How often do we hear teenagers complain that their parents don’t understand them, and parents don’t feel like they know their teenage children and think, “What happened to my sweet little child?” Yet, this situation didn’t suddenly happen overnight. After years of parents telling children what to do, what not to do and how to do it differently, both parties wind up feeling alienated.
As parents, we do all of this because we love our kids and want the best for them. Don’t we say that? However, in trying to change, correct and discipline our children, we create distance and lose sight of one of the most important goals as parents: Connecting to our children.
A prerequisite to being able to accurately guide our children is making the effort to put ourselves in their shoes. How well do we really know our kids? To really “see” the other person requires us to put ourselves aside, take off our own glasses, and put on theirs. Naturally, we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are. Therefore, it requires great awareness and effort to truly understand another person.
Another one of the more difficult things for us to do as parents (and in general) is not to take other people’s actions personally and, instead, look for the cause behind the effect. For example, if my daughter yells out, “I hate you!” – how do I react? I can just deal with the effect by reprimanding her for being disrespectful, punishing her and focusing on how she could do that to me after all I’ve done for her. Or I can take a step back and look for the real cause by asking: What is really going on here? Where is her frustration coming from? How did we get to a place that she feels I’m not there for her?
Kids, and adults too, don’t just misbehave; there is always more to the story. Part of knowing people is understanding where they are coming from and exploring the cause of their behavior. To get there, we have to take ourselves, specifically our ego, out of the picture.
Another helpful action to take is to ask your children simple questions such as “how do you feel when this happens?” or “what do you think you should do?” We’re very quick to give advice and solutions, but when we do so without having made the effort to see things through their perspective, it remains only from our point of view, and they feel we don’t understand them.
Each person experiences life differently. We want to support our loved ones, but we don’t realize how detached we are from truly feeling them. In order to see things how they see them, we need to make it our intention. It’s really our responsibility to know how our children experience life so that we can create a connection and better communication. If we don’t, we’ll inevitably fall into conflict.