Raise yourself

The eighteenth newsletter is about practicing parents

‘Don’t yell!’ yells my neighbor loudly from her backyard onto the playground where her kids are playing and shouting.

It’s not hard to see the apples falling from the tree in this example. And it painfully illustrates why this ‘do as I say, not as I do’ way of parenting doesn’t work.

How can we expect our children to listen to us when we aren’t able to listen ourselves? Instead of explaining how things work, let’s improve how we listen and show them how it’s done.

In the last newsletter I explained that, in addition to being a coach, I am also a listening skills teacher. Because I believe everybody needs these skills.

Since ‘everybody' is quite a big group of people, let me focus in on a smaller group of people who need these skills more than others.

Parents.

Built to copy

Babies come out of the womb as fully formed learning machines. They have exactly the right instincts, tendencies, and mirror neurons to learn the behaviors they need. Maybe we hope to actively program our children to be a certain way, but we forget that they learn the bulk of their behavior by copying us.

Sure, they might not engage in a thought-provoking conversation with you right away, or stand up or walk, but they have everything they need to learn those things. They’ll learn them all in spite of you. No need to preach, only to practice.

Now that I have a daughter, I can clearly see it. I don’t have to actively teach her anything. She inhales experiences and impressions. Calculating, deliberating and integrating information at a rate I can’t even attempt to follow. It’s so clear that I’m not needed to do any teaching or instructing, she’s doing the learning. Message received. I can do one of two things, get out of her way, or be the best role-model I can be.

This can be a scary premise for (new and future) parents because as much as you’d like to edit and tinker, they’ll copy your traits. Good and bad.

There’s no way to hide if you haven’t been working on yourself. Have a temper? Get ready to see it mirrored in your child. Have bad eating habits? Wait until they get a whiff of them and prepare to see them reflected.

Where to start

There are things you can do though. You can improve yourself and be a better ‘original image’ for them to copy. Dive into your traumas, fix your habits, work hard on you. And let them do the copying. We don’t need to teach, explain, or tutor. We need to exemplify.

Instead of raising our children, we need to focus on raising ourselves.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know what’s coming. No big surprise here, I’m talking about listening. Yes, there are other things that are important. If you have some not-so-excellent behavior you need to change, of course, that has precedence. But learning to listen should be a  very close second.

Taking steps to learn how to become a better listener, will change your entire attitude. And this attitude is important even before the use of words. Even more so, I would argue. Words and sentences aren’t the only things we copy when we learn to talk. We also copy how people talk. We feel their intention, their tone, their presence. If they talk loudly or softly. If they let each other finish sentences, or not…

When we do a good job practicing instead of preaching we’re helping our children become good listeners automatically. Just by being one ourselves.

I don't know the math on this, but this seems like an exponential benefit. Almost something I’d like to yell about.