“You are boring, princess, chubby and toothless” one of my girls said very angry to her sister.
The sister replied: “Are you going to talk to me like that just because I don’t want to play this anymore? and she continued: “I wouldn’t care if I were a chubby and toothless princess, but boring I’m not!”. And the two began to laugh.
When I heard this dialogue from the other side of the house I felt happy, mission accomplished – not because they had resolved the conflict tho. But for trying respectful ways, even if the beginning was an attempt to offend.
There are days when children manage to retrace their path inside them and realize that they acted because they were filled with anger, jealousy, hunger or even sleep. There are days when the confusion is great and the crying comes before the word. It’s part of the process.
Learning takes time, but seeing children conquer new emotional territories is beautiful and brings renewed hope.
How are the conflicts out there?
Cranky Kid, Huffy Kid, is it really?
…
In another day…
Once, during a play activity with some children between 6 and 9 years old, one of them expressed being very angry. She started to throw things on the floor, and I asked:
What happened? Are you upset? The child replied, “I don’t know”.
The child couldn’t even name what she was feeling. She just knew she was mad at her sister.
Even when the feeling is that strong (angry, mad), the child is not always able to recognise it. And when she recognises it, she’s not prepared to talk about it.
That day, I let the child feel everything she was feeling. She threw the papers on the floor and cried, cried a lot – with me there to support her emotionally.
Crying relieves, crying is good. As long as the kid doesn’t hurt herself or the other, or actually break things, throwing things and papers on the floor is not a limit for me. At the end we cleaned it up together.
I stayed by her side, making myself available until she felt better and safe.
And when the storm was over, she accepted my attention. She shyly told that her sister never let her join in the games and this made her feel that she was not good enough for her sister to want to play with her.
I asked if she had already said this to her sister and from then on she talked a lot about various subjects and situations. I didn’t bring the solution, I didn’t make her think in any way I imagined she might think. I just listened to her and was interested in her feelings.
It is very natural to label the children we live with, like our children, nephews, neighbours, friends of our children. We label them as “difficult child”, “agitated child”, “nervous child”, “limitless child”, “impossible child”.
The truth is that none of them actually is any of these labels. The child has just a lot of feelings inside and few adults interested in helping, understanding, and listening to them…
Almost none is willing to listen without wanting to point out any answer, solution or paths to take. Best solution is actually listening to feelings.
We don’t need to understand much, we just need to be a safe haven, like a bank that doesn’t let the river overflow, that doesn’t let it get stuck in the way, that supports and makes life flow at the pace it should be.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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