Meeting the Challenge
By Ken McManus, M.Ed.
Licensed Professional Counselor

No other generation of parents may have faced such difficult social conditions for raising children as parents today. While previous generations have faced various obstacles, none has attempted to raise children in a culture so riddled with substance abuse, violence and moral uncertainty. In the past, parents raised children in communities where churches played a larger role in family life and values between families were more consistent.

As a consequence, today’s parents have to be better at raising children than were their parents. Just as the developing global economy requires American businesses to get creatively proactive in planning for market influence, so does the current cultural climate require parents to be aggressively proactive with the skills and tools required for constructive influence in their child’s development.

There are many skills with parents must call upon in raising their children. Compassion, empathy, modeling, patience, firmness, clarity, self-confidence, creativity, long term ‘whole picture’ thinking, self-control, self-respect, community affiliation, spiritual strength and emotional availability are some of the essential day-to-day qualities in effort that make for effective parents. Tying all these together in one skill that rises in importance above the others: the ability to be a communicator.

In my years as a clinician, no set of skills has been more frequently referred to than those having to do with communication. Yet, despite the availability of books, seminars, classes and a myriad of other outlets of information on communication, most of the people who seek my services lack measurable effectiveness in their style of communicating within their family. There will be no more critical an environment for this lack of ability than within the contemporary American family.

It is my observation that the ability to communicate lies as the foundation for the other skills noted above. Neither one’s compassion, values, love, creativity, religion nor knowledge can influence another if they are not communicated effectively. One’s communication skills are reflected in a carefully crafted personal style that is consciously reshaped with the changing dynamics between parents and children. Just as one’s style of financial investing changes with age, so must one’s style for interaction. One’s style in communicating and its adaptability should well be an inner source of pride.

The remainder of this article will articulate an overview of important facets for effective personal communication. Communicating is truly a skill, the effectiveness of which is a function of practice over time. No different than playing the piano or perfecting a golf swing, consistent, conscious effort at specific detail renders the most significant measures of excellence.

Interpersonal Reception
More important than being able to present yourself, is the ability to receive the people around you. If you wish for your children to share themselves with you, i.e. their ideas, their talents, their feelings, their intelligence, etc., then from an early age they must experience that you can receive them. Notice I am not saying ‘listen.’ Save ‘listening’ for the boardroom. I am referencing something larger and more intimate, inclusive of listening that is absolutely essential for meeting today’s challenges in raising children.

Family communication is much, much more than an information exchange. When your child is arguing with you about curfew or being able to go to the mall unsupervised, there is more to his/her communication than the pursuit of short-term gratification. Their vision of social adequacy, their immediate experience of self-confidence, their overall experience of their earned place within the family is all on the table. Should one choose to respond only to the information exchange related to the mall, you will demonstrate that you cannot receive your child. You will pay for that shortfall!

Most of the families who invite me into their lives experience relatively superficial levels of exchange. This is due largely to battles for control over each other and outcomes. No one ever wins. Habits are established, both in expectation and behavior that carry forth from one situation to the next. Family members interact on autopilot, invoking the same emotions, the same interplays and the same outcomes. Feelings of parental impotence boil just below the surface and children/teens become more emotionally distant and/or manipulative, removing themselves with each situation a bit further from the influence of those who really do love them and want their safety and happiness.

Job I: Listen For Their Heart
Make your focus both one of gaining information and hearing for emotional meaning. Kids attach meaning to things in ways that we must not diminish. Ask about something’s importance to a child or a teen. Don’t judge their logic! Children and young adolescents rationalize irrationally and many adults lash out at the ‘immature’ nature of their thoughts and conclusions.

Listen for the heart and receive it. Treat it for the fragile thing that it is. Demonstrate, that as an emotional person yourself, you can understand how something can get so important be so hard to give up. (If you think you can’t relate to the irrationality presented in front of you, ask your spouse if you ever get irrational about things important to you.) Listening for the heart has nothing to do with giving in or acquiescing. It has to do with taking the time to hear feelings and to muster your self-control such that your half of the communication is safe for your kids.

Setting limits, saying “no” or imposing consequences should be done kindly, with the child’s ‘heart’ fully considered. You must receive them in accordance with how much they mean to you.

Job II: Get Your Ego Out Of The Communication
What is the point of taking things personally? This common defense mechanism reflects a lack of felt adequacy; that one is not good enough in the eyes of the other. It is predictable and age-appropriate in children/teens; not in adults. In our contemporary cultural circumstance we cannot afford to bring feelings of inadequacy into parenting. If these feelings are present, we must work them out away from our kids. If we do not, we will impose these insecurities upon the relationship with our kids and thus significantly limit our ability to receive them. We cannot afford to take personally the immaturities of our children. As soon as we do, we give them inappropriate authority over our self-esteem. We then must either get distant from them or work to control them. In either venue, possibilities for influence are lost.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t get your feelings hurt or be frightened by your kid’s actions. It is not to say that one should not express feelings and needs to their kids in an open and genuine manner. However, there is a huge functional difference between being a person with feelings and needs who expresses these in attempts to work out understandings with children versus being someone who needs their children to make them secure and comfortable—to assure their self-esteem.

Our children’s lives are theirs, importantly and separate from ours. Our job is to provide loving guidance and facilitation, not judgement and control.

Job III: Listen For Chances To Affirm
You have to say “no,” set limits or reprimand. Where in that situation did you hear an opportunity to affirm your child? Nine out of ten times it’s there! Did you miss it? Did you see the importance of the toy or the clarity of mind in the argument? Did you witness the fear of inadequacy or the pain of anticipated rejection? Did you see the effort at clarification and the spirit of tenacity in the confrontation? Stay watchful of opportunities to catch your kids exposing some piece of themselves that you can affirm. Some of their developing qualities may make you crazy and these may also be affirmable. No one likes to argue with a bright, articulate adolescent. But, who would want her to give up these attributes?

To receive means to hear the ‘who’ as much as the ‘what!’ It sets the tone and direction for response. It requires real-time availability and a sincere investment in the relationship between parent and child. It requires that we have our inner vision of our ideals as parents held out in front of ourselves at all times, serving as the guideposts for our postures of reception and response.

What kind of parent do you want to be? How will you want your hindsight reference to your style to feel? In detail, this should be clear.

Getting The Whole Message Across
Less important than getting the whole message, expressing yourself involves an essential set of skill. It blends language skills with emotional and interpretive skills in a creative process guided by knowledge of your receiver. Ideally, its style emphasis is one of invitation and persuasion—not control. Good salesmen know that before they ever sell a product they must first sell themselves. Our children are the ultimate customers who clearly will not buy any of what we have to sell if they first have not bought us.

Job IV: Style Management--Posture Matching
You must be fully cognizant of the emotional posture of your receiving children (discernable in Job I) so that you can choose your words, tone, body language and attitude to fit with your receiver. Too often, statements are made impulsively in ways that fit with the situational emotion of the speaker, not with the receiver’s posture.

Job V: Style Management—Choose Wisely
Unfortunately, for people of all ages, style choices are dictated by habits more often than careful, independent, creative thought. Thus, parents and children from early ages on exchange nothing more than habits of hurtful negations and manipulations. Consider every aspect of your style as you move toward expression of your feelings and ideas. What is the best choice of words? Of tone and attitude? What is the best body posture and timing for your presentation? If your style gets in the way of your message, you can be assured that you will have no influence. If your style hits your child more than you message, they will spend more time thinking about your style and how to cope with it than they will your message and its import.

Job VI: Style Management—Be Someone You’re Proud Of
Whether or not you get great results with your child, you must be able to look at yourself in the mirror and like who’s looking back. If you don’t like your style, no one else can. So many parents damage their own self-esteem because of the impulsive, habitual choices they live out in their communications with their children. Slow down. Breathe and think. Consider the big picture. Put a choke hold on your gut reactions and let your intelligence take over. You do this at work all the time and have accomplished much for your efforts.

Why do any less within your family? Without exception, the skills that render so many of my clients effective in their careers would carry the day time-and-again within their families if only these skills were given the chance. Be able to like how you handled and interaction with your child, even if the results are not yet what you want. In families, make people and their hearts more important than principles and tasks. As with your bright child’s schoolwork, if consistent effort is made, the grades (results) will come.

So, take a deep breath and consider… Who are you? What are truly your most important priorities in your relationships with your children and how does your style of communication reflect these? If your priorities center around really knowing your children and relating effectively to them, then you have the greatest defense against the dangerous cultural world your kids face every day. If not, then you are creating degrees of risk for serious problems between you and your child that will increase with age. As contemporary parents you and I cannot afford to be less than the most carefully considered communicator we are capable of being. We may indeed lose a few battles, but the ‘war’ never ends. We are parents forever.

E-mail: ken@frontlinefamily.com