Notes from Wine with Roleen 11/20/14
The Reimer family (James, WW) hosted our group shortly before Thanksgiving with a delicious dinner and fantastic company. We covered a vast range of topics during the evening — here are some takeaways from our discussion. The voice is mainly Roleen’s unless otherwise noted. Forgive the paraphrasing! -Jennifer Zonnas
TRANSITIONS
No one taught us how to do transitions well, so we all have these big feelings about them. And now when our kids are having transitions, it’s really our stuff that’s being triggered.
Book Recommendation: The Conscious Parent by Dr. Shefali Tsabary. Discusses mindfulness in parenting and what our triggers are.
WHEN YOU LEAVE
In the preschool years they know object permanence. So they know you are going and they know they can get you back, and that’s why you get the tears. That’s why it’s important to have a solid routine. You have to be firm with it, which is hard, but they are testing object permanence and it can be confusing for them. If it’s a hard morning you can talk to their teacher and they will tell you: 2 minutes after you left they were fine.
Stick to your routine. (I’m going to need one more hug, etc.) Because that offers them an incredible amount of security; they can trust you. Your teachers are here, they know just what to do in these situations. If you can separate the emotional component, understand that it’s really important for them that you say something and you follow through. It’s hard and it may be hard after the holidays again.
PREOPERATIONAL
Children this age are in a preoperational stage of development — meaning they cannot stop and think logically, their job is to get their needs met. If they can‘t get a cookie from Dad, they will ask Mom, it’s not manipulative — again their job is to get their needs met. It’s up to you guys to connect and be on the same page. Kids can’t actually plan that far ahead to be manipulative. They are just smart and trying to figure out how to get their needs met.
LANGUAGE
They are learning pragmatics of language, ‘how am I going to get what I want to say across?’ If they say something mean, our first response might be to say, “That’s not nice. That’s hurting my feelings.” The point is, really, don’t play into the words. You need to give them the words that they actually mean and can learn to say, which is “You’re mad that I’m not giving you what you want. You’re upset, you want that cookie, and you can tell me that.”
HOW DO I TALK ABOUT TRUTH?
Developmentally at 4 to 5 years old, the kids’ job is to save face. Google “saving face” in 4 and 5-year-olds. If you look at Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, first you have trust. In our culture you’ll hear the whole ‘don’t pick up a baby you’ll spoil them’ — which is ridiculous. If you don’t have trust you can’t move onto the next stage, which is autonomy. If they spill milk, “OK, let’s get the towel to wipe it up.” They will keep pouring — they know it’s spilling out, but they can’t reverse the action, they don’t have what Jean Piaget termed “reversibility.”
If you say, “What are you doing?” They can’t register that. You need to say “Stop.” But they won’t know to put it down unless you help them — until they have many experiences they won’t learn how to do it.
When they are caught in a lie they don’t know how to get out of it. Because they are so in the moment to get out of it, because you put shame in it. If they “lie,” you can tell them ”You really want that to be true.” Better yet, if you know what happened, replay the scenario as a statement.
Don’t say: “Why did you take his toy?” because you already know why he took it. He wanted it! Instead say, “You have Joey’s toy. He’s going to miss it, let’s put it back in his cubby.” Or “You really want that, I get it. It’s Joey’s and it has to go back.”
It’s because they are egocentric they can’t look past it. Their identity is still forming, and we have to be careful with language. Not until 6 or 7 are they operational and they can think ‘I shouldn’t do this but I’m going to do it anyway.’
If you go back to the Erikson stages you can fix them. Shame and doubt have carried through to the adult world. You have to be in a state of positivity in order to move onto the next stage _ initiative (I have great ideas, etc.) By the time we’re older we want to be in the stage of wisdom, which comes with how we’ve been received in the world.
Understand the stages because you can go back and fix it. We all yell at our kids sometimes, but going back and fixing it (and saying I’m sorry by replaying what you wish you would have said or done) is something our parents never did. But now as a generation of parents, we’re balancing permissiveness. We want to be friends and it’s hard to set ground rules — they mess with us and we don’t want to see them sad. By adolescence, children are supposed to find strength from the foundation you gave them in these early years and know how to make good choices for themselves. Too often, parents reel in out of fear during this time when we’re supposed to reel out a bit and let our children make choices.
Important: Don’t ask something that you already know the answer to. Did you have a pee accident or did you sleep today? — don’t bring it up, you already know the answer to it. The teachers have already given you that information.
Book Recommendation: PARENTING FROM THE INSIDE OUT by Dr. Dan Siegel and Mary Hartzell