Monthly Archives: December 2009

Listening to Angry Feelings

My daughter is two and a half years old and she enjoys changing her clothes many times a day. Needless to say this can be a little stressful after she has changed them 5 times in one day!

On this particular day, after the third change, I calmly told her she could not change her clothes again. She immediately got very upset and began crying and screaming at me. I moved closer to her and she began to scream at me to go away. She was furious and did not want me near her. I felt very calm for a change, and I quietly told her that I was going to stay there. I sat on the floor about 4 feet from where she was. She cried and screamed at me to go away and I simply said, “I’m just going to stay here and make sure you are safe and that you are not alone.” I said I wouldn’t come any closer to her but I was going to stay.

My daughter continued to cry hard and scream at me for what seemed like a very long time. I think it was at least a good 30 minutes although it felt like a lot longer than that. At moments I felt very hurt that she did not want me and I started to feel upset myself. Then she slowly began to move closer to me in a very quiet way.

She continued to cry and scream at me but she gradually moved closer and closer to me until she was in my lap. I just held her and she stopped crying. We were very close and cuddled with each other. At that point she was clearly in love with me and I was in love with her. I cannot say what all her anger was about. Other than setting a limit on her changing her clothes, I was confused as to what might have caused all those feelings. However, she got to have her feelings and she got to have her say about coming closer to me. She felt really safe and that it was O.K. to have big angry feelings because I was right there. Clearly the end result was a happy child and a closeness between us that was precious.

- a Parenting by Connection mom

Siblings Give Each Other Special Time

I am 5 years younger than my brother and we really didn’t have a lot in common after he passed the age of 10.

After I had my daughter I didn’t know whether I wanted to have a second child. I didn’t really understand the benefits of having a sibling. Life decided for me. My daughter is 4 now and my son is 3. I am gaining a much deeper appreciation for the sibling dynamic and for the effect of the listening I’ve begun to do with them.

I see them bicker and fight over toys and over my attention a lot , but they are also starting to announce to me that THEY are doing Special Time between them. What I notice about them being together in this way is that they are just really interested in each other, sharing, communicating and being really sweet. It’s beautiful.

- a Parenting by Connection parent

Gaining Cooperation with Limits and Listening

About a year ago, Kira (5 at the time) was just not cooperating. Sun would ask her to do something and she’d do the opposite. At one point she just started making a big mess. She was laughing, not in a happy way, but in uncomfortable way. It appeared she was “disconnected.”

I moved in close, established eye contact, and told her it was no longer time to mess, but time to clean up. She laughed a nervous laugh and kept messing. I then picked her up and held her, gently telling her again it was clean-up time. After a few minutes of struggling against me and continuing with the nervous laugh, she started bawling. I held her for a good 15 minutes while she bawled. After she was down she sat on my lap and we had a wonderful conversation. She was great (genuinely happy, cooperative and connected) the rest of the evening.

I’ve also had many instances with Leila simply not wanting to cooperate at clean-up time. I generally use the same technique I described above with Kira — move in close, establish and maintain eye contact, and gently but firmly state the rule. As opposed to Kira, with Leila it’s often necessary to pick her up and hold her, allowing her to release some frustration through a tantrum before deciding to clean up. In each instance, after Leila releases some frustration she’s back to her usual sweet, cooperative self and helps with the cleanup.

–a father in San Francisco

Advice Doesn’t Work for My Teen

Now, more than two years later, I am finally ready to write about a very special moment I experienced with my daughter Anna, then 16 years old. The booklet “Supporting Adolescents” was the reason for having this wonderful experience.

We are Greek and live on a small island in Greece. It is a peaceful life when you see it from the outside but that doesn’t mean all is perfect on the inside.

I had picked my daughter Anna up from high school, and during the thirty-minute drive home we had a good talk about how the day had been for both of us. After a while we went silent and suddenly she told me she had this awkward experience with a classmate during a break. They had been standing next to each other on the schoolyard and even though they know each other a bit, they had nothing to say to each other. Anna could not come up with anything at all to start a conversation. She found there was nothing interesting to talk about with the other girl and at the same time this made her feel so boring and even ugly!

I was driving the car, listening carefully and just nodding and saying I understand. I waited awhile (thinking of what I had read in the booklet “Supporting Adolescents”), but then I couldn’t control myself any longer and started giving advice, something like, “That it is very common problem. Even grownups feel like that, and that there are tricks to get out of that situation like…” Blah, blah, blah. I didn’t really realize what I was doing, but I could feel that Anna was not listening to me. Tension was building up in the car. When we arrived at home the first thing she did was to shout angrily at her little sister without any reason!

We got into the house, and Anna went straight to her room, all nerves. I went to the kitchen to prepare lunch. Standing by the sink, peeling potatoes, looking out of the window, it all came clear to me! What had I done?!!! Again!!! Instead of sharing the pain of not being confident socially, and just listening, I had to give advice, which immediately pushed us apart and made us both feel lonely and out of touch. I started to cry quietly. I felt so sad for leaving my daughter alone all the time with her difficult feelings. And why was it so difficult to do the right thing?

I had the feeling it was too late, but then I thought, “I have to ask her to forgive me for being so stupid.” But how? I felt nervous. Maybe I would make everything worse. Anyway, I gathered my courage and went into her room, sat down on a chair next to her and saw that she looked surprised.

“What do you want?” she said with a hard voice.
“I just wanted to say I am sorry for not listening to you,” I said.
“Like when?” she said.
“Like today in the car,” I continued. “What I wanted to say, Anna, is that I have felt the way you did today at school many, many times, and I felt that way when I was your age, too, and it is awful. It is like it is a black hole opening under you, all is empty, and all is meaningless. And I never know how to deal with it either.”

Now she looked at me with a soft, warm smile. “Yeah, I know mom,” she said, “That’s exactly how it feels. But I thought you always were so confident and clever and always found solutions to everything the way you have loads of ready advice all the time! I really felt you are so perfect and I am just a hopeless nothing.”

Now, that was a good lesson for me! I never really understood before how it worked with all the “good advice.” Why something always went wrong in these kind of situations. But now it was clear what the real damage was. And it was so easy to fix! All it took was a real apology and a real listen-talk.

But why is it so difficult to change behavior? I still make these mistakes, and sometimes still I do not realize it. It seems to be so deep in me, you know, to try to help out by saying something, instead of offering listening and caring.

(The daughter’s name has been changed to protect confidentiality.)

– a mother in Greece

Staylistening – In Stereo

My daughters, 2 and 4, were playing together in the family room while I was busy in the kitchen. The girls began squabbling over a pull toy. They came in the kitchen screaming and pulling at the toy and needing my help. I put my hand on the pull toy and said, “Girls, I don’t know who had this first, but I do know that you can work it out, and until one of you are ready to share, no one gets the toy.”

In stereo, they began crying loudly. Every so often I would interject with the question, ‘Are you ready to share?’ as I held my hand on the toy. Both responded with a resounding “No!” followed by escalated crying. After 10 minutes, my husband came in and said, ‘How do you know you’re not hurting them or making things worse?’ I had to shout over their wailing that we were on the right track and even predicted that, at the end of all this, one sister would genuinely give the toy to the other.

My husband looked at me with disbelief and went back to the family room. After another five minutes, the youngest stopped crying and went in the other room and began playing with daddy. At that point, my eldest flung her arms around me and sobbed heavily. After another five minutes, her mood and outlook shifted and she became calm and playful. She stated, “I’m ready to share now.” 

I suggested she give the toy to her sister. She brought the toy to the other room and, with a smile on her face, gave it to her sister. Her sister, of course, no longer had any interest in the toy. My husband had a look of disbelief, but this time with a smile across his face.

- a mom in California

Staylistening Ends A History of Grabbing

We had quite a bit of difficulty with one boy at the day care center where I work.  As soon as another child would begin playing with a toy, he would come over and either hit the child or grab the toy away. The other children were afraid of him, and after a short while there, children avoided him. We were responding to children crying frequently because of this child’s interactions. I am taking a class in Parenting by Connection, and I used what I have been learning with him. It worked out so well!

One day, when he had grabbed something from another child, I came to him and said, “I can’t let you do that. I am going to stay with you right now, because you aren’t able to play well with the other children.” I stayed close, and he began to cry. He ran to the cots, threw himself down on one, and cried hard. I went over and stayed close by, and said, “It’s fine if you are crying, I’ll stay right here. But I can’t let you take things away from the other children.”  He had a long cry.  I think it helped him.

A day or so later, though, he did the same thing again, and this time, I said, “I’m going to bring you outside with me, and I’m going to listen to you there.” I carried him outside, sat down, put him on my lap facing me, and said, “I’m going to listen to you. You can tell me whatever you want. Why do you take things from the other children?” He cried and kicked the bench we were sitting on for a long time without saying anything. I kept my arms loosely around him. When he slowed down, I asked again, and he cried some more. I held him and listened. Finally, he told me, “The other children don’t want to play with me. They don’t want to be my friend.” I asked him what else he wanted to tell me, and he cried and told me the same thing again. I kept asking him to tell me what was the matter, until he had finished crying.

When he didn’t have anything else to tell me, I said, “Thank you. I listened to you. I want you to listen to me.” He agreed, and I said, “The other children don’t want to play with you because you take their toys away. You need to wait until they are finished. Then, they’ll want to play with you again.” He listened. We then went back inside.

Since that day, he has been far less grabby with other children. A day or so ago, he came to me, holding hands with another child, looking so happy, saying, “Look, Miss Anne! We are friends! He is my friend!” I’m so pleased with the way things have turned out, and so is he!

–Anne Huynh