Connecting Deeply with Your Child

How deep is your connection with your child? Creating and maintaining a deep connection with
a child is no easy task. We live in a world that is filled with stress, speed, distractions, jobs, homework, bills, TV, ipods, computers, cell phones, lists and calendars. Our world seems to speed up every year and go faster and faster. The negative by-product of the speed and complexity of our world is that our connection to ourselves and to our children suffers. It is difficult to connect deeply when we are doing five things at once and thinking 10 thoughts within a few seconds. Something has got to change within ourselves and our lives or more problems will keep manifesting in our children. I believe that one of the main causes of many of the problems that our children are facing is the lack of connection that our children have with their parents.

Connection is the foundation of social and emotional intelligence. If you want to develop your child's social and emotional intelligence, you will need to pay attention to the quality of connection between you and child.  What do I mean by the word connection? It is an energy that brings a parent and child close together, not necessarily in terms of physical proximity, close in terms of your heart. Connection is when you and your child feel a heartfelt warmth and closeness. Since connection is manifested in so many unique and different ways in human beings, it is difficult to exactly describe what connection is. You definitely know when you are feeling that connection because you feel a sense of warmth in your body or a sense peace or love or joy. Pay attention to the moments that you feel close to your child. What is happening? What are you feeling? What do you notice is happening with your child? Have the intention to develop your awareness of connection so you will know when it is there and what is happening. This awareness will help you create more moments of connection with your child.

How do you create more moments of deep connection and closeness that not only create intimacy, but also teach your child?  One of the main ingredients to creating connection to your child is to be available to talk and to be with him. Another important ingredient is to be a good listener. To listen to your child without judging him or giving advice is a powerful thing. Just listen with an empathetic heart. That is such a gift. Giving a child the space to just be and to share what he feels and thinks without judgments or suggestions getting in the way. The action of creating and holding a space for your child is also very powerful and supportive. Often parents feel that they have to say something insightful or do something magical in order to be helpful and supportive for a child. A parent's presence is valuable gift in of itself. Feeling loved and cared about is part of the remedy.

Another main ingredient of creating connection is to honor the emotion that comes up in your child's life. Emotion is cord that can connect you with your child. When a child feels angry, sad, scared, or hurt, we often try to get rid of the feeling or mask it with our words of support. Those times that your child is feeling the strongest emotions are best times to teach your child how to feel their emotion and use it positively in their lives. Yes, those times of rage or fear or deep sadness are gifts and tremendous opportunities. Emotions are wonderful and are the true motivators of all of our actions. They give us useful information that can be extremely valuable in making wise and informed decisions. We need to use the thinking parts of our brain along with the emotional parts to function effectively in our lives.

Emotions are only a problem when we deny, suppress, or mask them because we don't learn from the information, and the energy of the emotions can stuck in the body.  Emotions are a lot like a flowing river which needs to move and meander. If you block the flow of the river in any way, problems arise and the water can back up and get stagnant or overflow and cause destruction. Many of us never learned when we were young children how to use emotion in a positive way in our lives.

It is so important to hold a space or be a container for your child so she can feel the emotion and let the energy of the emotion move through her body and eventually let go of it. The most important focus in dealing with a child's emotion is to have an attitude that the emotion is valuable and not to try to make the emotion go away or fix it. When we are like a container and hold a safe and accepting space for a child, a child learns to embrace and feel their emotions and learns to use them to help her life. Remember that emotion is the cord that connects us as human beings. Honoring a child's emotion creates a powerful bond between you and your child. She feels seen, supported, and valued. Whether it is joy or love or sadness or fear, emotion can touch your hearts and bring you closer to your child.

In those moments when you can hold a space for your child to experience their emotions, powerful lessons are being learned. Your child is learning to identify and feel their emotions and express them. Most importantly, your child is learning how to be not be afraid of their emotions and how to stay present with strong emotions. That is profound lesson. So many addictions from drugs to alcohol to overeating are just ways we learned to cope with strong feelings when we were too scared to feel them when we were young and no one was around to support us. In short, you are teaching your child to effectively manage their emotions and not to run from them. You are also teaching your child to self soothe themselves just by being present with them.

Here is the challenge for parents. In order for a parent to be fully present for a child's emotion and hold a space for them, s(he) must be present to their own emotions and be willing to feel them. Often we want to try to distract or fix a child's emotion because it makes us uncomfortable to feel that emotion in ourselves. Be gentle with yourself and wade slowly into the water of emotion. Take baby steps in honoring and feeling your own emotions. As much as it can be challenging and scary to feel our emotions, we won't die from feeling our emotions, but we can gain a tremendous amount of inner peace and wisdom by facing and feeling them.

Once this warm connection is made with your child then you help your child to figure out how they want to deal with the emotions or solve the problem that is generating the emotions. This activity is something do several times a week or when you would like to. You can acknowledge and honor an emotion quickly, but to go through this process may take ten to twenty minutes.

The more that you have an intention to just with your child and try to understand him and his emotions without changing or fixing them, a warm and heartfelt connection will be created. From this type of connection, there is great potential to guide your child through the steps of problem solving in order to address the problem or situation that was the catalyst for the emotions.

Here are some ideas to keep in mind when creating and maintaining a a deep connection with your child. First, be aware of your child's emotion. When your child is feeling a strong emotion, see it as an opportunity for intimacy and for teaching. Second, mirror your child's feeling back to them by using the words I see, I notice, I hear, you feel, you want, it sounds like, etc. without any intention of getting rid of the feeling. Next, validate your child's feeling by using words like I understand, it makes sense, you are making sense. Fourth, empathize with the emotion in anyway that you can. While dialogueing, nurture or hold your child if appropriate with the intention of feeling the emotion, but not with the intention of trying to help get away from the emotion. Finally, once you have guided your child in identifying, feeling, and expressing their emotion and made a connection with them, you are ready to problem solve. Help your child to brainstorm ideas on how they can solve their problem. Have your child pick one if they are old enough (6 or above) and act out the possible solution. Allow your child to try the solution and see if it works. Be sure to follow up later and ask him if the solution worked. If not, have your child pick another possible solution and try it.

Upcoming Teaching Heart blogs will also give suggestions on learning how to pay attention to your feelings and on being aware of them and will discuss the topic of problem solving with your child in more detail.

Comments

[Mindy]

This is really interesting, thanks for posting this, Tom.

[Karen]

As an educator, I deeply regret that our concerns are too often focused on academic and behavioral systems, largely ignoring the socio-emotional development of children, which research confirms largely impacts the potential for their success as learners. The tide seems to be turning, albeit a bit slower than I'd like to see, but resources like Teaching Heart will help to inform us regarding the critical need to address socio-emotional connections to learning.