Lean back

The most difficult conversation I have with parents, the one that frightens them the most, is the ‘lean back’ conversation. The one where I have to draw their attention to the fact that they can’t ‘make’ their child do anything. You see the born free child doesn’t buy into the idea of automatic authority or hierarchy (society did make up these concepts, after all)... someone being older or choosing to give birth to them does not mean they have to comply unquestioningly with their requests.

It is a fortunate quirk of nature that our children generally want our love and approval, so they do try to appease us. It is this going against their innate nature that creates the anxiety around demand avoidance and demand paralysis.

The internal battle between wanting to please our caregivers and the resistance to being controlled, coerced and treated as though everything we do is because you said so really undermines our sense of self and feels like constant humiliation. This is also why we react to praise as well as consequence.

It is so counterintuitive, as parents and carers we feel must DO to help; it goes against all our natural instincts that our job is not to protect our children from anger, fear, disappointment, ‘failure’... it is to cradle them through all of those emotions and the actions that led to them.

This is the only way to free them to try everything and take risks without ever worrying that they will hear, ‘I told you so’, ‘what did you expect?’, ‘see, you should have listened to me, I knew this would happen’, ‘you caused this, why are you angry?’...

I’m sorry we only ever learn ‘the hard way’ that no amount of telling us makes sense as we cant visualise or feel words. We do not process words, we process experience ... and if every experience only ever ends with, ‘interesting, what have we learnt? What next?’ Then we are going to do a whole lot more... and it will mean we will be far less anxious as we aren’t grappling with your disappointment in us on top of our failure and the judgment of others.

‘But even with me reminding and 'nagging' they barely do anything... they’ll do NOTHING if I leave them to it!’ I hear you cry...

Nope, this is the root of ‘demand avoidance’ ... we are not resisting you, we are fighting for the autonomy, independence and trust in our intrinsic motivation and strength that we know we are born with... it just takes lots of time, patience and courage from everyone while we re-find it.

That’s right, the less we are asked to do, the less invested you are in us doing/succeeding at it... the more we can do!