The Unspoken Needs

 

            I personally am a fairly new parent and am quickly learning the challenges of each stage a child goes though. As a newborn I never knew how to help and felt rather useless to my wife.  at about 9 months, I never knew quite how to teach them right from wrong as I didn’t know what they could understand and what they couldn’t.  Now our oldest is 21 months old and although she is old enough to know right from wrong, she isn’t old enough to really understand why. And I find myself struggling to know how to teach her the why. Just the other day we were in the car, and she was in the backbeat in her car seat, and I think she must have gotten bored or something because she started to spit. For no reason whatsoever and the more I tried to tell her to stop the more she did it. She was old enough to know I wanted her to stop, but not old enough to understand when I threatened time out when we got home. To her without a why my words were powerless to her. I found myself at quite a loss in how to teach her at this stage.

                I guess my point is, parenting is hard not only physically but also just hard to figure out. In my search for better answers, I found some really good information on how to help prepare our kids for the world they will enter into.  Turns out it all comes down to the child’s needs.  If we can understand their needs, we can almost always understand not only their response but also what we should do about it. perhaps before their response ever turns negative. (Most of the time.) I’ve learned that there are 5 basic emotional needs not only children have but also adults. Contact belonging, Power, Protection, Withdrawal, and Challenge.

                I want to start with the first one on the list and go from there. Contact belonging. Contact belonging is the literal need to feel like you belong physically. Although this will look different for everyone, this could be physical signs of love, genuine interest in their life, quality time spent with them, or even playing a sport. Whatever it may be A child particularly needs to feel like they belong and feel loved physically.  As a parent some o the best things we can do to help facilitate this is to offer contact freely and to teach them to contribute to the family. If a child is feeling deprived of belonging, they will often begin to seek what we call “undue attention seeking” where they will do anything they can to get attention. Both good and bad. I think this is what my daughter as doing by insistently spitting even when she knew she should have stopped.

                Power, both children and adult need to feel like they have power over their own lives, accordingly of course for children. But as a parent we can do our very best to offer them as many choices as seemingly fit and to do our best to let natural consequences take their course for better or worse. (Within reason). This will help them to both feel that they have power and learn responsibility. If we fail to provide this to our children, we will often see them act out in ways such as trying to control others in adults or open rebellion in children.

Protection: We need to tach our children protect themselves and others. We can do this by teaching them not only assertiveness but also forgiveness. This will keep them free from emotional chains and they will not seek revenge

Withdrawal: In older kids its important that they leant the value of taking breaks and looking at things from an outsiders view we very quickly can become tunnel visioned and our view can be skewed from reality. We should encourage our kids to take breaks but return to the task promptly. This will help them avoid undue avoidance or procrastination. In getting things done.

Challenge: Kids need something to challenge them. This could eb a sport, school, a project, or any other form of challenge but they need something that encourages skill building and a sense of progression in themselves. Without this they can begin to be depressed and slowed in life.

I hope these 5 things can help someone out there to be a better parent I feel they will help me so I wanted to write about them a  bit.