This may sound odd, but it began with heartbreak.
Sure, that may be a bit dramatic. But when you start to notice your 6-year-old voicing negative and self-critical comments about themselves, “heartbreak” is the only word that seems to fit.
As parents, we want our children to explain what’s going on in their heads, describe exactly how they’re feeling, and offer ideas on how we may help.
The truth is they don’t know.
So naturally we grab our Google shovel and start digging rabbit holes that slowly turn into underground mazes with self-blame waiting around each corner. We spend time with our spouses painting the tunnel walls with phrases like:
“We should’ve done X better.”
“If we just would’ve stopped doing Y.”
“We could’ve been more aware of Z.”
As the old saying goes… “Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda”.
Some of the cave paintings may indeed be valid, and there’s always room for improvement when it comes to parental behavior. With that in mind, we cannot allow ourselves to become trapped in this thought cycle of self-criticism. It’s not productive.
If you find yourself there…GET OUT.
How can we expect to help our children navigate their internal systems when we’ve gone and trapped ourselves in an underground maze of our own? We can’t.
So what do we do?
We sit down with our kids and share a little secret. The secret is that there are REAL superpowers in this world. Powers that most adults are still searching for. Powers that our children can discover and build within themselves.
These powers will be fragile in the beginning. They will require a great deal of practice, focus, and adjusting. But with time, effort, and consistency these powers will build into habits that will make our kids unstoppable.
Their SUPERPOWERS will enable them to stay positive when surrounded by negativity. They will form a shield around their minds that allows them to love themselves and be grateful for others. And their SUPERPOWERS will allow 2 simple words to propel them through time while strengthening relationships and building self-confidence.
Let’s start with mind reading.
TELEPATHY
Would having the ability to read minds freak you out? Or would it be the best thing that ever happened to you?
Some people would relish the opportunity to be a worm in the apple, to crawl through the neural network of each person they interact with. Others might experience it as a curse, and potentially resort to unorthodox methods to rid themselves of the capability. Who knows…. maybe scrolling the websites of local exorcists, buying Ouija boards on Amazon, or watching Ghost on repeat to see if Patrick Swayze held the key to mental freedom?
Whether or not Bluetoothing yourself into the brains of others is appealing, it seems we’d be better off learning to read and rewire OUR minds.
Let’s face it, as adults, it’s challenging to develop the ability to introspect our thoughts and course correct accordingly. But if we can guide our children to build this habit in the early years, not only will they be lightyears ahead of the pack, but they’d eventually be guiding themselves with a supercharged mind.
To start building this habit immediately, we begin with self-talk.
Coaching our children to read their minds and recognize when their self-talk has taken a negative turn, will teach them to nudge the asteroid off course and prevent craters from forming in their brains.
How do we assist in redirecting their self-talk? Or help them launch their own DART mission?
With a little bit of a growth mindset and a lot of self-admiration. As Bruce Lee once put it…
“Don’t speak negatively about yourself, even as a joke. Your body doesn’t know the difference. Words are energy and cast spells, that’s why it’s called spelling. Change the way you speak about yourself and you can change your life. What you’re not changing, you’re also choosing.” — Bruce Lee
Let’s say your child starts to express self-criticism or becomes upset each time they make a minor mistake. You notice they’re saying things like…
“I can never do anything right!”
“I’m not good at this.”
“I always mess up!”
Our first instinct may be to try and make them feel better by telling them…
“It’s okay, you’ll do better next time.”
“No need to get upset. It’s not a huge deal.”
“Just try a little harder next time and you’ll get it.”
Making our children feel better makes us feel better and we feel that we’ve accomplished something. Yay! We’ve solved another problem and can pat ourselves on the back.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case and it’s doing more harm than good.
By shifting our focus from providing immediate solace, to instead guiding our children through their emotions and self-talk, we provide something much greater than a few seconds of relief, we instill a permanent foundation of self-esteem. A pride and belief that they can overcome any obstacle, and teach that challenges are merely temporary.
That sounds great and good, but are there techniques to implement this?
Absolutely.
First, we must capture these thoughts as they happen in real-time and stop them in their tracks. If we continuously interrupt the negative thought loop habit and replace it with a new, positive pattern, our children will learn to repeat it independently and without guidance.
The moment you notice your child is expressing self-criticism or coming down hard on themselves, consider it the perfect opportunity to stop what you’re doing and start the conversation immediately… beginning with “Not Yet”.
Based on Psychologist, Carol Dweck’s research into “Growth Mindset”, by teaching our children that intelligence and ability can grow with effort, remarkable results will be inevitable.
Fortunately, beginning the process of building a Growth Mindset turns out to be relatively simple. Whenever you hear those sinister, self-critical, comments slither through the teeth of your child, it’s time to pull out the map and chaperone them out by rephrasing the sentence.
For example, we can guide our children to substitute…
“I can never do anything right!” for “I haven’t figured this out, yet.”
“I’m not good at this.” for “The more I practice, the better I’ll get.”
“I always mess up!” for “These mistakes will allow me to learn and get better.”
While interrupting these patterns is key, let’s take it a step further. Let’s talk about enabling our children to protect what they’ve built.
FORCEFIELD GENERATION
“I don’t envision a single thing, when unguarded, leads to such great harm as the mind. The mind, when unguarded, leads to great harm.” — The Buddha, Anguttara Nikaya
Now that our children can read their minds and reframe their self-criticism, it’s time to develop some defense.
By building a protective layer around their minds, they will reduce the amount of self-critical thoughts that can squeeze their way in. And those that do manage to make it through must be met with an onslaught of white blood cell thought patterns to attack and destroy these mind viruses. In other words, let’s provide our children the tools to construct a forcefield. For that, they’ll need PRIDE and GRATITUDE.
Following the rephrasing adjustment, we can ask our children to state 3 things they’re PROUD of.
This exercise will allow them to verbalize and highlight the progress they’ve already made. Providing them additional confidence as they start to realize how far they have come. This may sound familiar if you have read my thoughts on HAPPINESS.
Once our children have identified 3 things they are proud of, we can dive deeper by asking what specifically about the list of 3 makes them feel proud.
At first, their answer will likely point to the results. They’ll be proud they finished their drawing, tied their shoes, peddled away without training wheels, scored their first goal during a game, and so on.
This is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for. We can now use one of the most powerful responses to help guide their mindset change…
“I’m proud of you for that as well. Can I tell you what my favorite part was?”
“What?”
“My favorite part was how hard you tried, how you didn’t give up, and I’m most proud of your creativity and problem-solving!”
Now watch their eyes light up and the gears start to turn in their minds. We’ve now shifted the focus to encouraging our kids to highlight the things that make them most proud of themselves. All while using a growth mindset paintbrush to bring new life to those old self-critical thoughts and phrases. As Bob Ross would say, we’re making happy trees.
To further fortify the forcefield our children have built, let’s install another pillar. One named GRATITUDE.
It’s been shown that performing a regular gratitude practice, even just once a week, can lead to a long-lasting impact on subjective well-being (Among many other benefits). Gratitude practices come in all shapes and sizes so it may be wise to experiment to find the right one for you and your children.
My two cents…if we keep it simple it will be consistent.
For simplicity’s sake, try to add a gratitude practice to the bedtime routine. Ask your children to list 3 things they’re grateful for and then share 3 of your own. Not only will we reap the benefits of our gratitude practice individually, but by participating in this exercise together nightly, we are effectively welding our parent/child bond.
At this point, our children are becoming literate within the library of their minds and have a state-of-the-art security system to keep imposter thoughts outside.
It’s time we teach our kids the two words that will allow them to travel through time. And no…. they aren’t “Flux Capacitor”.
TIME TRAVEL
This is one many of us will be learning and re-learning, side by side with our children for the rest of time. In the words of the great Marty McFly…
“Whoa, that’s heavy!”.
It’s hard to imagine any other two words in the English language that when used early and sincerely, save us more time in the world than “I’m Sorry”.
Yet, many of us can’t seem to bridge the gap.
Why is that?
Well…apologizing is hard. We’ve all been there, right?
You get into a heated argument with your spouse, friend, sibling, parent, or child, and the next thing you know you can’t stand to be near each other. You each start scrolling through the Netflix-esque categories of your mind to gather proof as to why you’re right and they’re wrong. When the reality is both parties should come to the negotiating table and start with “I’m sorry”. The sooner that happens the sooner we move on and the more time we save in the process.
When it comes to our children, like most things in parenting, the best way to teach it is to model it. It’s up to us to swallow our pride and be the first to engage. The importance of apologizing to our children is immense.
For our children to see that their parents make mistakes and own up to them, will teach them to allow a little more slack in their ropes.
Although a sense of resolution feels great, the benefits of the apology itself reach much further. Apologizing strengthens relationships, reduces stress, improves mental health, and builds up social connections.
Imagine if we challenged ourselves to apologize faster each time an apology was warranted. What effect would that have on our children as they witnessed it consistently?
We would get back more time to connect with our children, spouse, friends, family, etc..
Effectively traveling through time.
Superpowers are real. They aren’t the extraordinary abilities that we see in Marvel movies and comic books. They’re the small things that each of us can practice each day that will have the most positive impact on ourselves and those around us. So rather than trying to shoot lasers from our eyes and summoning lightning from the sky with a hammer, let’s practice strengthening the minds of our children and ourselves.
As we model what we preach, our parental habits will change, and we too will cultivate the superpowers we wish to grow in our children.
…
3 Recommendations
- Good Inside — Dr. Becky Kennedy
- The Dad Edge Podcast
- Developing a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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