, you’re on the right track. The tears and the struggling and fighting that come next are every child’s way of offloading feelings of fear. If you want her to move out of these difficult behaviors, you need to allow an outlet for the feelings underneath, in your arms, with you guiding things along. You listen. She spouts and cries and yells and is beside herself. You tell her you care. She spews the things she has heard next door and on the playground, aiming them at you. You keep telling her that you’re going to stay with her while she feels this badly.

She needs you. It’s your attention and caring that are going to help her right her overturned emotional boat, once all the tension it carried has floated away.

We call this Staylistening, and it works beautifully to relieve a child of the meanness she’s been showing. Listening with kindness is the cure for the “bully infection” she caught. Your love replaces the hurtful memories she is processing. Here’s an article that contains a powerful anecdote in which an adult diffuses meanness in a child with Staylistening.

There are also playful ways to respond to a child’s upsets. One kind of response that works really well to diffuse meanness is described in the article, The Vigorous Snuggle.

Those are the things to try with your daughter.

But you don’t want to have to mop up after the neighbor children’s treatment of each other and your daughter every day.  Children who are out of bounds with each other need an adult to stop them, with kindness but full intention that this behavior will stop. If no one at their home is setting effective limits, then I wouldn’t let her go there, or to any unsupervised place to play with them. 

Here’s where you have some choice. You can, instead of letting her go there, invite them over to your place. For them to have half a chance of being good to one another, you’ll need to help all three of them feel connected to you. That probably means playing with all three. Pillow play, hide and seek, or active chasing and romping are the kinds of play that have the best chance of getting laughter (and thus, connection) going between them. If and when one begins to target another (and it doesn’t matter whether it’s your child or sibling-on-sibling harshness), intervene playfully and physically, “Ohhhh! Suzie has a few grumpies today! Hmmm, how do we get those grumpies out!? Shall I pick them out of your hair for you? I bet I can get them all! I FOUND one! Here’s another!” or “Hmmm, how do we get those grumpies out? I think I have to pump your arm up and down a bunch to squirt them out! Here goes!” If you’re strong enough, pick one of them up and turn her upside down and shake her…something like that. Offer immediate, vigorous, playful intervention. See if you can get them laughing, and “showing” you their mean moves, so you’ll tackle them again.

Let these games go on for as long as you can—they’re healing, and they help children find a way to have a good cry, sooner or later. The aggressor child needs some good big cries, to help her get her upsets taken care of.

It may not be workable for you to offer the neighbor children that kind of resource. 

If not, you can try setting limits seriously, but kindly. You might say with your most friendly tone, “Suzy, I can’t let you be hard on Sally here. If you have to be angry, come with me and tell me how you feel,” and bring her with you into another room. Listen to her upset until she feels better.

Or you can say, “Suzy, I can’t let you be hard on Sally here. I’m going to ask you to go back to your house for awhile, and come back when you feel better. We like you so much, and we want you here, but that kind of talk doesn’t work at our house.”

This last is the least workable, because it sends a child who is in her worst emotional state off by herself. She can’t help but feel blamed and shamed. And it may be that if she is sent home, she’ll get more harsh treatment there, fanning the “Mean Girl” flames for another day. But if your resources are at low ebb, it might be all you can do.

You’ll be able to think about these alternatives, and figure out which ones feel like they fit what you can manage, and what the neighbor children might be able to tolerate, too.

Let us know what you figure out!

Patty

Hand in Hand is a parent education non-profit that has been helping families to build the super-protective factor of parent-child connectedness for twenty years.  You can learn more by reading the Listening to Children booklet series by Patty Wipfler or by signing up for our free monthly newsletter, Connecting! . Or follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ListenToKids .

Q.� � I really want to connect with the kids this Summer when we’re less busy. I would love some relaxed ‘down time’ with just the family but don’t want the kids to complain the whole time that they’re bored. What do you suggest?

What do you remember of the lazy days of summer when you were a child? What were the best times? What did you look forward to all year long? What new experiences did you have that taught you new things about the world, your talents, and yourself?

For parents in two-job and three-job households, the anticipation of the fun of summer is lost in the pressured rush of figuring out child care, camps, and whether or not a vacation is financially possible this year. But it’s important to think, for a moment, about what opportunities summer does bring, both conventional, and unconventional!

There are chances to play more fully

The chance to play all day, every day is wonderful for children. They need those long days and weeks with no pressure to perform, pass tests, or prove themselves, except by their own choosing.� Play is the natural habitat of children. At play, they are using all their minds and their hearts to learn and grow.

We can relax some of the rules and worries we usually live by to let fuller play happen. Having water fights in the yard, playing hide and seek at dusk in the neighborhood, staying at the park until it’s really dark, making a mud hole and some really thick “chocolate” cakes in it, making a tent from a sheet in the back yard as a hideout, spitting watermelon seeds as far as you can—these are the kinds of play that don’t require electricity, don’t require any purchases. They just take imagination and a “Sure, that sounds great!” attitude from a parent.

Any play that includes laughter (and doesn’t include tickling or making fun of someone) is play that helps children grow strong. They gain confidence in the goodness of others as they laugh. They feel like there’s genius in the air when they laugh. And, chuckle by chuckle, they shake loose from their fears and worries.

There are chances to learn in unusual ways

When you have a toddler nearly ready to use the toilet, you can allow him or her to roam the back yard naked, learning to master bodily functions in a place where there can be no “accident.” You can pee with him in the bushes, and laugh together as the leaves dance. When you have a child afraid of the dark, you can sleep outside with her when the moon is full, to see what it’s like to have it be light all night long without a night light. When you have a child afraid of the water at the pool, you can try to stick your toe in, and then run playfully away, “afraid” of the water, so he can laugh while you “borrow” his difficulty for a half hour or so. When you’ve got a child who chews her fingernails, you can grab a puppet, and let the puppet want a nibble, getting some laughter going as your child denies the poor puppet a taste. Summer means that fresh new things can happen, usual boundaries can flex, and parents can relax a bit more around play that one wouldn’t allow when life has to be more structured.

There are chances to learn to help children with the feeling of boredom.�

Some summer days can lose their sparkle. Children feel listless, and say they are bored. You’ll notice that there actually are things they could do, and people they could play with, but they are missing that sense of adventure that can turn a simple piece of paper and a scissors into an experiment with hat making, or airplane crafting, or cut out design. The feeling inside of them is actually the problem, not any lack of things to do.

As far as I can tell, when children say they’re bored, they really are telling you that they don’t feel connected enough to feel hopeful. So rather than become irritated that they don’t appreciate all the things they have, or all the time you’ve spent trying to make them happy, move in close. Lie down with them, or next to them, where they languish. Don’t try to solve the problem of what to do. But do look pleased to be with them. Do cuddle. Do just stay there with them, until they can absorb your presence and your attention. If you want, after several moments of just lying with your child, paying attention but not prodding, you can begin musing about stuff they could do. But be silly in your suggestions. Say things like, “Well, we could start a booger collection and pick all our noses and see how much we can get, and figure out where to store it!” “We could try to give Bowser an airplane ride like you get on my feet!” or “We could hide under the bed when Daddy gets home, and see how long it would take for him to find us.” or “I could lick your toes and see how they taste!” or “I could shake you upside down, and see if that gives you any ideas at all,” or “We could put a cotton ball on the overhead fan, and then turn it on, and see what happens!”�

Any silly idea will do. You’re not trying to solve the problem of what to do. You’re trying to get a bit of laughter going, and then a bit more, and then even more. While children are laughing, the bridge between you and them rebuilds. Your silly ideas, and the release of laughter, jumpstarts their minds. Soon, they know what they want to do again. If not, they become irritated with you, and your presence becomes more and more of a bother. They work themselves into a good cry, which is the other way children clear their minds of emotional sludge, and regain their enthusiasm for life. Stay. Listen to what a dumb day they are having, and how you are a stupid parent because you won’t let them x, y or z. To really get the awful feelings out, they need someone safe as their target. That would be you! You don’t have to believe that this is their full and final evaluation of your parenting. It’s not. It’s just what they need to do to get the tears going strong, so they can come back to you and feel their love for you again when they have finished.

Vacations provide the chance to help children over big behavioral humps.

For children, the best thing about vacations is that their parents aren’t so busy. The prolonged contact (which often starts in the car or on a plane) gives children’s emotional minds a sense of greater safety. This, in turn, translates into children trying to set up chances to heal from the harder times they’ve had. Any times of forced separation, strict boundaries, or tense parent preoccupation with adult issues leave an emotional burden sitting heavily in children’s emotional memory.

When the family comes together and spends extended time, a child’s limbic system, the seat of her emotions, gets the signal that all is better than usual. Feelings that don’t correspond to the closeness, the ease, or the sense of relaxation pop up, ready to be released. Those feelings, held in storage for days or months or years, don’t match the present circumstances. It’s as if the limbic system says, “Hey, we have a wad of xyz upset in here that is old and taking up lots of space. The world isn’t xyz any longer. Let’s heave it on out!” and up comes the upset, right at the time when the parents are trying to relax and enjoy their children.

If you’re not ready for your children’s emotional cleansing sessions, you’ll be irritated for sure. You’ll think, “This ungrateful kid can’t tell that we’ve practically stood on our heads to get her to Jungle World. And now she’s crying because we won’t buy her a second stuffed animal! What have I done wrong to raise such a child!?”�

If you have remembered that, when conditions are extra good, children then cry about when they weren’t wonderful, so they can leave the emotional debris of that past incident behind, you’ll think, “Well, this is a hassle for sure. But here we are, we don’t have anywhere we have to be. We can sit here and listen to her cry about wanting a second stuffed animal. We can just keep saying ‘No,’ and loving her. That’s what she needs, and that’s what we’ve got. Time and love. The rest of the people here we’ll never see again. If they are bothered by us, they can find another gift shop.”

Here’s how it works:

One of our Hand in Hand moms went with her husband and her two sons on vacation in Hawaii. It was a very special trip. The whole family went through a three-hour time change, and this upset sleep and family rhythms for the first day or two. They used Playlistening—wild wrestling and pillowfights in the morning—to help relax her children, who were tense with the changes and the early rising. They also took care to give their boys Special Time—each of them took one son, and did Special Time each day, trading boys back and forth day by day. The boys were also getting unusual treats: special foods, lots of fun in the water, and even a video or two, usually forbidden at home.

By the third day, their older son, who has been an edgy, tightly wound child from the beginning, launched into a big cry. The pretext was small, but the theme was, “You never take me anywhere!” He went on for very long time. His next upset was, “You never buy me anything,” launched right after he’d been allowed to have a new toy. He was clearing out old feelings that the new and relaxed situation had shoved up for healing. The parents guess that, over the next week, he cried a total of 4 or 5 hours, hard! They listened and didn’t hurry him. Yes, it was disappointing at times, but they decided to trust his sense of what he needed to do at any one time. His little brother also had some really big cries, the most obvious of which was one sitting on the jetway on the way home, refusing to walk because the airline attendant had handed his brother a boarding pass after scanning it, but not him.

The parents were feeling a bit badly done to, as they had imagined an idyllic time, full of play and enjoyment, but finding at least one big long cry each day was being chosen by one or the other or both of their sons.

When they returned, they noticed a huge payoff in the behavior of their oldest. He was one who refused to touch a vegetable. He began showing off, eating every vegetable at dinner, and salad for breakfast! He would never clear his plate from the table. “It’s too heavy,” was his usual excuse. After vacation, he has been showing his parents how many plates he can carry at once—he is up to five at a time! He would never allow his mom to help him with spelling or other homework. Any suggestion was rebuffed, or taken as a criticism. After vacation, presto! He was easy to work with, interested in suggestions, open to help. The boys’ mom says that they have a neighbor who gives very few compliments, and who has known her son since infancy. A week after they came home, he said to her, “Your son has become so flexible, so easygoing! I’ve never seen him like this.”

She is sure that what allowed this progress to happen was the close family time, and the Special Time, Playlistening, and Staylistening they did. They hadn’t planned to create an emotional “spa” for their children. But children know when an opportunity is at hand, and they’ll go for healing and a better connection any chance they have.

May your vacation offer such chances. May you remember that your children’s upsets are the beginning of a summer growth spurt, a healthy sign that they love you and trust you to care.

For more stories of how parents use the tools of Parenting by Connection with their children, visit our new blog at http://superprotectivefactor.wordpress.com/

Hand in Hand is a parent education non-profit that has been helping families to build the super-protective factor of parent-child connectedness for twenty years.� You can learn more by reading the Listening to Children booklet series by Patty Wipfler or by signing up for our free monthly newsletter, Connecting! or follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ListenToKids� .

My daughter is becoming a pre-teen, and I’m worried! She has big emotional upsets now and then, but is fine with us other times. How do I ride this roller coaster with her, rather than be upset with her for being on it. I know this is a hard time for kids!
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Dear Parent:

Good for you for thinking ahead! Adolescence is a stage that gets very bad press, which is unfortunate for teens, and for parents as well. It is a growth stage that is full of promise! The perils get much more attention than the excitement of seeing your child grow, learn, and explore her expanding world.

The fact that your daughter has occasional passionate emotional upsets is a good sign, not a bad one. Children who feel safest with their parents are the ones who tend to have open upsets. Your daughter’s explosions are a sign that she is using her instinct to offload emotional tension, whenever she feels overloaded and can’t march forward one more step.

Here are some ideas about building a safe, secure relationship with a child who is entering adolescence. There’s not room here to cover everything, but these ideas may be helpful.

Find a listener! Parenting an adolescent is a big deal!

First, find a good listener (not someone who will judge you, analyze you, tell you what to do, or tell every story about their life that they feel relates to yours). After ten or so years of parenting, you will benefit from a chance to look at the background noise in your mind that will be accompanying you and your child from here on in. The things to talk about are, “What happened to you when you were ten, eleven, and twelve years old (or the exact age of your child)?” “Who did you feel close to then? Did you feel safe and valued?” “What did you love to do? Hate to do?” “How was school for you during these years?” “What did you worry about then? What helped?”

We parents may already have a dim awareness of how heavily our own history tints our experience with our child. Memories of adolescence, both the good and the hard, send up emotional smoke that has a strong effect on our relationships with our children. For instance, if you felt lonely and out of place during those years, then when you look at your child’s unhappy face, you’re sure that your child feels that very same way. This projection from the past blurs your ability to understand your child, who may indeed be unhappy, but for entirely different reasons. Having a chance to talk at length about your own adolescence with someone who will be interested but not judgmental will help you see what emotional landmines were planted in you as you grew. It will help you tiptoe around them as you try to support your fresh new teen.

The second set of things to talk about has to do with your ten- to twelve-year relationship with your child. By now, there are things that go well in that relationship, and interactions that always follow the same unfruitful pattern. With a listener, ask yourself these questions; “What do you remember thinking and feeling when you realized that you would be having this child?” “How was pregnancy? How was birth?” (These are important questions for fathers, too!) Often, dynamics get set up in a relationship between parent and child in the first days or weeks of the baby’s life, if not before. It’s good to remember back to those early days, and to go over your history with your child in detail. We all have memories of times we wish hadn’t happened, and of times we wish we could have had more often. Talk about them. Notice what feelings you have about them. And if your feelings happen to spill out into tears or laughter, that’s wonderful. Your story as a parent is important, and it’s right and good that your feelings are close by. You love. You care. You have worked so hard. Of course you have feelings. Let them show!�

Often, a parents’ patience for and “feel” for his or her teen is vastly improved by talking about the above subjects, and by the emotional release that can come with telling your story to a good listener.

Nurture the good times by offering Special Time
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The second initiative I think makes a big difference is to begin to do Special Time with your child. Offer an amount of time you can manage, set it up ahead of time, and tell your child that you’ll do whatever he or she wants to do during that time, short of things that are illegal or unsafe. And you’ll need to put monetary restrictions out there on the table. “Yes, we can spend up to $4,” or “No, we won’t have any spending money, but you can figure out what else would be fun to do.” Then, give your delighted and undivided attention to your child. Be pleased with him or her, no matter what. Use whatever activity he or she chooses as a vehicle for your delight in your child. Offer more eye contact, more affection, more energy and more closeness. And do not bring up even one sore subject. Not one!

Set up a tradition of doing Special Time now, so that it can carry through adolescence. Make it a priority. Make it happen. It’s going to be the recurring place that your child can count on for feeling your approval and your efforts to listen and to love. Don’t tie it to doing chores or to getting homework finished: this is a parent/child given, like brushing teeth every day is a given. It helps keep your relationship with your child healthy.

Your pre-teen might want to have you listen to his favorite music. Or to show you his skateboard moves. He might want to teach you a video game, and then win over and over again, while you lose badly. She might want to bake. She might want a backrub. She might want to be taken somewhere special. Let your child experiment with what to do.

This kind of time ensures that your child will see you as a resource, as someone who is interested in them, someone who wants them to have fun. And whatever other difficulties the two of you might face, they’ll be able to count on Special Time, during which you don’t try to tackle those difficulties directly. You’ll see that Special Time can play a big role in resolving difficulties, simple as it is. It gives parent and child a time for things to go well, so that when you make your appointment with your child to discuss her falling grades or her rising cell phone charges, she can remember that you love her. The hard things will go better.

Find the “grooves” for closeness that you and your child have developed.
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There are things you and your child have done together that were lots of fun in childhood. Maybe it was letting her jump on the beds when she was three and four. Maybe it was making cookies together. Maybe it was playing catch in the park. Maybe it was romping together with the dog.

Never let go of one of these grooves. If you have had the habit of spending some time lying with your child before sleep, don’t stop because he or she has become ten or eleven or twelve years old! School is getting tougher. Adult attention there is becoming more dilute. The chances to play are being stolen away year by year. Keep that cuddling going!

If you have let the children cuddle in bed with you on Saturday mornings, call for them, or wait until they finally wake up, and pile into their beds instead!

If you have a child who loves his back rubbed or scratched, spend time doing this whenever you can.

If you have had sock fights, with “warring” camps on either side of the living room sofa as a family when the children were small, get them started again. Gather all those big-sized socks. Have another family “battle.” Lose, but not too quickly.

If your child now wants to talk with you at midnight on Saturday night, arrange for a nap on Saturday, so you can listen well while he or she pours out thoughts and experiences that are important to hear.

Here’s one mother’s experience of keeping a groove of play and closeness open into teen years.

“My son is 15 now, and he’s much bigger than I am. When he was younger, he used to chase me, and get me down and tickle me. And he just loves that, absolutely loves that. He laughs and laughs. Now, he’ll take a stinky shoe or a stinky sock, and chase me around, or pick his toenails and try to gross me out with what he found. Of course, I am VERY grossed out, playfully! My yelping and running gets him laughing and playing hard. This kind of play is really good, because he’s so big and strong; it’s a way we can have fun without me being too overpowered.”
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Don’t worry that other families don’t seem to be doing what you are doing. It’s your family. It’s your relationship with your child. And every relationship, like a thumbprint, is different, lovely in its intricacy, and reflective of just you, and just your child. You’re not supposed to be like anyone else! Neither is your child!

And finally,

When your child begins to cry or rage, listen. Don’t argue or teach. Just listen.
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We’ll say the least about this, but it might be the most important idea. Crying and being angry and upset are signs that your child is doing the healthiest thing possible to get rid of bad feelings and tension. They are our natural safety valve for an overload of feelings. If you’ve set a limit and this is what set your child off, relax and just stick with your limit, or your expectation. Your child will be totally unreasonable for the period of time that he or she is scrubbing out the upset. Then, sweet reason will return, especially if you don’t get angry or insulted in return. Just listen. It’s pain coming out. It’s pain your child doesn’t want to hold in any longer. It’s a messy, hot-button process. But it works to clear your child’s mind and heart of sadness, anger, and distance. If you listen, you’ll be helping in a way that most of us never experienced.

I wish you well in your journey into this exciting stage of parenting! Hold on to your hat, and expect to learn a lot from and with your child.

Hand in Hand is a parent education non-profit that has been helping families to build the super-protective factor of parent-child connectedness for twenty years.� You can learn more by reading the Listening to Children booklet series by Patty Wipfler or by signing up for our free monthly newsletter, Connecting!
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Q. My 6-year-old daughter seems to be suffering from performance anxiety and perfectionism not only at school but overall in her life. I’d love to get some ideas and/or resources for help with this issue. Specifically what I notice is that my daughter will start on a homework activity (for example, a math word problem) and get into an emotional frenzy such that she cannot even read the actual word problem (which she is easily capable of doing). This problem is not just limited to schoolwork, but affects every area of my daughter’s life.
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Dear Thoughtful Mother:

Yes, it looks like feelings have trapped your little girl into a box that is getting tighter and tighter for her. Good for you for reaching out for some ideas and help!�

One way to look at her fear of making mistakes is to see it as a symptom of some knot of fear that she carries into every situation. If you just address the symptom—the difficulty with math, for instance—the things you do will be less effective than if you address this as a situation that calls for your help with her fears in general.

One way to help children gain confidence in a global way is to play hard with them, to play rambunctiously. Children’s strength and confidence is built with pillow fights, chasing through the house, horseback rides that end with you bucking her (carefully, but not too carefully) off onto a soft carpet, contests in which she jumps on the bed or the sofa while you try (but mostly fail) to catch her feet, and putting her on your back and giving her bouncy rides around the house.� During this kind of play, watch carefully to see what lets her laugh, and do more of that, working to get as many giggles as you can. Take the less powerful, less capable role in the play. Be goofy, try to catch her but trip and fall, offer kisses and chase her all over to land just one. You don’t need much of an excuse to play this way. Just start, notice the moments when laughter breaks through, and do more of whatever created that opening.

Try to sustain this kind of play, which we call Playlistening.� Be watchful not to play so forcefully that you overwhelm and frighten her, but do challenge her every now and again in the middle of play she knows she can handle. You don’t want her to feel that she’s in danger of being defeated. Always give her a chance to rise again to “get’ you back. Her laughter helps her to offload fear and build a sense of resilience. When she gets hurt (minor bumps may bring floods of tears or anger), just move in and listen. Let her cry passionately for as long as she needs to. These hearty cries, with your support, are part of what’s necessary to help her move from easily feeling overwhelmed by small tasks toward feeling her power even when she’s challenged.

Vigorous Playlistening sets the stage for this next piece of work, which will address her fear of making mistakes more directly.

I’ll now describe the Staylistening tool for helping her with her fear. You’ve told her, probably many times by now, that mistakes are OK, and are part of the learning process. That’s important, but it’s a step you can now consider “done.” Your verbal guidance has done as much as it can. Concepts don’t help us when we’re upset. When her “I’m overwhelmed” feelings come up, they blot out the good things you’ve tried to convey. You can’t teach her anything during those moments. What you can do is pay attention and offer your caring while she is overcome by the feelings she has and offloads them in tears and tantrums.�

So, let’s imagine that she’s become flustered over a word problem in math. You say, “I’ll help you while you try the word problem again,” with a light and encouraging tone. She says she doesn’t want to, and feelings arise. Move in, get close, and say, “Well, I’ll help you. Let’s take a look at it.” Then she gets angry and says she doesn’t want to. Stay close. Listen. Let her become engulfed in feelings. Be as warm and confident as you can be, under the circumstances. When her crying or tantrum slows down, say, “I think you can probably do it. Let’s take another look.” Let her blow up. Let her cry. Let her be beyond reason. Let her be angry with you. Let her say horrible things about you and school and anything else that’s on her mind. Listen. Your attention is a powerful antidote to the feeling she is battling.

Keep putting forward the idea that she can do it. That you will stay until she is ready to try again. That it will be good to try again. That she’ll figure it out. But don’t talk a lot. Just say a few words now and then while she rages or cries. Keep her there, where she is positioned to try again. Don’t insist that she try again within any particular timeframe. The expression of feelings is healing, and it will take whatever time it takes. There’s no rush. She’s in the middle of an emotional bad dream, and her perception is warped by the bad feelings as they make their exit. When she has worked through a chunk, she’ll be able to think and try again.

This is the healing process. This is discouragement melting. This is frustration draining away. This is, “I can’t do it! I’m no good!” washing out of her. Don’t try to reason. don’t try to convince her that she’s smart. Instead, Listen till she feels better–it may be a long time. But she will feel better when she’s done, if you can listen until she is done.

So, any time she goes into an upset, about math or anything else, get close, and offer very mild encouragement. If she says, “I hate math! I’m terrible at it,” say something like, “That can change, sweetie. It’s not always going to feel this way, or, “Honey, I think you probably can do this.” (Not “Oh, sweetie, you are SUCH a smart girl! Of COURSE you can!”) Just indicate mildly that things might turn out OK in the end, and that she’s not alone–you’re with her while she feels this badly. You’ll be her anchor through some world-class emotional episodes. And she’ll move this fear out of her way.� You can see how a little bit of this process worked for one father we know in our new blog.

A word about praise here: the effect of constant praise for children’s efforts and the work they produce is not entirely helpful. What actually is helpful for our children is those moments when they feel good about what they’ve done. Our feelings about their work are important, but secondary. The most powerful motivation to learn is a child’s own sense of accomplishment and mastery. And they “get it” when we’re pleased, even without words of praise. They can hear delight in our voices, and see it on our faces. If we can get enough listening time from another parent so that our tension has an outlet, then we can feel and show our genuine delight, so our children also feel “seen” in their accomplishments.

As Alfie Kohn points out, we want children to work for their own inner satisfaction, rather than to try hard to earn our praise. Special Time is a good tool for helping children feel that inner satisfaction, as well as our pleasure in them. During Special Time, we pay pleased attention to them, and they do what they love to do. This keeps children aware of their own feelings, and able to access our delight in them by asking for Special Time. They master things because it feels good to master things. We want to notice them, acknowledge them, but not use praise as part of a “reward system.”� Connection with us, which will foster their natural drive toward mastery, is all they need.

I hope this is helpful to you. We’d love to hear what you try, and how it goes on our discussion group. It may sound like a lot of work, but it happens only one minute at a time, and the rewards last a lifetime!

Yours,

Patty
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Hand in Hand is a parent education non-profit that has been helping families to build the super-protective factor of parent-child connectedness for twenty years.� You can learn more by reading the Listening to Children booklet series by Patty Wipfler or by signing up for our free monthly newsletter, Connecting!

Q. What’s the Problem with Spanking?

In most Western cultures, there’s a longstanding history of permission to spank children. Many of our parents spanked. And most of us hold the perspective that our parents were doing their very best to love us. So whether to spank children or not is a confusing issue—if we turned out OK, and our parents spanked us, then isn’t spanking an acceptable, even desirable way to make sure that children do what’s right?

It seems to me that there are three core questions to ask about spanking. The first is the broader question, what’s the long term effect of spanking on children? The second is, does physical punishment really achieve the goal of controlling a child’s behavior in the moment? And there’s a third important question, seldom asked but certainly relevant and a good place for us to begin: what does spanking do to us as parents?

What does spanking do to the parent?

Most parents feel angry when they spank. An angry person is determined to assert control in a situation, and doing something physical feels like it will bring some relief. So spanking a child may make a parent feel temporarily righteous, back in control, vindicated, and/or satisfied that he did not allow himself to be victimized.

However, there are very few parents who have gazed at their newborn child and thought, “I can hardly wait until I can spank my beautiful daughter!” or “When he gets a little older, it will be so good to have the chance to spank his little bottom.” We know that these statements are absurd! When a parent feels he has no alternative but to spank, he is acting out of desperation: he doesn’t know what else to do. It wasn’t part of his original plan for relating to his precious child.

Parents have to steel themselves emotionally in order to follow through with a spanking. We have to harden our hearts. Or, perhaps more often, a challenging situation that we’ve been trying hard to deal with finally sends us into the emotional badlands, where love can’t be felt. And there, we feel that our child has driven us to spank—it’s too heartbreaking to think that our child was actually asking for our help, and we attacked instead.

Does spanking control a child’s behavior in the short term?

When a child is spanked, his or her limbic system (the emotional center of the brain, and the part of the mind that mediates learning and understanding) goes into alarm mode. The child’s brain clearly perceives spanking as an occasion of danger, and responds accordingly. For the child, it is an experience of being small and unable to control an overwhelming and unpredictable force. In this state, his mind can learn nothing. His prefrontal cortex, the center of reason and judgment, shuts down. Hence, a child’s behavior during and after a spanking is not thoughtful behavior. It’s reactive. The “control” that the parent is striving for has everything to do with fear, and nothing to do with teaching, learning, or a child’s understanding of concepts of right and wrong. What the child “learns” is that, seemingly out of the blue, for reasons he can’t fathom, he has been hit or hurt by a person who loves him. This is a confusing lesson indeed.

Spankings are perceived by a child to be random acts of violence. Over time, they create a wedge of fear and resentment between child and parent. The more time a child spends with his mind shut down by the fear response that physical attack brings, the more reactive his behavior becomes. A vicious cycle results: a fearful child becomes aggressive or withdrawn, the parent spanks in response, the child becomes more frightened, and loses more of his access to his own good judgment.

So, though a spanking may result in a quieter, more cautious child for a few hours, that apparent peace has a high price. A child’s sense of safety, and with it, his ability to reason, to cooperate, to learn, and to trust, are all eroded with every spanking. So is a child’s openness to love from his parent.

What are the long-term effects of spanking?

Many studies have been done on spanking in the United States and in other countries. The evidence is clear that the effects on children are strongly negative. The American Academy of Pediatrics and a long list of other professional societies take a clear stand against the corporal punishment of children, both at home and in the schools.

One large study showed that the more parents spanked children for antisocial behavior, the more the antisocial behavior increased (Straus, Sugarman, & Giles-Sims, 1997). The more children are hit, the more likely they are to hit others including peers and siblings and, as adults, the more likely they are to hit their spouses (Straus and Gelles, 1990; Wolfe, 1987).

Studies show that even a few instances of having been hit as a child are associated with more depressive symptoms in adult life (Strauss, 1994, Strassberg, Dodge, Pettit & Bates, 1994). A landmark meta-analysis of 88 corporal punishment research studies of over six decades showed that corporal punishment of children was associated with negative outcomes, including increased delinquent and antisocial behavior, increased risk of child abuse and spousal abuse, increased risk of child aggression and adult aggression, decreased child mental health and decreased adult mental health (Gershoff, 2002). It has also been shown that corporal punishment has an adverse effect on a child’s cognitive development.

What is a parent to do instead?

We parents need more support than we get. It’s not right that we must repeatedly face parenting issues that drain our patience entirely. It’s not right that there’s no dependable way to restore our emotional balance when we’re beyond frustration. It seems to me that spankings point to our need for more help, more kindness in our own lives, and less worry about our futures and the futures of our children. We want the best for them, and we need better for ourselves, too.

We parents need to listen to each other’s stories, to hear each other out. We need to hear how many troubles an exhausted or frustrated parent has seen. We need to offer each other appreciation for the things we do well. We need someone we’ve built a measure of trust with to hear all about our anger, our worries and our desperate moments. It’s remarkable how much difference the chance to be listened to can make in a parent’s life!

And then, we need to move close to our children, instead of attacking them for their troubles. It’s an unusual thing to do, but to move close, set a limit, and then stay with a child while the passionate feelings pour out is far kinder than punishment. It also helps a child learn from the limit that was set. His mind flushes lots of emotional tension out while you keep things safe around him. And in the end, he knows you love him, and that drive to cross the limit again is gone. You’ve connected with him. His mind has moved from an “I don’t care what they say!” state to feeling like part of the family again.

Listening until the child’s feelings are spent helps a child actually learn from mistakes and poor judgment. At the end of a good cry or tantrum that’s supported by his parent, a child can make sense of what just happened. He understands the limit that was set, and that limit doesn’t leave lingering resentment or anger. Short range, it helps a child rebuild his connection with the parent who listened to him, so his mind works again, right here, right now. And it gives a parent a way to exert real power when a child has gone off track. The parent uses the power of his caring, and the power of his good judgment, to retrieve his child from behavior that wasn’t working for either of them.

Here’s how it can work:

“It’s been really hard. Our four-year-old son has been extra demanding lately. He has been asking for what feels like constant attention and in often unflattering ways. Requests for help come out as demands. He also has been intensely rigid. The shoes aren’t tied right. The hood isn’t just so. All of which have triggered down on the floor tantrums with wails and flailing legs and arms. And they have come some days endlessly one after another even with all our many hours of focused attention.

“To add to it lately, he has started hitting his sister, me and my husband. He only hits at home and never has hit friends or other relatives.

“This morning we could see it coming again. As my husband and I both can feel triggered by the intensity of our son’s rage, especially when it was directed at us, we decided until things shifted, we would work together when we could to help our son through his big feelings. This morning was our second attempt together at helping him, the previous night we had stayed together as well.

“This morning, my husband set the limit and brought him upstairs. I joined him and together we stayed with our son while he flailed on the bed, screaming at us. He didn’t want to hit a pillow or any other object; he wanted to hit one of us, with our faces being the prime target. We kept ourselves safe and reminded him that he was safe. As the feelings intensified, he complained of not being able to breathe when it was clear to us that physically he could breathe. I think that he was having some kind of emotional flashback. We told him we could see he was breathing and that we would make sure he continued to breathe just fine. He pushed hard against us with all his strength. It went on like this for what felt like forever.

“Then he stopped, just stopped and popped up his head. He nuzzled close to me and, with no forethought, I made a circle out of my arms which our son took as an invitation to squirm his way through the circular opening in my arms. Making it safely to the other side, he came back triumphantly to squish his way back through the circle again. He asked to do it again and again. “Tighten your arms this time” he’d request. Each time he made it through he’d smile. Back and forth he’d go between his dad’s arms and mine. Soon his sister, hearing his giggles, joined in and we all had a good laugh on the bed. We needed it. We made it through. I wonder whether, that whole time, he had been working through feelings from his birth. We’ll never know, but he was sure enjoying getting through a tight spot again and again at the end! And he was easy-going for the rest of that day.

Hand in Hand is a parent education non-profit that has been helping families to build the super-protective factor of parent-child connectedness for twenty years.� You can learn more by reading the Listening to Children booklet series by Patty Wipfler or by signing up for our free monthly newsletter, Connecting!

Q. “My five-year-old can’t seem to stay dry at night. We’ve tried and tried, and nothing I do seems to work. She feels bad when she wets the bed, I try not to bother her about it, but I am very tired of the work it takes to deal with this. I get cranky, and that doesn’t help her learn. Do you have any light to shed on why my daughter can’t learn to stay dry at night? Any fresh ideas about what to do?”

It’s so much work to deal with bedwetting! That added load of laundry per day can be infuriating. And once a pattern has set in, it can be difficult to find a way to change it. But I have an approach that is different from reward systems, waking a child in the night, and the kinds of training that are more familiar to parents who have to deal with kids who wet the bed.

First, I’m sure you know that your daughter doesn’t wet her bed on purpose. She’d much rather stay dry. She’d also prefer to see you pleased and relaxed in the morning, unstressed by the extra work of washing sheets and making beds every day. Second, it might help you to know that 75% of all children up to age three can’t stay dry all night. And about 10% of all children up to the age of 5 can’t stay dry. Between the ages of 5 and 9, about 15% of bedwetting children each year will somehow figure out how to stay dry, without any particular kind of organized help. Only about 2% of children still wet the bed by the age of 15. We could guess that each family does try to help with this issue, that the efforts they make are varied in kind, and that most children figure out something that works sooner or later.

People who study children have lots of different ideas about why children wet the bed. It is a tendency that seems to run in families, which makes researchers think that it might be a tendency passed along in the genes. Other researchers have found that children who grow up at an economic disadvantage have a stronger tendency to wet the bed, which could indicate that stress, which is often higher in poor families, plays an important role.

You should have your daughter checked by a doctor or nurse, who will screen for urinary tract infections, diabetes, sickle cell anemia, and food allergies. Any of these illnesses can cause incontinence. Second, if you haven’t already, try restricting your child’s fluid intake late in the day, so her bladder won’t be so full at night. You can also try waking her once to pee before you go to sleep.

My experience over many years tells me that often, children’s bedwetting has emotional stress at its root. Children are built to be cherished, to spend large amounts of time with loving adults, and to explore their environment without fear of disapproval. Children who don’t get an easy start in life can become quite frightened on the inside. Circumstances like a difficult birth, prematurity, other early medical problems, being the witness to or the target of harsh treatment, or separation from one or more parents are bound to frighten an infant or a young child deeply. The fear children carry inside them after events such as these can interfere with the ability to relax, to concentrate, to learn, to make friends, and sometimes, to control bodily functions. It is well known that a typical reaction to fear is to urinate. If you’ve ever picked a toad up out of its hiding place in the garden, you’ve felt this response to stress right there in your hand! Most mammals and many other creatures respond this way to fear as well.

You may not be able to think of an event that might have frightened your daughter, but that’s OK. You don’t have to know the cause of her fears in order to help her. She doesn’t have to know what frightens her, either. Her limbic system, the seat of her emotions and her emotional memory, is all set and ready to offload any tension that’s interfering with a good, dry night’s sleep.

To help a child who’s wetting the bed, there are several unconventional but effective steps you can take.

1) Give your child 5 or 10 minutes of your undivided attention and approval each day, or as often as you can, and say, “I’ll play anything you want to play for this Special Time.” Offer your love and stay close while your child decides what he/she wants to do. Use a timer, to start and stop. It helps a child build a closer, stronger connection with you, which she needs to hold against her fears.

2) Play games that elicit laughter, without tickling your child. Usually, games that allow children to laugh are ones in which we allow them to be stronger, faster, and smarter, and we are the ones who “lose” when we try to chase them, or bounce them off our knee, or give them 100 kisses. The more a child can laugh, the more she can offload tension that is in her way of living his life well.

3) Roughhouse with your child before bed. Physical play, in which children have permission to bang into us, be caught by us, squirm away from us, ride on our backs, and bounce around with us is deeply healing to any child who has had frightening things happen. You need to keep your eye on the play, so that your child is laughing as much as possible, and so that your affection and warmth toward her are plain to see. A game like “I’m going to give you 100 smooches!”, in which you land only 5 or 6 fleeting kisses, and she escapes, laughing, the rest of the time, is an example of the kind of roughhousing and physical play that children love, and that does them great good because lighter fears are shed as they laugh and “dominate” us. Do as much of this as you can—it is particularly helpful for bedwetting children, and particularly helpful as an evening-time activity.

4) Staylisten when your child cries or tantrums. Children need to have a time almost every day when they can get thoroughly upset about something. They need to have us come close, listen to their feelings, and simply care. They don’t need us to fix anything. They need us to slow down, hear how they feel, and allow them to shed the grief, fear, and anger feel at the moment. Afterwards, they feel very close to the person who listened to them, and often, their behavior shows obvious improvement.

Many is the parent I’ve encouraged to try roughhousing and Special Time to for bedwetting, and in every case so far, with children ages three to fourteen, a good wrestle, a good romp, a good tussle on the bed with an adult who’s up for some fun helps solve the nighttime wetting. Sometimes, the results are overnight. Sometimes, it takes a few weeks or months, because the child’s initial trauma, the source of the nighttime fears, is a serious or long-lasting trauma. But you will see improvement if you can play hard, play well, play with full-bodied enthusiasm, and Staylisten as the bigger feelings start to show.

Here’s how it can work:

“My husband has a son that he was separated from when the boy was two. He was not allowed to see his son, except for very short periods of time, for many years. Finally, at age 13, his mother consented to have him come and live with us for the summer. It had been a very long time since he’d seen his dad, at that point.

We noticed right away that he wet his bed every night. We just let it go at first, trying instead to concentrate on the positive things we wanted to do to help him feel loved and at home. Some days went well, others were harder, as you would expect after such a long separation. After awhile, I did a consultation with Hand in Hand to see what they could tell us about his bedwetting. The idea that he was scared, underneath, made sense to me: he was not raised in an easy environment, and how here he was with us, trying hard to make a go of his relationship with his dad. I was advised to try physical play—for him, that would be wrestling with his Dad—as a way to help ease and release some of the fears that might be causing his inability to stay dry at night.

Fortunately, we had a friend with a tumbling mat. We have a very small apartment, but we moved furniture around, and put the mat down. He was delighted, and the first night his Dad and he wrestled for about 45 minutes! It was one sweaty time. Both of them felt tired, but good, when they decided to stop. He did not wet the bed that night at all!

They wrestled several nights after that, and we saw that the nights they could wrestle, he didn’t wet the bed. The nights they didn’t, he did wet the bed. It seems that the physical contact, that very personal, very strenuous engagement, somehow got him into a state where his fears didn’t arise in the night, and make him lose control. It was so encouraging to see how direct an effect that kind of affectionate but all-out play could have on a young man whose life has been a struggle!”

—a step-mother in Oakland, CA

Hand in Hand is a parent education non-profit that has been helping families to build the super-protective factor of parent-child connectedness for twenty years.� You can learn more by reading the Listening to Children booklet series by Patty Wipfler or by signing up for our free monthly newsletter, Connecting!

Q. I’m struggling with getting the kids to take some responsibility for all the work that needs to get done at home.� I don’t want to spend all my time fighting with them over chores, but I would love some help around here!

By the time children are about seven years old, most parents have begun to think, “It’s about time she did a little work around here!” and the battles begin. “When are you going to feed the dog?” “That garbage needs to be taken out right now!” “Honey, how many times do I need to ask you to make your bed!”

It’s good to expect children to take part in the work of the household. Children are quite capable, and feel a lot of pride in a job well done. But, like us, they acquire feelings about the jobs they’re expected to do. And when those feelings are negative, children can drain a lot of their parents’ emotional capital on the way to completing their household jobs.

So how can parents set it up so that children do take responsibility for the work of the household? I think there are two main keys to keeping the drudgery out of chores for parents and for children.

All work is worthy work

Our customary attitudes about household jobs can create strong allergies to chores. Because of generations of housework being done mostly by women who were underappreciated and certainly underpaid, feelings that don’t have anything to do with the actual work of cleaning or taking out the garbage get passed on to us through the generations.

Simple jobs have their simple joys: the warmth of the suds in the dishpan and the sight of a happily feasting dog, for instance. But inherited attitudes make these jobs feel like work that isn’t worth an intelligent person’s attention. So no wonder that, when we ask our children to do those jobs, they don’t respond well. Our attitude is contagious, and children catch it as soon as it becomes “their” job. We parents need to do our best to respect ourselves as we do the work of the household. We need to do our best to notice the rewards of the jobs we do. The jobs we do are necessary. Intelligent people do them. They are worth doing well. They are worth our attention.

Do the work together

Part of the problem with chores is that as we grew up, we were made to do our chores alone. So without thinking, we expect our children to do their chores alone, and on our time schedule.

Children aren’t designed for solitary work. They’re designed for fun, for collaboration, and for being noticed. They’re designed for absorbing your presence as you notice their skills and their accomplishments. Watch your four-year-old jump from the arm of the sofa into the middle of the living room carpet again and again while company is over. Watch a seven-year-old race a friend to the end of the street, and turn around to see if you noticed how fast they both went. Your child is showing you that there’s plenty of energy for tasks when they’re fun, when the child has choice about the timing, and when someone is there to see them as they do it. Praise is less important than simply being seen and acknowledged.

So getting jobs done together works much better than sentencing children to solitary work. Rather than, “Please take out the garbage,” try, “Can you grab one end of this sack? It’s really heavy!” and opening a conversation about what might be in there. Getting pairs of family members to tackle tasks together, or having one ten-minute period when everyone does something that needs to be done in the household can keep the feelings of isolation from settling in and turning jobs into drudgery.

Connect, then work

When a child has already caught the “this job is no fun” infection, the remedy can be a short Special Time to strengthen her sense of connection. None of us work well when we feel isolated or unseen. Special Time gives a child the time and the framework in which he or she will be seen, no matter what the choice of things to do.

So around of Special Time can sometimes help a child to tackle an expected job without feeling like it’s a burden. A parent’s story below illustrates how this works.

Lead your family

When children see that the family is working together toward a goal, or working together to make life better for one or more members, they are much better able to understand that doing the work of the household is a form of power. They see that their work contributes to the good of all, that they are appreciated, and that they make life better when they pitch in.

So nightly or weekly Family Meetings, in which parents share their thoughts about the good things that happened in the last week, and the challenges in the coming week, can help children understand their parents’ thinking. It gives them a place to share their own. They see that the family is a group that has direction and leadership. They see that their voices are heard, as ideas are sought on how to handle Dad’s business trip and the help Mom will need, or the fact that Grandma needs her yard tended on Saturday, while several other things need doing too. They feel part of a larger whole. They learn that the jobs aren’t isolated tasks that have to be done by isolated people. They participate in solving problems and can take pride in their contributions.

I know a family that expects each member to say one thing they appreciated about someone else each night at dinner, or to say one thing that went well and one thing that didn’t go well for them that day. The children really come through for each other and for their parents at times during these rounds of appreciations or checking in. The fact that little things are noticed by all helps the children’s perspective on their own importance.

Here’s how children’s attitudes can change

Special Time isn’t guaranteed to turn your child into an instant cleaner-upper! Nothing can promise that result. But it may help you move from trudging through your days separately into more frequent mutual cooperation. Here’s the experience of one parent whose daughter was willing to try a cleanup activity she’d always refused, after a good Special Time.

It’s funny how Special Time helps not just your kid feel more connected with you, it also helps you feel more connected with your kid. One afternoon when I was feeling somewhat down, my ten-year-old daughter asked me for some Special Time. She wanted to wrestle with me. I wasn’t quite ready to get out of my shell, but I went ahead and wrestled with her. She was terrific. We both had a great time wrestling. She decided that I was also a bouncing machine and she bounced on me. She also decided I was a rolling machine and she rolled on top of me. And, mind you, she was eighty-six pounds then, so that’s a lot of weight! It was hard to deal with all that sheer physical force and power. She was relentless and didn’t realize the strength of her own body. But it was so much fun. We laughed and laughed and laughed. And at the end of it, I was out of my shell and she had had a great time connecting with me.

I had a pile of chores to do that afternoon, including scooping a whole bunch of dog poop from the backyard and getting laundry done. For the first time, my daughter came with me to the backyard to help me clean up all the poop. She has a strong sense of smell, so this was something that had always disgusted her, but she was able to overcome her distaste for going near the poop and actually helped me do it. I showed her how to do it so that she wouldn’t have to have any contact with the poop. And she did it! Right after that, she helped with all the laundry and we folded a lot of clothes. I attributed all of this cooperation to the Special Time we had together!

—a mother in Sunnyvale, California

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Hand in Hand is a parent education non-profit that has been helping families to build the super-protective factor of parent-child connectedness for twenty years.� You can learn more by reading the Listening to Children booklet series by Patty Wipfler or by signing up for our free monthly newsletter, Connecting!

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Q. My wonderful, energetic, 4-year-old boy has picked up some wonderfully expressive behaviors from his Transformers, Power Rangers, Iron Man and watching friends at school. His latest play involves pretend shooting and “booming” with his hands, with sound effects, dying people, pretend-cutting people and the lot. His preschool teacher tells me that it’s becoming more and more the play at his public preschool, which has zero tolerance for gunplay. It’s so very, very taxing and upsetting, and I don’t know what the “right” thing to do is.

Good for you for asking this question: it’s an important one, both for your son, and for the boys of our society!

Here’s my take on what I will call “combat play.” I date myself when I say that in my childhood, the “Taming of the West,” which we now know involved the genocide of Native Americans, was the main theme of TV and movie drama. The Lone Ranger, Cisco the Kid, Roy Rogers, and Davy Crockett had adventures, and sometimes fought the “bad guys.” We kids had cap pistols, holsters, bows and “arrows,” hideouts, and did lots of running around as we played out the roles we had seen. When we got old enough, we were allowed to have BB guns! The dramas we saw involved some shooting and capturing bad guys, but they also involved friendship. The Lone Ranger had Tonto and his horse Silver; Roy Rogers had a large cast of sidekicks. These partners provided humor and loyalty. They helped the hero solve problems in every episode. We didn’t have to worry about our frontier heroes: they weren’t riding alone.

“Parents Strongly Cautioned”

Many of the dramas being played out today that, literally, capture the minds of children are fierce, fraught with isolation and scary images, heavily sexualized, and shockingly violent. Real humans are almost unrecognizable in these fantasies. “Children’s” picture books of Batman, Spiderman, and The Hulk are full of grotesquely exaggerated bodies and frightening, outsized foes whose teeth are long and sharp, whose saliva froths all over the page, and whose eyes burn with murderous intensity. The women companions are bursting out of their skin-tight suits, have tiny waists and melon-sized busts, and bring no mercy or tenderness to a child’s imagination. The movies about these characters are dark with evildoers. Even jaded grownups come away feeling that they’ve seen a new depth of hellish existence on the screen.

These images are harmful for children. Many parents don’t realize that these intense, threatening tableaus are interpreted as real experiences in children’s minds. They create a frightening backdrop to everyday life. They cause bad dreams. They cause children to feel less secure in the world. They haunt children’s imaginations. And children don’t “grow out” of the fears they acquire when they’re exposed to this kind of mental pollution.

Videos and movies, in particular, install messages that are very difficult to erase. The attacks of the shark and the deep-sea fish in Finding Nemo, for example, create a sudden, frightening experience that injects fear into a child’s mind very nearly as deeply as if he were the tiny fish being threatened. The emotional center of a child’s mind can’t tell the difference between the movie or video and reality. In fact, your child won’t be able to reliably remember that he’s seeing a movie until he’s in his teens.

Keep your child away from superhero videos, movies, and books

You want your child to have a sense of safety and love in his life. You want him to retain his natural kindness, his ability to be tender, his sense of injustice when people are hurt or mistreated. You want him to be able to trust other people’s good will. You want him to embrace the world as a place full of possibilities. So don’t expose him to fictional harshness, which his mind processes as real harshness. Don’t fill his mind with images of one person, fighting alone against threats from every corner. Our world has been scarred enough by this mental model. Don’t install fears that are difficult and time-consuming to dislodge.

I highly recommend previewing every video aimed at your child, and letting other parents know that you don’t allow your child to watch videos on play dates. The images of peril, the isolation of the “hero,” the onslaught of fantastic foes, each one more terrible that the last, don’t offer the kind of experience that empowers our children.

Instead, choose videos, books, and comics that have the tone that Sesame Street sets: a friendly community, mutual help, humor, and bad guys who are no worse than silly Grover in his garbage can! If we are to work together as a human community, we need children raised with warm community experiences of play and cooperation.

Children freeze when they’re scared, and cry later to heal

Children’s minds don’t grasp evil. They don’t grasp unkindness. They don’t grasp harshness. They can’t even shake off a slightly edgy comment from you on a stressful day. “Put on your boots now!” can cause a young child to collapse in tears. And that’s a good thing! Children who cry when threatened are offloading the emotional tension that has assaulted their delicate systems. A good cry at that moment, or later, over a drop of spilled milk or a broken cookie, (or, if a child has just seen a “children’s movie,” the crying he does in a bad dream) is the healthiest thing your child can do. He needs you to listen. To care. To provide the safety that was shaken at the moment he was frightened. Put your arms around him and let him cry, long and hard. It’s the fastest, most efficient way to help his mind free itself of that fear.

But most children can’t respond at the moment they see a frightening image. They get wide-eyed, and their mind freezes. They do what animals have been doing for millennia—they go quiet and wait for the danger to pass. So they don’t say anything about the scary part of the video, or the horrible eyes of the comic book character on the page. They wait for the scene to change, for the page to turn. But those images stick.

Combat play is often heavily scripted

So later, children engage in combat play, in an attempt to portray and work through their fears. But each child in play is carrying his own frightening image and has his own scenario. So combat play often amounts to several children playing a similar game, with each child, in reality, playing almost alone. Each child is tense. Each child insists that other kids have to play the game the way he sees it. So eventually, there are hurt feelings. And the play can become hurtful, because children’s minds are saturated with the harmful images they want to recover from. They don’t have enough awareness left over to keep track of each other. I wouldn’t call this play, in the true cooperative sense of the word.

When combat play dissolves into upset, if an adult will simply embrace the crying child and listen to how he feels, rather than trying to legislate turns or forbid the game, the fears that drive the play, at least for that child, can be relieved.

Forbidding combat play in large groups may be necessary

Forbidding combat play, one strategy adopted by some parents, schools and preschools, does prevent children from hurting each other as they try to portray their fears in play. It can be the wisest thing to do in a group situation, where there are few adults and safety must be maintained. But children’s appetite for this kind of play remains strong. The fears are still lodged in their minds, and play is their instinctive bid to shake those fears.

When you’re geared up to help, enter into the play and elicit laughter

If your child is full of superhero energy, make a safe place for his imagination to run free! He needs to be able to show you his enthusiasms, and he needs a kind, energetic, thoughtful adult to steer the play toward laughter, and to set limits on the rough edges that might emerge. During Special Time or family playtime, enter the play with your child with enthusiasm. You’ll find yourself cast as his “victim” over and over again. He’ll make you the monster he captures, he’ll shoot you, he’ll put you in jail, he’ll burn you with “fire,” he’ll “cut your head off” with his sword. Let him play out these fantasies. He is letting you know what experiences he’s had in the fictional world that have troubled him. You’re learning the details of the scenarios that are imprinted on his mind.

In the midst of the play, do what you can to elicit laughter, which helps to diminish the storehouse of fears he carries. You do this by playfully exaggerating his power, and your plight. Don’t go stoically to your fate! Protest (with a warm, generous tone). Offer a bit of a fight. Try to run away. Give him a chance to try hard to get you. And do goofy, affectionate things to ward off his violence. Say loudly to yourself, “Gee, that guy wants to cut off my head! Maybe if I pet him a little, maybe he will put down his sword!” You catch him and pet him and he laughs and wriggles away. But of course, he doesn’t put down his sword. So you say, “Akk! Petting didn’t work! Maybe he needs a big hug!”

Twenty minutes of play can give you twenty chances to try the “love cure” for your superhero. Or you can say, “Hey, when you shoot me, I just get this feeling I have to love you! And kiss you! A big, wet one!” Or when you’re languishing in “jail,” you can reach out, grab his ankle, and say, “Oh, what a sweet little foot! I’m so lonesome here in jail, I just have to kiss this little foot!” Dr. Lawrence J. Cohen describes this approach beautifully in his book, Playful Parenting. (Be sure not to tickle to trigger laughter. Earn your child’s laughter with affection.)

Your attempts to counter combat with affection will bring a good tussle, which you can lose again and again. But most likely, there will be lots of laughter as you try to get close to your superhero. That laughter is healing. That laughter will relax him, bit by bit, and help take the urgency out of his play.

When children play in groups, willing adults can arrange combat play that’s safe, fun, and laughter-filled. Balloon battles, pillow fights, and sock fights, with grownups serving as the main “targets,” and keeping things safe and affectionate, are ways to engage children in combat play that acknowledges their appetite for it. Whatever laughter you secure reduces their fears and isolation. Children win together, without targeting each other. As they team up, they laugh and “get” the grownups. Tension releases. They regain their sense that the world is a safe place. And they have great affection for any grownup who plays with them in this way.

Get laughter going, and listen to crying, to replace fear with the safety you provide.

In summary, the real problem is not with the actual toys a child plays with, but with the images and feelings that are stuck in his mind. The fascination with combat play is a flag your child waves saying, “I’ve been frightened by fictional experiences, and I want to work this through!”

You have the power to help! Just keep remembering that toy guns aren’t real, that fantasies of cutting off your head are your child telling you what he’s witnessed in his mind’s eye. They indicate some gunk in your child’s mind, but there’s no real threat to you, or to anyone else, as long as you’re there to keep things safe.

We have more information on helping children release their fears in play in our booklet, Healing Children’s Fears, a part of the Listening to Children series available here.

Last month, we explored the healing role that laughter can play when a child has unworkable fears. The mother who wrote in had a three-and-a-half year old daughter who was absolutely terrified of using the toilet. Our two-part remedy for those fears was to first get laughter going around toileting. Here’s A Toilet Tale, Part 1, outlining Step One, which this mother and father did beautifully.

Step Two involves Staylistening, a kind and effective way to work with a child to dispel his fears.

Fears stick in a child’s mind during moments of perceived danger or isolation, and they don’t go away by themselves. They can take hold of a child’s behavior, and even dictate that behavior. If you don’t allow the fear an outlet, it “collects interest” over time, and gradually commandeers more and more of a child’s relaxed creativity, making her behavior ever more extreme—deeper dependency on diapers, for instance, and then avoidance of every entry into the bathroom.

What releases fear is a natural process that children use again and again in infancy and early childhood, unless adults insist that they stop. (It works for adults, as well.) Fear releases when a child cries loudly with few tears, trembles, thrashes, arches, sweats, and feels deeply threatened by the closeness of a caring adult, or threatened by some other perfectly benign thing. In this case, the daughter had vomited, screamed, cried and trembled when her diaper was taken away, and, alarmed, her parents had given her diaper back, feeling that this was far too much stress for her to experience.

But their child’s emotional episode was brought on by her genius for recovery from fear. Their child was doing exactly what she needed to do. She simply needed her parents by her side, calm and confident, until the emotional episode passed, a sign that she had overcome a good chunk of fear.

So, after doing a couple of weeks of Playlistening, securing laughter around the issues of peeing and pooping in the toilet (and elsewhere), they moved to this more challenging stage of Staylistening. I assured them that their presence while their daughter felt her terrified feelings would have true healing power. Confident and steady, they learned to stay very close to their daughter during these frightened moments, and offer calm reassurance.

The things that are helpful to say while a child is offloading fear all point to the safety of the present moment. “I’m right here, and I’ll make sure that you are safe.” “You are doing just fine. I’m with you.” “I know you want your diaper, but you can pee without it.” “Your body knows how to pee and poop without your diaper.” “You’re safe on the toilet, and I’ll keep holding you.” “You’re doing a good job, sweetie. You’re a brave girl.” “If your poop hurts coming out, it will only last a little while. Then you’ll feel better.” These are the kinds of things that a child with fears of toileting, or fears of pain during toileting, needs to hear from her parents while the fear grips her mind.

When saying these things, ‘calming the child down’ isn’t the goal. Quite the opposite. The steadier the parent sounds, and the more effective the reassurance, the deeper the feelings of fear the child is able to express, because there’s a safe person right there willing to witness the child’s emotional experience. A parent’s presence and confidence encourages full expression of the true depth of the emotion. The child’s mind vigorously scrubs the offending feelings, releasing, rather than repressing the child’s fear.

When a child’s mind has expelled a chunk of fear in the safety of a loving parent’s arms, the child becomes calm, stops fighting and panicking, and leans into the parent who listened. Sometimes, a child will sleep deeply. Sometimes, he or she will calmly look around, as if in a new world, for several minutes, and then jump up to play, happy and lighthearted. There’s a visible tone of relief, if the parent has been able to listen until the child is done. And, over time, the child’s behavior becomes more confident. Proof that the fear is remedied is there for all to see.

Here’s part of this parent’s experience. In the beginning, her child was so terrified of spending a night without a diaper that she vomited—this was true terror they were battling together. The parents set a “diaper-free by Christmas” goal, and told their daughter that every weekend would be diaper free, a time to practice with their support. Here’s the final part of their story.

“This particular weekend we were aiming for three consecutive days without diapers. On Friday afternoon we took away the diapers. That night was extremely difficult for her and for us. She kept saying she had to go to the bathroom and then denying she had to go once one of us would take her.

“Finally, after many denials her Dad held her on the toilet and told her that he knew she could do it and that we’d seen her do it before. She screamed and writhed and raged for at least 45 minutes until she finally fell asleep with her arms around her Dad while seated on the toilet. That felt really awful. We put her to bed and talked about not continuing but also realized that she had again worked through substantial fear and not left the bathroom. Perhaps that was a small victory.

“The rest of the weekend was fun in that we continued with our plans to see friends, buy and decorate a Christmas tree, and watch movies together. She peed the bed every night after having held it in most of the day, and pooped the bed one night of the weekend, holding it in the rest of the time. The encouraging thing was that between bouts of having to go to the toilet, she was happy and relaxed and talking about buying small bags of diapers because Christmas was coming soon and she wouldn’t need them for long.

“We encouraged her, told her she’d succeeded in pooping without diapers for the first time, and praised her unsuccessful attempts to pee and poop on the toilet. She was given back the diapers on Monday morning. The following Friday was the Friday before Christmas, and we took the diapers away again.

That evening, she began to dance around, saying she had to go to the bathroom, and then denying she had to go. Soon she was crying, screaming ‘Don’t make me, please give me a diaper!’ and sweating, shaking, and hyperventilating. It was clear that she had to poop, and it would take another major session in order to work through the fear.

“We decided because of our stress levels and our desire to enjoy Christmas that we would give her the diapers back. We told her we were extremely proud of how hard she’d worked and that we were going to take a break from toilet training. She threw her arms up in the air and yelled ‘Yippee!’ followed quickly by ‘Can I have a diaper right now?’

Her grandma came up with the analogy of her dad’s triathlon training:� he would work hard and then take a break so his body wouldn’t get too tired. She reminded her that we had seen her dad finish the triathlon and that we knew that she would finish her training too.

The day after Christmas, after talking about it, she started wearing panties again. With no problem at all she started to pee on the toilet. She would tell us she had to go and one of us would go with her and she would pee. She also told her Dad to move the diaper pail, wipes and pad into her baby brother’s room because she wouldn’t need them any more. She still hadn’t pooped but she was clearly taking ownership of the process. However, she continued to wet the bed nightly.

The following day we left on a family trip. The first night away she successfully peed on the toilet a number of times. She was no longer holding it in. Late afternoon she started to say that she had to go to the bathroom and then deny it immediately. She would sit on the toilet and then jump off. This behavior lasted about an hour. We had decided that we would likely have to hold her on the toilet again until she was able to poop. She called mom into the bathroom and told her she had to poop. Mom said she would help her and within two minutes she had pooped in the toilet. Twenty minutes later, she announced she had to go again and then did. It was absolutely anti-climactic—all of a sudden it was so easy.

The three-year-old from the other family we were with had our daughter act as his ‘privacy guard’ while he used the toilet, and he would act as hers. On one particular occasion they came out of the bathroom together and our daughter announced ‘Daniel pooped and peed – I just peed.’ Daniel’s mom asked him, ‘Who wiped your bum?’ and he replied, ‘She did!’ She had gone from toilet terror to toilet accomplice in a few short hours! And since that day, she has worn panties and wet the bed only once. Thank you for your advice! It really worked!”

You can learn more about using the Listening Tools mentioned in this column by reading the Listening to Children booklets, available through Hand in Hand. More information and the monthly newsletter Connecting! is available at http://www.handinhandparenting.org/.

Q. Potty training has been a huge issue for our three-and-a-half-year-old daughter. She tells us when she has to go, wants privacy and is uncomfortable in dirty diapers. And she is TERRIFIED of going on the toilet. About six months ago, we told our daughter we had no more diapers and stuck with that story for a weekend. The weekend consisted of her throwing up from stress (we think), not going to the bathroom at all for twelve hour stretches while screaming that the poo was coming out, and when given a diaper shaking and crying when about to soil it. Needless to say we quit the experiment and she has been in diapers ever since.

Other kids are starting to make fun of her, which upsets all of us. We have had two deaths in our family this year. She also has a new brother who was born in July, and has asthma and a deadly dairy allergy. So she’s experienced stress in her life, for sure.

Other than this issue, she is happy, fun child with no other developmental concerns. I would appreciate any ideas you have!

Dear Parent:

You’ve been wise to be careful how you move her toward toileting—you did an experiment that brought up a lot of feelings for her, and backed off rather than push an agenda. I think that was wise.

There is a way to playfully tackle toileting fears. It’s based on the fact that laughter releases tensions that have nailed a child’s behavior into one rigid pattern. In particular, laughter helps children ease their fears, and they love to laugh, so it’s an approach they are pleased with.

We call this strategy Playlistening. The parent takes a less powerful role than the child, so that, for instance, the adult can, with a wink and a bit of sparkle, suddenly be “afraid” of even going in the bathroom. The parent says, “Ohhh, I have to pee so badly!” and jumps around, holding his/her crotch, tiptoeing toward the bathroom, pushing the door open, then running away—Eeeek! I don’t want to go in there! The toilet is in there! Yikes!” Then, the parent jumps around again, “But I have to pee!”

You can also get laughter going by being silly—inviting her into the bathroom because you’re going to pee like her daddy this time and you wonder if she wants to see you try to pee standing up. Or Daddy pees by standing on the toilet seat. Or you put Cheerios in the toilet and Daddy tries to “shoot” them with his pee stream. As you can see, these aren’t experiments to try while visiting Grandma, or when others are visiting you. But in the privacy of your home, watch to see what kind of play like this brings laughter, and then do more of it, as often as you can. The laughter will help her become less fearful, and feel better about herself—after all, suddenly, Mommy and Daddy are having troubles like hers, are peeing in strange ways, are “afraid” to flush the toilet, etc. This will be not only funny, but a big relief to her.

Try this and see what happens!

The mother replies:

Here are the silly things we did:

Lots of songs…for example, “do you hear a tinkle, tinkle tinkle, do you hear a tinkle of the pee
We inserted all of the different sounds that pee could possibly make while mom and dad were going (whoosh, spray…you get the� � � � picture)

Peeing and pooping on the cereals of our daughter’s choice and then being horrified that Cheerois were in our poo and then laughing hysterically.

Dad standing on the toilet seat and peeing in to the toilet—once he even missed and peed all over himself! It was unplanned but extremely beneficial. She laughed very hard and long. So did we!

Changing the words to one of our daughter’s favorite songs from “Down in the meadow, hop-a-doodle” to “Down in the toilet, bomb-a-doodle” for pooping.

Examining the color of food coloring before and after peeing.

Lots of “oohing” and “ahhhing” after going poop ourselves.

Following our daughter’s instructions about how to grunt and which faces to make pre-poop.

Peeing together in the shower.

IF ANYONE HAD TOLD ME I’D BE DOING THINGS LIKE THIS AS A PARENT I NEVER WOULD HAVE BELIEVED THEM! But they make her laugh, and she’s eager for these “games” and songs.

Dear Mother:

Well and creatively done! I hope it’s been fun for you to step out of adult decorum that far! You’ve been remarkably creative and flexible. All this play has helped your daughter to offload some stress around peeing and pooping, and for some children, that would be enough to help them over the toileting hurdle. But because her fears are deep-seated, you will need to try another Listening Tool, Staylistening.

This is the strategy of setting a simple, reasonable expectation, and then allowing a child to cry hard and perhaps to struggle, tremble and thrash about, while keeping her safe and close, so she can face her fears and move through those very intense feelings. Children do move through their fears and come out the other side more flexible than before, if a parent can lovingly stay and show confidence in the child. So you might once again set up a night and a day when you say, “It’s time to try using the toilet. No diapers until Sunday.” Then, stay close, stay relaxed, and when she begins to cry or feel panicked, let her know that she’s safe, that it feels scary, but that you will stay with her until it feels better.

Then, hang on for a very passionate and intense emotional ride. Her fears will release in trembling, perspiring, screaming, and perhaps thrashing and trying to get away from you, or in this case, away from the toilet. Stay with her. She was releasing her fears when you did that weekend experiment, but you didn’t know that this was healthy and a good sign, so you probably weren’t able to stay with her confidently and warmly. It’s not easy to do, but you can trust that, when she’s through, things will be better.

Her fears are strong, so one long cry probably won’t, by itself, open the door to the independent toileting kingdom. Don’t worry. Pace yourself, and when you are relaxed and ready to set an expectation, for instance, “I’m going to help you stay on the toilet when you need to poo,” go ahead again, and let her cry and feel like it’s a life-and-death experience. She’s working through some experience that did feel like a life-and-death struggle. Guide her through by telling her that she’s safe, that you’ll stay with her, that you’ll make sure that no harm comes to her. And allow her to show you how awful that experience was, in the guise of having to be near or sit on the toilet. It’s not a harmful thing, in reality, to sit on the toilet, so don’t worry, you’re not being a bad parent. As long as you’re really listening, really caring about her, and really keeping her safe, what’s releasing is feelings from another time and place. This is what will make toileting possible for her, as soon as this wad of fear is worked through.

The Staylistening part of this mother’s story will appear in next month’s CleverParent. Preview: after several good long, sweaty, panicked cries, with her parents supporting her and showing confidence that she was actually doing fine, just feeling frightened, her daughter took charge of the toileting process, and uneventfully one day, simply used the toilet.

More information about Parenting by Connection and the monthly newsletter Connecting! is available at http://www.handinhandparenting.org/.

Q. We had a wonderful summer as a family, but both my kids are feeling pretty apprehensive about returning to the school routine.� What can I do to help them adjust?

Children love to learn.� Learning is as natural as breathing to them–they absorb every single thing that happens!� They learn through play, they learn from the behavior of the children and adults around them, they learn from their own experiments.� By all rights, going to school, where there will be new experiences, many children, and a chance to master powerful skills like reading and math, should be exciting and fun for them!

In order to learn well, our children need to feel safe and wanted
Their minds don’t function well unless this bottom line condition of being welcome and appreciated is met.� At school, they need to know that their teachers like them and think they’re special.� They need to know that they won’t be bullied or made fun of on the playground or in the hallways.� They need encouragement, high expectations, and a good deal of fun.�

Play, which is the language and work of young children, is still deeply important to children of school age.� The more they are allowed to play in their learning activities, the faster they absorb information and new skills.� At home, children need kindness, affection, and some measure of one-on-one time with their parents, even if it’s has to be as little as a five-minute snuggle before going to sleep every night or the ride in the car to the Boy Scout meeting once a week.

There are several basic ideas about helping children learn that aren’t well understood in our culture.� In fact, they’re not well understood in most cultures of the world.� For schools to foster learning, and for parents to support their children, we grown-ups need to see that these learning needs of children are met both at home and in the schools.� Here are a few of the key concepts that aren’t yet well-understood:

• Children need to feel loved, or at least understood and respected, in order for their minds to be clear enough to learn.�
• Children need large amounts of physical affection and closeness.� Closeness fuels their confidence and frees their minds of worries about whether or not they’re OK.� If they’re unsure about whether they’re OK, they can’t concentrate on learning.
• Children learn best through play and hands-on activities.� The best teacher is experience, experience, experience!� We need classrooms in which children are doing things together, experimenting, and teaching each other what they’ve learned.� In particular, free play without competition or pre-set rules is a great builder of children’s intellect, imagination, and confidence. Jumping on the beds at home, chasing around the house, and wrestling and pillow fights (the children win, of course!) are the kinds of personal, physical play that lift children’s spirits and create enough fun that they can manage to stay hopeful even when days at school aren’t inspiring.� If life feels like drudgery, learning won’t take place.� So free play is vital.� It keeps your child’s spark of hope and interest alive!
• Children need the freedom to make mistakes and ask questions without fear of shame or belittlement.� Mistakes and “failures” teach as effectively as successes, as long as a child continues to be respected.
• Children’s keen sense of justice demands that they and others be treated thoughtfully and fairly.� Fairness, to children, means limits but not anger, boundaries but not belittlement, facing problems but not attacking people for having problems.
• When a child isn’t able to concentrate or to learn, there’s usually an emotional issue that blocks his progress.� It feels bad on the inside when you can’t think!� It feels scary on the inside when you can’t do what’s expected of you, and you don’t know why or what to do about it!� This is the position children are in when they can’t write a story, can’t memorize their times tables, or can’t sit down to their homework.� They feel upset, and often scared.� They also feel alone.

When we parents see our child caught in upset around learning, it’s usually infuriating.� Our child’s problems make us feel tired and worn.� Our thoughts are something like, “By now, he should be able to do school work on his own!� Why do I have to get into it?!”� We badly want our child’s problems to go away so we can get a little peace!

What helps immensely is something we’ve always been taught to avoid at all costs.� If you can sit close by while your child has a good cry about school, or a tantrum about not wanting to do homework, your child will do the work of draining some of the bad feelings that have paralyzed him.�

Emotional release helps children focus their attention and regain their ability to be hopeful about learning.� Your child won’t sound reasonable while he cries or rages.� He’ll believe very strongly in the terrible feelings he’s having.� But surprisingly, the crying and the chance to make sure you know how bad it feels inside has a deeply healing effect.� So try to keep from arguing and reasoning with him, and stay close while he “cleans the skeletons out of the closet” with his tears and his bleak or angry thoughts.� He’ll finish.� The longer he has been able to cry, the more improvement you will see in his ability to concentrate and to believe in himself.

Schools are not set up to help children with the tensions that keep them from learning and getting along.� This is a job we parents need to do.� It’s a very hard job, one that was never done for us.� It feels all wrong to allow a child to cry on and on without fixing anything, without sending him to his room or insisting that he pull himself together.� But listen.�

Listening heals.� Listen your way through a big cry or tantrum once, without trying to “fix” his feelings or solve the problem, and you’ll see how well it works to clear your child’s mind and restore his sense of closeness to you.

The huge need children have for one-on-one attention while they learn is natural.� It’s the school environment, where so many children need to compete for the attention of just one adult, that’s not natural.� Children’s needs feel bothersome to parents and to teachers, not because the children are out of line, but because our society is out of line.� Policymakers and citizens haven’t yet decided to give young children enough adult attention in school, and parents enough support at home, to meet natural human needs for support and attention.� When schools are genuinely supportive to children, we’ll look back at present class sizes, at the lack of support for teachers, and at the lack of services for children experiencing difficulties in learning, and think of conditions in the year 2000 as primitive indeed!

Assisting Our Children, Supporting Their Schools

Almost every child will experience some difficult times in school.� And almost every parent feels upset, helpless, and/or angry when these troubles surface.� Our strong love for our children and our frustration with a society that doesn’t offer much support to its young people makes it hard to think clearly when our children are having a hard time.� There are a few guiding principles that many people find helpful when they hit a hard patch

• It doesn’t help to blame your child, yourself, or the teacher for the difficulty.� Blame wastes energy and makes others feel worse than they already do.� Because blame spreads bad feelings, it gets in the way of the fresh thinking and cooperation you’ll need in order to build solutions.� You aren’t to blame.� You’re working as hard as you know how that this difficult job of parenting.� Your child isn’t to blame.� He’s doing the best he can, and is carrying burdens he hasn’t told you about yet, or doesn’t know how to shed yet.� The teacher is not to blame.� No matter who has made mistakes, the heart of the matter is the lack of support and assistance for everyone involved.
• We live in a society that doesn’t value its children or the people who work with them.� There is talk of the importance of education, and many skilled and good-hearted people working in that field, but too little funding and respect are funneled toward schools.� In most schools, human caring and teaching expertise is spread far too thin.� You, your child, and your child’s teacher are all stressed because learning conditions aren’t optimal.� Constructive action means to look for people’s strengths, call on their good intentions, and perhaps to look for additional help.�
• First, listen to your child about the difficulty.� He’s feeling hurt and upset, and he can’t solve the problem in that state.� See if you can be warm and positive enough to help him have a big cry or a tantrum.� Children can often work through their feelings of victimization and come up with their own solutions to troubles at school, if they have the chance to offload the feelings in big, hard cries at home.
• Let your child be in charge of the solutions.� After your child has shed big feelings of upset, and after you’ve spent some time just being close to him without trying to solve the problem, ask him what he wants to do.� Listen carefully.� There may be a role you can play in advocating for him with the teacher or helping him talk with his friends.� But don’t assume that because he brought his feelings to you, that he wants you to take charge of the situation.� Many times, children can think of how they want to take charge after one or several good cries.�
• If he wants you to approach a teacher or other students, listen well before you attempt to find solutions.� A teacher, principal, or student needs to have their side of the story heard before they will be able to change a viewpoint or cooperate toward a fresh solution.� If things aren’t working well, they feel badly about it (even if they’re acting like they don’t).� Fresh, workable behavior comes only from a mind that’s been freed a bit from its troubles by a good listener, a listener who cares about all the parties involved.� Your thoughts are important, and working toward a solution is important.� But listening well to the others involved is as vital as tilling hard-packed soil before you attempt to plant a new seed.
• Problem-solving goes better if we find a listener, too!� When our children struggle, we feel as frustrated and disappointed as they do!� When they meet with unfairness, we want to storm and rage until the threat to them is gone.� When they seem to be unable to help themselves at home, we aim our frustrations at them, driving them further into their shells of hopelessness.� In short, when our children meet trouble, we feel troubled too.� To be good allies and problem-solvers, we need someone to listen to us, perhaps again and again, to how we feel and to the things we’ve tried.� Someone listening to how angry or disappointed or exhausted we feel freshens our communication with our children, their friends, and their teachers.� Our problem-solving effectiveness is 100% improved if we decide to find a listener and let them hear our fears and our frustrations before we try to help!

How Listening Works
Here is one parent’s experience:� “My daughter was given a month to learn all the states and their capitals.� I offered to help her learn groups of about six states at a time.� After she memorized the first six she felt she couldn’t possibly learn all the states, and she had a huge cry.� Then she proceeded to learn the second set of six states and capitals, but again she felt that this was too much for her.� She had another long cry.� She kept saying, ‘I’ll never learn this.� I just can’t do it!’� She also got mad at me for trying to help, and cried about my ‘interference.’� I was somewhat confused by this, and wondered if indeed I had gotten too involved in this assignment.� In a few days,� she again felt hopeless about learning them all, and had a third big cry.� Each cry she had went on for half an hour or more.� She felt she could never do the assignment, and expressed frustration and anger at me, at the assignment, and at the world.� I kept listening and wondering how this was all going to turn out. ”

“After the third cry, everything changed.� She learned the next sets of states quickly and easily.� She took on a set of 18 states and capitals, and did them all at once.� Three days before the test, she asked me to quiz her on them, and she knew them all!� She was ecstatic, and I think she was amazed that she had done something she was sure she never could do.� She was so proud of herself.� The day before the test, she was completely confident that she would get 100%, and she was actually looking forward to the test!� She usually showed a lot of anxiety around tests, so I’d never seen her like this before.� After the test was over, she said she was sad that it was over, and she told me that she wished she could do it again!� She has referred to it again and again as one of the major learning feats of her life, and she has thanked me profusely for my help with the project, saying that she never could have done it without me.� It was great to see this whole process work!”
�
More information about Listening Partnerships for Parents and Hand in Hand are available on our website at www.handinhandparenting.org

Q. I’m wondering if you have some sage advice about dealing with our rambunctious 2 year old on a transatlantic flight in a week. My son is very physical and very loud in his crying, and I’m dreading the potential tantrums and inevitable shorter crying in such a small space!

There’s a reason why so many young children have extended hearty cries on an airplane! Physical closeness and attentiveness sends strong signals to a child’s emotional center. The signals say, “The closeness that you crave is here, right now! Enjoy!”� And if a child’s feelings have been listened to recently, and often, then the child enjoys the closeness, and can sleep, or find a variety of ways to amuse himself.

But most little children have loads of unheard feelings stored up, and those feelings sit like carbonation in a bottle of sparkling water. You can’t see the bubbles, but when you pry off the cap, they fizz mightily, a force to be reckoned with!�

Your presence engages a healing process in your child.�

Your presence as you sit, strapped in and close by, pries the cap off any stored feelings your child has. His mind dearly wants to absorb your presence, but unpleasant feelings are aching to be heard! The longer you sit, the more likely it will be that your child’s proximity to you will nudge those feelings to the surface, so he’s driven to cry or tantrum or struggle as he heals from some hurt from the past. The thing he begins to cry about will be a small or a provocative issue: wanting to pull off your buttons, suddenly trying to hit your face, or wanting to bang his feet on the seat in front of him. When you set a kind but definite limit, the healing begins.�

Crying, tantrums and sweaty struggling and flailing are the signs that emotional tension is leaving his system, released by your presence. When a child begins to cry on an airplane, nothing has gone wrong. In fact, everything is right. There’s closeness. There’s time. There are other people around to make physical punishment less likely. The perfect conditions for offloading some emotional baggage are at a child’s fingertips. Every hopeful child with an emotional backlog will unconsciously but eagerly reach for this golden opportunity to heal from hurt!�

Some children do experience ear pain as the pressure changes and their tiny Eustachian tubes won’t clear. But I think that a good number of children’s upsets on airplanes are the result of the mind’s instinct to do an emotional spring cleaning.�

How to Staylisten, and why.�

It’s hard to keep perspective as a parent during these times, because other people feel free to behave so rudely around young children. But at these times, you have a child who is having an emotional “bad dream,” with feelings from the past appearing to them in hair-raising form. Your job is to keep your child safe and secure while he goes through this upset. No amount of talking to him or distracting him can really stem the tide of his wild feelings. Those feelings want out!�

Like a bad dream, this emotional flood will subside when his mind has done the necessary work. The feelings will leave him much faster if you stay positive and supportive. It was his inborn instinct to heal from emotional hurt that started this process. Go with that instinct. And as you do, other passengers will see an unusual sight: a parent calmly in charge and caring. This may help them understand that things are not out of control in your family. Their own emotions may be throbbing, but you are not responsible for their feelings. So rather than trying to play the role of the polite host to people you don’t know and will not ever see again, focus on being your emotional child’s parent. Stay in charge and keep offering your child your confidence that all is well, and your reassurance that these feelings will pass. It’s the most positive, responsible thing you can do.�

Guide him through the upset by talking to him, offering him reassurance at the rate of about one sentence a minute. He needs you to listen, and he needs to hear your calm voice, too. Make your sentences short and loving and confident. “I know this is hard.” “You are doing a good job.” “You won’t feel like this for too much longer.” “I’m going to stay with you.” “You are safe here.” “I know ____ _____ _____ (you want to go back home, you miss Daddy, you want to run around, your ears hurt). But right now, we can’t fix that. You have me here.” Your calm reassurance is the balm his mind and heart are looking for. As soon as his mind has cleared the clog of feelings, he’ll come back to you, refreshed, or will fall asleep. He’ll most likely be quite chipper and cooperative when it’s over.�

Here’s what won’t work:�

• Reasoning with him (the reasoning center of his mind is out of commission while feelings are high)
• Trying to set up rewards for not crying (as soon as the reward is eaten or becomes uninteresting, the feelings return)
• Setting up punishments (this generates more feelings of alarm, upset and pain)
• Spending lots of energy on distraction (the minute you stop, the feelings return with great power, and you lose your cool)

Spending time on these alternatives will exhaust and frustrate you.�

Planning in advance can help.�

We recommend finding a way to listen to a child’s feelings before a long trip, and to take measures to deliberately stay connected with a child while you’re preparing to go. A child’s emotional center becomes deeply alarmed when Mommy or Daddy are preoccupied with other things for even twenty minutes, so staying connected before a trip is challenging. Short dollops of Special Time are helpful during packing and shopping, for instance, and running and playing chase around an airport lounge, setting up lots of laughter, can help children feel connected, encouraged, and close, rather than bored and distant.�

If you have a particularly active child who hates to stay in one place for longer than a moment, you would do well to slow him down in your lap for half an hour for each of several days in advance. This may trigger the same emotional work that he would do on the airplane, but in a place where you can listen and let him offload some of that undercurrent of fear that may be� driving that constant activity. Helping children notice your presence by inviting them (not forcing them) to make eye contact can help you learn whether your child is running scared (very little ability to hold eye contact with a relaxed parent) or just loves to run (able to hold eye contact with you and play with you at close range for awhile, then running off to do something else).�

A few other tips from parents who have logged miles in the sky.

• Bring some new toys to ward off boredom. Wrap them like gifts.
• If there are 3 or 4 of you, reserve one or two seats at another location so that you and your partner can “spell” each other.
• Bring healthy snacks—what you get while flying isn’t nutritious.
• “Ear Planes” earplugs help – they have a smaller size for kids now.

And lastly,

• Fly the relatives to you, rather than flying your family to the relatives!

Here’s how Staylistening with a flying child can work:“We were traveling with a large group of extended family. The traveling was stressful for my six-year-old daughter so she was having a lot of behavior problems. She was saying mean things (“I hate you!” “You’re stupid!” “I hate my sister!” “She’s so stupid!”), and refused to cooperate with simple requests. I believed that part of the problem was that we were not getting enough one-on-one time with her. I decided to have her sit with us instead of with her sister and cousin on the flight from Malaysia to Hong Kong. She was very angry, and protested loudly as we took our seats on the plane. She was kicking, screaming and crying.� “We used Staylistening. We let her protest but I held her legs so she could not kick the seat in front of her. We listened to her complaints in an understanding way but also calmly let her know that she would be sitting with us.

Not all children can move feelings out of their way as fast as she did, but long or short, Staylistening gives you the power to help your child return to his or her sunny self in the end.

For more information about� the Parenting by Connection approach, see our website at www.handinhandparenting.org or subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, Connecting!
�

Q. I know my kids are very sensitive to TV content and watch really “young” shows for their age. They seem to feel what they see on TV very deeply. For example, we have tried to watch Nemo and when the baby fish gets separated from the dad, it is not pleasant for them and they don’t want to watch it. Even intense music makes them want to turn it off. Forget about every watching a Disney movie like Aladdin or Snow White! There are too many scary parts for them.

Is there something wrong with my kids?

Your children are just fine! Children’s TV and video often portray experiences and a world view that young, sensitive minds simply can’t digest. By being careful about what they see you’re helping your children retain their ability to be empathetic toward others, and to use their imaginations freely. The thought of losing one’s parents (Nemo, Bambi), the thought that some adult would intentionally set out to harm a young, helpless creature (Snow White, 101 Dalmations), or the idea that children can be put in grave danger by adults around them (Hansel and Gretel, some Bible stories, and hundreds of other fairy tales) are all shocking thoughts, fraught with emotion for young children.

Your children haven’t been exposed to much of this, so they are still able to ask you to help keep their world a safe and kind one. You do well by them to have strong policies that protect them, so they can preserve their own inner compasses that tell them what’s good and what’s fun.

Children’s minds are pre-set for cooperation, for a loving and tender family group, surrounded by a loving and tender community in which respect, play, laughter, and warmth are the prevailing ways people interact. Children are built for compassion. They’re built with a strong sense of justice. They are shocked and hurt by every little act that isn’t full of caring. Exposing them to these influences frightens them deeply, but many children don’t show that fear overtly. They hold it deep inside.

Rather than filling children’s tender minds with stories of good and evil, we can choose to offer them the more accurate understanding that thoughtlessness and harshness come from good people who have been traumatized and lost their sense of being part of a loving group. We can improve on a culture dedicated to rewards and punishments for behavior by providing an environment that gives the support people need to offload bad feelings when tension makes them rigid, uncooperative, or afraid of learning. Many cartoons and videos communicate the notion that ultimate good is wrought by one person, fighting alone in a world full of danger and intentional harm. It’s up to us to highlight the experience (prevalent, but unsung) of cooperative, compassionate, community-based activity that makes life better because all those involved both give and receive.

You can see the effects TV-, video-, fairy tale-, and evening news-induced fears have on the playground. You can see fear in the tone and content of children’s play and in their relationships at home. Kids who have been exposed to lots of unfiltered media or who have heard frightening stories play the scary scenes out in an attempt to release the emotional tension. They spend hours in stereotyped play.

What parents and teachers see is the tip of an emotional iceberg—a strong fascination with the video or TV program that contains the scary scenes, and a real drive to see the videos or hear those stories that have frightened them again and again. The other visible signs of the big fears children carry are their tendency to be quick to feel insulted, quick to isolate themselves, or quick to assume that adults or other children don’t like them. When the images of a harsh world are alive in children’s minds, they lose good portions of emotional resilience. Their sweetness has to go underground.

Acting those roles out in play doesn’t relieve the fear that’s stuck inside, nor does seeing or hearing the stories that fascinate them over and over. Moving in affectionately but firmly to limit any aggression in play will allow a child to feel the upset that lies buried: there will be lots of thrashing, crying, and screaming! This is how children release the fears that TV and video install. Our booklet, “Healing Children’s Fears” (one of the Listening to Children set), will help guide you as you set the limits that allow your child to recover from the fears he has acquired.

Sometimes children try to offload their fears in nightmares. When they wake in the night frightened, they need their parent to hold them and let them cry hard and struggle. The nightmare is a blessing in disguise, allowing the child to fight against the frightening image, in the safety of a loved one’s arms, until the fear leaves their mind and they can tell once again that they are safe.

When children have acquired a real hunger to watch video and/or TV, simply proposing that you are ready to play with them instead can bring up the anger, and then the feelings of being trapped in a harsh world that lie beneath. As a parent listens, offers to embrace his child, and holds the limit—“No, I’m not going to let you see a video now, but I do want to play with you”—the child ejects the feelings and impressions of alienation that have locked down his mind. This parent’s experience is a good description of what happens when parents help their children break the TV habit.

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Q. What can I do to help my children get through our divorce?

Many families face the challenge of divorce or separation. Whatever the causes of the separation, and whatever the circumstances, it’s hard on everyone involved. Parents want the best for their children. They want stable, loving relationships in their lives. And they want their children to thrive. Yet big changes must be made.

There are many things parents can do, singly and in concert with one another, to help children with the pain of separation and divorce. This article will outline some steps that are simple, but not easy to do in the swirl of emotion that accompanies separation in a family. Both parents may not be able to agree to take these steps, but for at least one parent to head in these directions will help greatly.

Three sources of hurt

There are three basic sources of hurt for children when their parents separate. One is the loss of the family configuration that has anchored them. The children may retain the relationships, but their homes change, who is at home changes, their parents’ work schedules and their own school situations may change, and their parents’ economic circumstances change. These core changes can feel threatening to children, even if they eventually lead to positive outcomes.

Second, children are often aware of their parents’ raw, unhappy feelings about each other and the depth and intensity of those feelings also rocks a child’s world.

And third, children are built to abide in a loving, cooperative community. The end of a living arrangement they trusted and depended on forces a loss of innocence, a breach in their ability to feel that the world is a safe and welcoming place for them.

Shielding children from unnecessary hurt

There are a few commitments that separating parents can make that will shield their children from some of this hurt. These are commonsense commitments, but in a heated situation, they take work to remember. A parent needs to consciously add support and resource to his or her life to keep steering him or herself in a direction that benefits the children.

• When children are present, I will speak and act respectfully toward my child’s other parent, his or her family, and friends. In a stressful situation, a parent’s need to talk and to express anger, outrage, grief, fear, and other deep feelings is strong. Unguarded and extended expression of emotions can be very helpful in clearing a parent’s mind enough to be able to focus on the needs of their children. But parents must seek adult listeners—trusted friends, counselors, rabbis or pastors—in whom they can confide. Children are not at all equipped to listen to parents’ negative feelings about each other. No matter what the other parent has or has not done, children are far better off when parents act respectfully toward one another in their presence. Respect doesn’t imply that one isn’t allowed to set limits with another adult who is behaving poorly. It does mean that, as limits are announced, the limit-setter refrains from personal or physical attack.

• When children are present, I will not display my upsets about their other parent. We humans have a million ways to convey what we’re feeling. When we’re upset, we roll our eyes, heave loud sighs, grunt, stomp, slam, throw up our hands, clench our fists: the litany of expressions of upset is long. None of this is verbal, but all of it is hard on children. They are built to see the expression of love, confidence and relaxed cooperation. Separating parents don’t need to put up a false front, but they do need to model simple decency toward one another. Their displays of upset can be saved for adult company. With an adult who agrees to listen to the feelings, it can be a huge relief to show every bit of the upset. It’s a relief to use choice language, make angry gestures, groan, or pound on the wall. The feelings are there, throbbing for release. Show them to a grown person (not your child’s other parent) who can handle them.

• When children are present, I will not conduct extended arguments with my child’s other parent. Parents can’t help but have differences of opinion and arguments. And some arguments, conducted with ground rules that ban attacks on character and categorical statements, can actually help to rebuild a sense of caring. But in a family that is thoughtful of its children, the meaty part of a fight will be conducted out of earshot of the children.

• I will not recruit my child to agree with my grievances about their other parent. A separation is painful enough for children, without the additional pressure to side with one parent or another. Children love both their parents, and want the best for both their parents. It is heartbreaking to a child to have to choose between them.

• To the best of my ability, I will not assume a victim role. Each parent in a separation feels like a victim, and most feel pulled to cast blame for the breakup. These are our tendencies under stress, because our strongest feelings got their start in childhood, when we were helpless to defend ourselves, and were blamed, or learned to blame ourselves, for any lapses of judgment we had. Attaching ourselves to the role of the injured party tends to keep us from pulling up our socks and building good into our lives in every way that we can.

The feelings of being a victim are probably unavoidable, but we don’t have to believe those feelings. It’s far more constructive to cry hard or rage, with a good listener, until we can see a way to make things work well for us and for our children. When that path isn’t yet visible, it’s still possible to make a commitment to keep taking the initiative, to keep one’s attention on the positive moments and the lessons being learned. One young child I know, who is battling her fears of being in social situations, cries and rages as she says to herself, “This fear will not win! I won’t let it win!” That’s an attitude that will move her forward, even at the moments when she is stricken with panic. That’s an example of a path out of the victim role.

Working hard at keeping these commitments gives children maximum exposure to their parents’ good will and caring, and minimum exposure to adults in emotional upheaval, and therefore unable to put the children’s interests first.

Handling the hurt of separation

In order to begin to thrive in new circumstances, children need to offload their feelings about the changes in their beloved family. We offer another article, Healing the Hurt of Separation, that spells out ways that parents can help their children regain their confidence after big changes have unsettled them.

In order to begin to thrive in new circumstances, children need to offload their feelings about the changes in their beloved family. We offer another article, , that spells out ways that parents can help their children regain their confidence after big changes have unsettled them. Here are a few of the headlines.

• Children often unload their feelings about big, difficult events by erupting over small, insignificant triggers. A child can do an hour of healing work about missing Daddy or Mommy when the corner falls off their cookie, or they spill a drop of water on their pajamas. If you move in, put your arm around your child, and gently refuse to “fix” the upsetting little thing, your child can use it like a can opener. They scream about needing a whole cookie, or a change of pajama tops, and you hold them, look into their eyes and offer love and understanding. So many feelings, so passionately released! After a big cry or tantrum about such a small thing, a child feels much more secure in the world, and much less troubled, because you were there for them. You listened. You cared. He has grieved over something amiss, a small thing that’s a stand-in for the frightening events that he feels overwhelmed by. You’ll see your child relax, if you’ve been able to listen to him all the way through.

• At transition times, make time for children’s feelings to be heard. It’s healthy for children to have upsets around transition times. These are the times when the reminder that things aren’t the same is strongest. Far better to have a child who can powerfully cry that he doesn’t want to leave, or doesn’t want to stay with the parent he’s going to, than to have a child who swallows his feelings and winds up either subdued and separate or aggressive because he has too many feelings to manage. Often, children can fully feel their love for a parent directly after a huge cry about how they don’t want to be with him or her! This is one of the powerful paradoxes around emotional release. A child feels “I don’t want to go to Mommy’s” very strongly, cries hard about it, finishes, and has a good time at Mommy’s after all. It’s not pleasant to hear that your beloved child doesn’t want you, but if those are the feelings stuck inside, then your fastest way to a closer relationship is to assist your child to cry or rage until he’s done.

What do you say to a child who’s rejecting you? In a way, what you say is less important than how you are. Children read body language and tone of voice very clearly. Keep eye contact with your child, and imagine that you are taming a small, frightened animal by showing that you are trustworthy. Say, “I know,” with quiet acceptance, when your child says, “I hate you,” or “I don’t want to go with you!” You can say, “But I want to be with you.” You can say, “You’ll see [your other parent] again soon.” You can say, “I’ll listen to you until you are ready to come with me.” These will be balm for your child’s troubled spirit, though he or she won’t show that it’s helpful until this big outburst is over.

• Make your child’s arrangements. Listen to your child’s feelings about the custody arrangements, and take those feelings into consideration, but parents are the ones who need to make the decisions about when and how custody is shared. To leave children in charge of custody arrangements is too much like forcing them to choose sides. If your child is longing for her other parent while she’s with you, listen to her feelings, rather than cart her back to the other parent’s place. This will strengthen your child’s relationship with you, and will help him/her overcome the stored feelings about separation that have been triggered by the current situation.

• Always reassure a child that their other parent loves them, or would love them well if he/she could. Some children lose all contact with a parent, and some children have parents whose minds are deeply affected by addiction or other difficulties that bend their lives away from effective parenthood. But the underlying truth is that, if their child’s parent were healthier, better supported, had access to more love and opportunity, was blessed with beginnings that were gentle and kind, that parent would be delighted with them. It’s hard to explain human frailty to children, because it breaks our hearts to see them hurt by it. But we need to let them know that it’s not their fault that their Mommy or Daddy isn’t able to be in their life. Something has been missing from their parents’ life. There’s nothing missing in them.

Here’s how it can work

Here’s a quick story that gives an example of a parent who gathered enough presence of mind to treat her child well in a moment of emotional turmoil. It’s a small picture of a healing moment, both touching and funny. The healing action of emotional release is at work for both mother and child.

“My husband left me suddenly, when my daughter was eight months old. He had been having uncontrollable rages aimed at her, and he left angry, but I think underneath, it was to protect her, and me. He gave us no financial support whatsoever. This made life very difficult for me for several years.

“One day, he called and we had had a fight over the phone. My daughter was going on three years old. I got angry, slammed the receiver down hard, and began to cry. She came in from the other room and said, “Mommy, who were you talking to?”

I said, “I was talking to your Daddy.”

She said, “Oh, I miss him too!” and burst into tears.

I picked her up, held her, and we both cried for a good long time about her Daddy. She for her reasons, me for mine.”
—a mother in Palo Alto

More information is available in the Listening to Children booklets. Topics include How Children’s Emotions Work, Special Time, Playlistening, Crying, Tantrums and Indignation, Healing Children’s Fears, and Reaching For Your Angry Child. Click here to receive the free monthly newsletter from Hand in Hand, Connecting!

Q. Our neighbor recently returned from the war in Iraq badly injured including the loss of part of his leg. My son is very upset that his friend’s father has been so hurt. How do I explain a traumatic event like this to him?

There is, at heart, no way to understand murderous acts, whether from a far away world or a neighborhood crime. People hurting people simply doesn’t make sense. Children’s minds are jammed with upset and hurt when they are exposed to violence of any kind, because it is inherently offensive, inherently inhuman. So we as Moms and Dads must handle these sad and unwelcome events in ways that hurt our children as little as possible, but we cannot avoid the fact that war is hurtful to them.

Here are some thoughts about caring well for our children and ourselves during difficult times.

• First, we need to set aside time to talk with each other, and work through some of our feelings and reactions, at times and places separate from our children. We adults carry a heavy load of feelings about the current events, no matter how hard we try to tamp them down. So often, the first task is to remember what and who we care most about.

From there, we can remember the hopes we had as children that the world would be sweet, safe, and just. We need to let our thoughts about who we love and our longings for safety and justice lead to emotional release in crying, trembling, and an open show of upset. We need to do this with other adults. We won’t communicate well with our children unless we have acknowledged and expressed at least some of our own fears, outrage, and grief. But expressing those feelings only to our children is asking them to handle a far too heavy load.

• It is important, however, for our children to see that we care about people, about justice in the world, and about bringing an end to people harming each other. If you are upset, go ahead and cry openly, but without detailed explanation of your feelings. “I’m sad about something I heard on the news” is fine, along with “and I just need to cry for a little while to get the sadness out.” What children don’t need to hear is expressions of our feelings of anger, hopelessness, or helplessness.

• It is not helpful for very young children to know all the details of what has happened. They can’t digest violent behavior, and can become terrified by exposure to the graphic images and the feelings of horror and drama that we attach to the details. To keep young children from becoming unnecessarily terrified, we can

• Shield them from the media. TV reports, newspaper photographs, and radio commentary can communicate that adults do not feel safe, in charge, or trustful of others. Get your news after the children have gone to bed, or while you’re commuting in your car. Don’t let news of war erode the sense of connection and caring that you work so hard to build in your family.

• Offer an accurate perspective on “off-track” behavior. The casting of some people as good and some as bad is a construct that promotes misunderstanding and is used to market injustice in today’s world. We need to let our children know that we all are good, and we all do things that are “off track” when we feel hurt or afraid. They need to know that some children are treated very badly growing up, and it’s these people who can be made to want to hurt others. But if someone steps in, stops the hurtful behavior, and stays close, a hurt person can change.

We need to disavow the attitude that some people are evil and deserve to die. This attitude is one that we as a human race must replace so that we can live peacefully with each other, and mend the injustices that breed hopelessness and violence. We have much work to do to develop effective but nonviolent ways of preventing people from doing harm. We’ll need minds dedicated to the subtler but more accurate perception that an originally good person lies beneath a load of hurt that has created harmful behavior.

• Keep concentrating on our present lives, the tasks and routines of every day, and the goodness of being together and enjoying one another.

Children who are exposed to injured veterans or to tense, distressed adult talk will need explicit reassurance. They will need to know specifically that they are safe, that you will keep them safe, and that you will be doing what you can to help people work together so harmful things don’t have to happen again.

If you are asked why this happened, fashion your answer to your child’s age and experience. Acknowledge that we grownups haven’t yet figured out how to have everything fair for everybody in the world. You can explain, for instance, that when they don’t feel that things are fair for them, they may get mad and cry about it, and that you listen to their feelings, and then you work out solutions. But for many people, there’s no one to listen or to help them enough with their concerns. So sometimes people get mad and do things they never really wanted to do when they were children, because they feel so hurt, alone and misunderstood.

When talking about injustice and human irrationality, it’s also important to remind children of what you do in your family to help each other when one of you needs attention. For instance, you resolve fights by listening carefully. You make sure people don’t speak hurtfully about anyone else. You ask someone to listen to your own feelings of upset whenever you can. And you reach out to people you know have had trouble, so that they don’t lose hope or their connection with others.

In the end, though, irrational acts don’t make sense to children, because they don’t make sense, period. So don’t try too hard to get the explanation “right.” The facts don’t make irrationality understandable. Children need to see that we don’t give up loving, caring, and working to make life good in our families and our communities.They need as much reassurance as you can give that no one is going to bring violence to them.

If your child has become frightened by the injuries he has seen, he will find ways to bring up his fears that may be indirect. For example, he may wake up crying in the night, may get upset over not getting to sit on your lap during dinnertime, or may have a tantrum over not being able to find the shoes he wanted to wear today. Our children need us to LISTEN at these times, to stay close and reassure them while they feel the feelings in a big way. “You can sit on my lap after dinner, I promise,” said with a relaxed tone, will let your child cry and fight, releasing the feelings of fear and tension until your reassurance sinks in. “We’ll find your other shoe, but right now, I don’t know where it is,” will work just fine to give him an outlet for his fears and worries.

Children need these small upsets to serve as “can openers” for the emotions they have stored away. They usually choose a safe family time, like dinnertime or bedtime, or a challenging time like leaving for school or day care in the morning, to break open an upset so they can offload the feelings, then sense that they are safe again. When you listen, you can expect the feelings to last a good while. The warmer and more loving you are, the more intense the feelings will become. This is normal, healthy, and a wonderful acknowledgment of the sense of safety you have provided. Don’t mention the crisis that you think may be attached to all these feelings. Children’s emotional release process can be stopped cold by our interpretations. It works better to keep referring to the small issue at hand, which your child chose because it was exactly the size he could handle.

For more information on Listening tools, please visit our website at www.handinhandparenting.org.

Q. What should I do about my 5-yr-old lying? He’s a bright boy. Sometimes the lies he tells now are imaginative, but more frequently it’s just denying that he did something by saying it was the ghost who lives with us. How can I get him to accept the consequences when he won’t admit he’s done it? Sometimes I try just saying “Oh look! The shampoo’s spilled all over the floor! Here, you take this towel and I’ll take this one and let’s clean it up.” He shrugs me off like he was a teenager! (He’s 5.)

Other times I ignore the lie coming out of his mouth and go on based on what I can see: He says he put his books away, but they’re still out, so we don’t leave for the park. I don’t think I give the impression that I believe his lies. I just don’t want to have to deal with it.

You’ve done a good bit of experimenting with your responses, and that’s smart. It helps when we parents can notice a difficulty, and instead of stomping on it hard, we try this, and try that, and watch what seems to help and what doesn’t. Experimentation is the sign of a good learner! I think I may be able to add a bit of perspective, and a suggestion or two.

First, every lie a child tells has a truth behind it, and different lies signal different truths.

The “tall tales” lies. One mom I know has a daughter who loves to spin tall tales when she meets adults she knows in town. She talks about the long trips she has taken, or the five pets she has at home, at great length and in detail. She works hard to captivate her audience. In listening to her Mom, and thinking about her life, we made a guess that she didn’t want to be left out of the adult conversation. The truth here is that the child badly wants positive attention.

The “I’m OK” or “I’m better than you” lies. Most children carry a fear of being found to be less than, or are in contact with others who are highly competitive. Competition means that someone has to be judged as less than, and this is always, always hard on children. So some lies are designed to make sure that the child will be seen as adequate. “I have five Barbie dolls at my house!” or “I know how to drive now!” are boasts that ward off humiliation. The truth is, the child wants to be seen as adequate, as good.

The “I don’t want to do it” lies. Children will lie when you ask them to report on completing a task. If they don’t want to do the task, but feel that it’s not safe for them to have their opinion about that task, they will just tell you they did it, hoping not to have to face either their big feelings about not wanting to, or your big feelings about their “failure.” Children want to be good, want to cooperate, but they also need times and places where they can say that they don’t feel like cooperating. When there is no such time or place, a lie occurs. The truth here is “I don’t want to, but I can’t tell that anyone will love me if I say that.”

The “I’m going to sneak to get what I want” lies. These are pretty similar to the “I don’t want to do it” lies—there’s something that the child wants, and he’s pretty sure that no one reads how powerfully these desires drive him. So, rather than face his feelings of need, he goes about silently getting the desired thing. (We grownups do this all the time! We sneak M&M’s when we diet, we sneak a few more minutes drinking a cup of tea before taking the children to day care, making ourselves speed through the city instead.) The truth here is, “I want! And it doesn’t look like there’s any room to have what I want, or to show how badly I want.”

The “I am not bad” lies. These are probably the most common, and the hardest for grownups to deal with. We see that our child has done something that’s beyond reasonable limits. We know who did it, and want the child to admit it. But he won’t. We want the child to take responsibility, but he keeps lying.

This is, for most parents, infuriating and frightening. We begin to worry about our child, and the kind of person he will be when he grows up! The truth behind this lie is an important one. We are big, children are little, and they depend—depend for their lives—upon our love and approval. They won’t threaten their lifeline to us by saying something that will make us more distant from them, or angry at them, or harsh toward them. They can’t (and perhaps shouldn’t be expected to) cut their own lifeline to love that way. It’s a terrible thing to be humiliated. It’s a terrible thing to face an adult’s anger, or an adult’s punishment, when you are a quarter of their size and fully dependent on their approval. Punishment and blame eat like acid at a child’s sense of security and hope. The truth behind this kind of lie is, “I have no idea why I misbehaved. All I know is that my life depends on my Mom and Dad’s approval.”

What will help a child who lies?
A good first step for a parent is to think about the bigger picture. Yes, honey has been spilled all over the floor, and the child is standing there with sticky hands, saying she didn’t do it. The lie may be infuriating, but it sends a clear message. “I need you to love me!” We’ve been taught very sternly that a child must tell the truth to a parent. It’s important to take a step back and notice that our own adult standards of truth are actually quite inconsistent. All of us tell social lies: “Oh, I’m sorry I can’t make it to your gathering—I have a previous engagement.” Or, “I love the paté.” And we cover for our own faults, for the same reasons our children do. “I forgot to wash the shirts, honey! I’m sorry!” when the truth was, we remembered, but just felt too exhausted to do one more thing. We don’t want the hassle of disapproval or a lecture or the cold shoulder. At one time or another, we will lie for love, too!

What helps children who tell tales or lie is a stronger sense of closeness with his or her parents. This means, in general, some regular times when it’s Special Time, and it’s OK to do whatever they want (with the parent keeping things safe), with their parents’ approval and undivided attention. These times don’t need to be long, but they do need to be regular. This helps children to feel the love we offer them more directly, and to feel that they can depend on our attention. And as you may have noticed, most lies children tell reveal a truth about wanting and needing love and closeness. Special Time helps you deliver what your child craves and needs.

Children also need firm limits, set with warmth, rather than sternness. “I know you want another piece of Halloween candy, but I’m not going to let you have one until tomorrow,” when said with disapproval, shuts down a child’s ability to show how big feelings of need. Those feelings are then likely to drive him to sneak some, because there was no room for anyone to see and accept (but not give in to) his desires.

When you say the same thing while drawing a child onto your lap and accepting the tantrum about wanting the candy, you’re allowing a child to unload those big feelings. You don’t give the piece of candy, you give your love and attention. At then end of a cry, he’ll feel better, and his obsession with his candy will most likely be worked through, at least for awhile. He got it out on the table, you heard it all. Those desires shrivel to nothing, like a balloon that’s flown around the room wildly, then fallen to the ground. Relieved of those desires, he can figure out other ways to be happy. We call this Staylistening. It has the effect of allowing children’s emotional truths to have their moment (or their hour, depending on how long the truth has been kept under lock and key).

The last idea that might be helpful is this: don’t pretend ignorance. If you know the answer to the question of “Who did this?” or “Did you complete this task?” don’t ask it. Don’t expect your child to tattle on himself when you are all set to get angry. Asking this kind of question will only make you disappointed, because, backed into an impossible corner, a child has to lie. The truth is, he can’t please you either way. You’ll be angry if he tells the truth, and angry if he doesn’t.

Instead, go and look to see if his room is picked up, or if the garbage has been taken out. If not, then go to him, get down on his level, and say, “I see that you haven’t picked up your room. “ He doesn’t need to lie, because you have the truth in hand.

And don’t set consequences. Just stay with him until you and he figure out together how the job is going to get done. He may need to cry about not wanting to do it. He may need to complain and have you hear how hard his life feels. He may need to make bargains. He may need you to say, “Nope, no bargains tonight.” Sooner or later, the effort to connect will pay off. He’ll feel better understood. You’ll have escaped being harsh and angry. Most likely, he’ll feel safer, more loved, and more likely to come to you when he feels things are hard, rather than having to lie about how he feels and what has happened.

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Do you have a question you would like answered in the Connected Parent? Contact us today.

Q. What can I do to help my timid little girl gain confidence?

Does the answer, “Wrestling!” come to mind? Many of the confident, capable, courageous girls I know have families in which vigorous physical play is a tradition. It’s an unsung activity that is far more important to children’s development than we’ve guessed.

What advantage does wrestling and horseplay give our daughters? There are many reasons why it’s great for girls. (It’s wonderful for boys for the same reasons, but let’s focus here on girls, as they are socialized not to participate in this kind of play.)

Knowing their bodies and their strength gives girls a grounded confidence. We humans have faced many dangers in our evolution, and in order to feel confident in the world, we need to test and train our “equipment” intensively. Children need to tumble, jump and fling themselves into piles of pillows or into a waiting parent’s arms. They need to climb on their parents, ride on their backs and bounce on their tummies. Children need to playfully push grownups over, run from room to room, throw pillows hard, then harder. They love getting bounced around by the pillows that are thrown back. The more girls can play like this, the stronger they become, and the surer they are that they can handle a challenge.

This confidence develops over time. Having “wrestling time,” “puppy pile time” or “pillow fight time” on a regular basis gives girls a setting in which they can practice their moves, learn their capabilities, and become more daring in play. Parents create a kind of human gymnasium, providing just the right amount of resistance and challenge for each child. Little equipment is needed. With excess furniture moved aside, a bed, a carpet, maybe a blanket and a few pillows are all it takes. A parent might start on hands and knees, saying “I’ve got 100 kisses for you! Here I come!” with a grin. Then, a rousing game of catch and release ensues. The parent tries hard, but the clever girl gets away often, giggling in the struggle and the victory. The parent doesn’t tickle, but keeps doing what will bring laughter, a sign that the play is just right for her at that moment. Usually, what brings the laughter is the child winning the upper hand as they play. The girl wins most contests, and as her confidence builds, the parent challenges her a little more. Gradually, her stamina builds. Laughter pours. Perspiration blooms. And, over time, a confident girl emerges.

Laughter creates a path well worth following. As she plays, a girl will “show” you issues she has. If there’s name calling going on at her school, she’ll call you the names that are circulating there. You can up the ante in play when she does that: “Ooooh! Anyone who calls me “poo-poo head” gets a really big kiss on the foot!” She doesn’t want to insult you. She needs to see a playful version of someone sticking up for him or herself. Do it with vigorous affection, so she can laugh hard. The laughter dissolves her name calling compulsions (but not her eagerness for this kind of play with you). If she laughs when you say, “You can’t climb that sofa! You’re not strong enough!”, respond with great amazement when she clambers up the sofa back and stands there triumphant. Do it again, and again. The fun of surpassing your expectations makes her feel elated, and draws her closer to you.

She’ll get hurt, then recover and learn. In this kind of play, a girl will inevitably get hurt. There will be a bump, a bruise, a cut lip, or an unexpected collision. This is not a reason not to play hard! Especially with timid girls, these moments of pain and upset provide a prime opportunity to offload the fears that keep them confined to meek and unadventurous behavior. The bump occurs, the child bursts into tears, and the wise parent will go to her side, but will not make a fuss. You don’t need to run to get a band-aid. You don’t need to run for the ice. Your child needs your warm, confident attention while she processes what just happened. Her mind needs the chance to unload the fear that instantaneously shot through her system. The bump is small, but that fear may be big, and if it is, it will take her awhile to cry it through. When you’ve listened until she’s done crying, her mind will be free to make sense of what happened, and notice that she’s safe and well. She will have become sturdier. She’ll learn that her body is resilient, and that she has the power to heal. She’ll also learn that you care, and that you don’t panic when things feel hard for her.

For instance, you’ll want to be a very tame bucking bronco for the first five or ten rides for a timid girl. Jiggle her gently, so she succeeds in clinging to your back, or only slowly slides to the carpet. If she’s laughing with the challenge of hanging on tight, you’re playing the game right at the edge of her comfort zone. The laughter builds her strength and confidence. You don’t have to feel badly if she falls off once, and cries because her head thumped down on the carpet. She will benefit from a good cry in your care. As long as you listen until she is finished, she’ll play with less fear afterward.

She’ll feel closer to you, and more hopeful in your family. Wrestling and horseplay are great for helping children feel connected, creative, and seen. The attention you pay as you play seeps into their every pore. It bathes them with reassurance that they are liked. It lets you show your sense of humor with them. It gives them the chance to be swift and clever, while you suffer loudly in the slow and bumbling role. What a relief after long days at school or day care, where grownups are very serious about being in charge, and about knowing more than children!

So get some play fighting, pillow fighting, wrestling, chasing, thumping or bucking bronco riding going at your house. If it’s challenging for you, start with a timer set at five or ten minutes, so you can build your confidence and tolerance too. Start with the toss of a pillow, or perhaps the offer of a horseback ride. The play that follows will delight your daughter. Over time, it will bring her confidence, closeness, and a very handy sixth sense about people that will stand her in good stead as she decides how she wants to use her fine intelligence in our challenging world.

Here’s how it can work. (We wish we could guarantee these particular results after every pillow fight!)

I had been having trouble with my seven-year-old daughter’s pickiness and uncooperative behavior. She was becoming increasingly hard to live with at home—she had many complaints, and seemed to want to be upset at me at the drop of a hat. I brought this to my Hand in Hand support group, and the leader suggested that her sense of her own power might be dwindling, as it often does when girls get older. The thought was that girls get directed strongly toward reading and sedentary skills, and there are too few physical challenges to inspire them and remind them that they are good and powerful people.

So I have begun doing good hard pillow fights with my two daughters (the younger one is now three.) Yesterday, I had a nice and rough playtime with both of them. We fought and wrestled hard on the bed and the floor. After we were finished, they decided to go into their room and announced, “Don’t come in here!” Well, a couple minutes to myself cannot be argued with, right? About 20 minutes later they invited me in to see their hard work…a completely clean room (bed made, shoes in pairs, toys put away, the works)! I continue to be amazed by the power of a good pillow fight!
—a mother in San Anselmo, CA

This month we’re still working on last month’s question about how to help children who are picky eaters.

For picky eaters, food ignites strong feelings.

When you have a picky eater, the problem isn’t so much with food, it’s with your child’s feelings about food. Children whose palate is broad generally have the feeling that food is interesting. They experience enjoyment and ease when they eat. At one year old, one of my grandsons would toddle downstairs to breakfast saying “Mmmmmmm!” as he thought about breakfast. Anything would do—avocados, fruit, eggs, spaghetti from the night before would be just fine with him.

A picky eater doesn’t have that ease. When a food tastes creamy, when two foods touch each other on his plate, or when he sees the color green at mealtime, his feelings flare. And there’s often a matching set of strong feelings, feelings of comfort, attached to the select foods he can tolerate. In other words, rather than being an interesting everyday experience, food is emotionally charged, with positive and negative poles that are set off by colors, textures, smells, and how it sits on the plate.

Conventional parent tactics don’t ease the child’s feelings about food.

Parents try insisting that certain foods are eaten, and they try slipping healthy foods unnoticed into the child’s meal. Some parents hide peas inside individual macaroni noodles, trying to make a nutritious meal! They try pestering, and they try waiting until a child is busy, hoping the child won’t notice what is being slipped into his mouth. All these tactics may bring short-term successes, but none of them ease a child’s attitude about food. And over time, they perpetuate tension both for the child and for the parent. It is important for parents to pay attention to nutrition, so some of the above strategies may be necessary at times. But helping the child relax his vigilance around food gets to the emotional center of the matter.

I want to introduce a strategy that is respectful of a child’s emotional experience, and that helps build a stronger parent-child bond in the process. To take this tack, parents need to think about their child’s experience as a whole, and look for the possible roots to the feelings he has pinned so strongly onto food.

Feelings about food may have very early roots.

When a child has strong negative feelings about an everyday occurrence like eating, it can be that those feelings spring from an early, highly charged experience that he hasn’t yet recovered from. For instance, I have found that babies who scream in full protest when a shirt is pulled over their heads are often babies whose births were long and difficult. Children who spent time in intensive care may, after a few months of getting used to life at home, launch screaming protests when they are laid on their backs for a diaper change. These simple everyday occurrences carry a faint similarity to some part of the child’s frightening early experience, and he has a wildly emotional response. His feelings don’t match the innocuous nature of getting dressed or having a diaper change. They are, however, entirely appropriate for the earlier time and situation that’s been triggered in the child’s emotional memory.

Help your child release his stored upsets by listening.

So when a parent works hard to shush the nighttime crying of a baby, or offers a pacifier for a baby who begins a hearty cry every afternoon at five, the parent may be making life more peaceful that day. But the child’s feelings don’t go away when the crying is stopped. (See our Crying booklet for more details.) The sadness, fear or frustration stays parked inside the child. Feelings build. And the child’s emotional system includes delicate triggers that tip those feelings into awareness again. The feelings embedded in a child’s early experience can and do migrate from his baby efforts to cry. When he reaches his toddler stage, he doesn’t just open up and cry, he finds things he is fussy about. He hates shoes, or he needs a blankie, or his fussiness attaches to food! He needs to cry about his earliest frightening experiences, but was trained not to. So now, little things set him on edge. Peas. Carrots. Anything crunchy. Anything with vitamins in it.

Food isn’t usually the only trigger for a picky eater. Very often, children who reject many foods, or reject sitting at the table for more than two minutes are children who have easily triggered feelings about lots of other things too. They don’t like to get dressed, or hate to have their hair washed, or can’t sleep unless they are held, or they wake five times every night. Perhaps they don’t like the unexpected movement of physical play, or, on the other side of the spectrum, they play hard, don’t want to be cuddled much, and hate to slow down.

Any trigger will do to help heal the early hurts that make food difficult.

These kinds of triggers offer opportunities for a parent to initiate a child’s emotional healing from an early, bothersome set of feelings. Listening and allowing a child to have a full and passionate cry in your lap will help your child relax over time. There are particular ways of interacting with children or setting limits that will allow you to help your child with feelings. Say, for instance, that you decide to help him with his feelings about hating to get dressed. All the child needs is someone to tell him, “I know you don’t want to put on your shirt. But it’s time. Here it is. I’ll be with you until you can put it on.” Listen with care—his upset is from another time and place, but he needs you to fully understand how hard that time was for him. He needs your steady gaze. He needs you to remind him that the shirt won’t harm him, and that you’re keeping him safe. He’ll cry and fight and he may sweat as well, as he offloads his fears. When his emotional system has released enough pent-up emotion, he’ll relax in your arms, be glad you are there, and will put on his shirt, which he now can tell poses no threat to him.

The overall emotional charge from his early struggle will lessen, cry by hearty cry. Your child will gradually become better at sitting at the table, better at sampling foods, even though what he’s doing his crying about is his aversion to getting dressed. Any upset he cries about will tap into the same reservoir of hurt if you listen warmly, and allow him time.

We call this process Staylistening, and you can learn more about it through our Listening to Children series. In very simple terms, the parent provides the safety and the caring. The child expels old feelings that keep him on guard against certain reasonable activities.

As he relaxes on the inside and recovers from whatever overwhelmed him, his overall behavior will brighten. Most likely, food won’t elicit such strong responses. And you won’t have to focus on food to make progress—you can relax about food, focus on his feelings about getting dressed or sitting in the car seat or leaving his blankie behind in the morning. Tension between him and you won’t increase meal by meal.

The road to recovery from picky eating can be a long one, because the hurts that underlie children’s strong reactions to food often go deep. But this path is one that’s respectful and healthy. As you help your child recover from a hard time, he feels your support, and the warmth between you grows. Last month’s article talks about the playful ways you can help a picky eater. Our Playlistening and Staylistening tools will help you help your child gently, over time, without fighting over food. You may occasionally sneak peas into his macaroni in the meantime, but things will improve. Unless, of course, he decides he loves peas inside macaroni!

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