So, I have been very slowly reading this book that’s supposed to teach me how to be a good parent, called “Easy to Love Difficult to Discipline”. Actually, it was a goodbye gift from a therapist who moved out of Lincoln’s area, and when I first saw it I thought, “Hey, what makes you think I have trouble with discipline?” Then I remembered that she had seen both of my kids in action and figured I should probably get started reading.
It was not what I expected at all. I was thinking it would be some hard and fast rules to implement, military style, to whip your kids into shape. Instead, it is this hippy trippy (don’t worry, I like that kind of thing) examination of why our kids are so out of control. The premise of the book is that you will never get anyone to do what you want through fear; you can only truly motivate people through love. Also, the backbone of the book is that we, as adults, are expecting our kids to do what we can’t: have self control. We expect a three year old to be able to manage their emotions, obey commands they don’t understand, calm themselves down, refrain from outbursts, and go right along with rules and regulations that feel downright adversarial. Meanwhile, we can’t control our own emotions and find ourselves barking at our children for not following these commands, complaining about our boss, shouting at other drivers in traffic, and giving in to our own craving for a candy bar that we want when we would never give in to our kids’ pleading for the same candy bar.
In other words, our children learn self control by watching us model it, and if we are lacking in that area (ouch, guilty), then they can’t possibly be expected to be able to use self control themselves. Anyway, as I have been reading, it has become clear that I need to start working on myself first rather than expecting a miracle cure for my kids’ behavior. The thing that is helping me the most, it seems, is what the author calls the Power of Attention, which says that what you focus on, you get more of. If you can focus what you want instead of what you don’t want to happen in a situation, your attention will bring about the better outcome. Focusing on not getting a bad result tends puts your attention on the problem and blocks your ability to reach a solution.
Like I said, hippy trippy, right? But it has been teaching me how important it is to focus on positive things, to fill myself with good thoughts, attribute decent intentions to the action of others, and otherwise keep my attention on love. So, in an odd way, this idea of the Power of Attention got me thinking about why I care about people using hurtful words like retard casually. See, even if their intention is not to be hurtful, their attention is on the ridicule of someone different. It projects hurtful separation to an entire group of people, and in that For Whom the Bell Tolls Kind of way, hurts us all. Everyone who hears it is forced for one second to focus on the ugliness of the word. Their carelessness affects me and my family in an abstract and yet very real way.
And it’s that way with so much of life. I read a study once that said people who force themselves to smile more often actually release more of the neurotransmitters that create happy feelings, so you can fake happiness as a way to become more happy in the long run. I would like to believe the same is true for people who make a habit to focus more on love and acceptance, that even if it feels forced at first, it will create more love and acceptance in their lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment