I've been teaching Nonviolent
Communication SM to parents for 30 years. I would like to share
some of the things that have been helpful to both myself and to
the parents that I've worked with, and to share with you some insights
I've had into the wonderful and challenging occupation of parenting.
I'd first like to call your attention to the
danger of the word "child," if we allow it to apply
a different quality of respect than we would give to someone who
is not labeled a child. Let me show you what I am referring to.
In parent workshops that I've done over the years,
I've often started by dividing the group into two. I put one group
in one room, and the other in a different room, and I give each
group the task of writing down on a large paper a dialogue between
themselves and another person in a conflict situation. I tell
both groups what the conflict is. The only difference is that
I tell one group the other person is their child, and to the second
group I say the other person is their neighbor.
Then we get back into a large group and we look
at these different sheets of paper outlining the dialogue that
the groups would have, in the one case thinking that the other
person was their child, and in the other case, the neighbor. (And
incidentally, I haven't allowed the groups to discuss with the
other group who the person was in their situation, so that both
groups think that the situation is the same.)
After they've had a chance to scan the written
dialogues of both groups, I ask them if they can see a difference
in terms of the degree of respect and compassion that was demonstrated.
Every time I've done this, the group that was working on the situation
with the other person being a child was seen as being less respectful
and compassionate in their communication than the group that saw
the other person as a neighbor. This painfully reveals to the
people in these groups how easy it is to dehumanize someone by
the simple process of simply thinking of him or her as "our
child."
I had an experience one day that really heightened
my awareness of the danger of thinking of people as children.
This experience followed a weekend in which I had worked with
two groups: a street gang and a police department. I was mediating
between the two groups. There had been considerable violence between
them, and they had asked that I serve in the role of a mediator.
After spending as much time as I did with them, dealing with the
violence they had toward each other, I was exhausted. And as I
was driving home afterwards, I told myself, I never want to be
in the middle of another conflict for the rest of my life.
And of course, when I walked in my back door,
my three children were fighting. I expressed my pain to them in
a way that we advocate in Nonviolent Communication. I expressed
how I was feeling, what my needs were, and what my requests were.
I did it this way. I shouted, "When I hear all of this going
on right now, I feel extremely tense! I have a real need for some
peace and quiet after the weekend I've been through! So would
you all be willing to give me that time and space?"
My oldest son looked at me and said, "Would
you like to talk about it?" Now, at that
moment, I dehumanized him in my thinking. Why? Because I said
to myself, "How cute.
Here's a nine year old boy trying to help his father." But
take a closer look at how I was
disregarding his offer because of his age, because I had him labeled
as a child. Fortunately I saw that was going on in my head, and
maybe I was able to see it more clearly because the work I had
been doing between the street gang and the police showed me the
danger of thinking of people in terms of labels instead of their
humanness.
So instead of seeing him as a child and thinking
to myself, "how cute," I saw a human being
who was reaching out to another human being in pain, and I said
out loud, "Yes, I would like to talk about it." And
the three of them followed me into another room and listened while
I opened up my heart to how painful it was to see that people
could come to a point of wanting to hurt one another simply because
they hadn't been trained to see the other person's humanness.
After talking about it for 45 minutes I felt wonderful, and as
I recall we turned the stereo on and danced like fools for a while.
So I'm not suggesting that we don't use words
like "child" as a shorthand way of letting people know
that we're talking about people of a certain age. I'm talking
about when we allow labels like this to keep us from seeing the
other person as a human being, in a way which leads us to dehumanize
the other person because of the things our culture teaches us
about "children." Let me show you an extension of what
I'm talking about, how the label child can lead us to behave in
a way that's quite unfortunate.
Having been educated, as I was, to think about
parenting, I thought that it was the job of a parent to make children
behave. You see, once you define yourself as an authority, a teacher
or parent, in the culture that I was educated in, you then see
it as your responsibility to make people that you label a "child"
or a "student" behave in a certain way.
I now see what a self-defeating objective this
is, because I have learned that any time it's our objective to
get another person to behave in a certain way, people are likely
to resist no matter what it is we're asking for. This seems to
be true whether the other person is 2 or 92 years of age.
This objective of getting what we want from other
people, or getting them to do what we want them to do, threatens
the autonomy of people, their right to choose what they want to
do. And whenever people feel that they're not free to choose what
they want to do, they are likely to resist, even if they see the
purpose in what we are asking and would ordinarily want to do
it. So strong is our need to protect our autonomy, that if we
see that someone has this single-mindedness of purpose, if they
are acting like they think that they know what's best for us and
are not leaving it to us to make the choice of how we behave,
it stimulates our resistance.
I'll be forever grateful to my children for educating
me about the limitations of the objective of getting other people
to do what you want. They taught me that, first of all, I couldn't
make them do what I want. I couldn't make them do anything. I
couldn't make them put a toy back in the toy box. I couldn't make
them make their bed. I couldn't make them eat. Now, that was quite
a humbling lesson for me as a parent, to learn about my powerless-ness,
because somewhere I had gotten it into my mind that it was the
job of a parent to make a child behave. And here were these young
children teaching me this humbling lesson, that I couldn't make
them do anything. All I could do is make them wish they had.
And whenever I would be foolish enough to do
that, that is, to make them wish they had, they taught me a second
lesson about parenting and power that has proven very valuable
to me over the years. And that lesson was that anytime I would
make them wish they had, they would make me wish I hadn't made
them wish they had. Violence begets violence.
They taught me that any use of coercion on my
part would invariably create resistance on their part, which could
lead to an adversarial quality in the connection between us. I
don't want to have that quality of connection with any human being,
but especially not with my children, those human beings that I'm
closest to and taking responsibility for. So my children are the
last people that I want to get into these coercive games of which
punishment is a part.
Now
this concept of punishment is strongly advocated by most parents.
Studies indicate that about 80% of American parents firmly believe
in corporal punishment of children. This is about the same percentage
of the population who believes in capital punishment of criminals.
So with such a high percentage of the population believing that
punishment is justified and necessary in the education of children,
I've had plenty of opportunity over the years to discuss this issue
with parents, and I'm pleased with how people can be helped to see
the limitations of any kind of punishment, if they'll simply ask
themselves two questions.
Question number one: What do you want the child
to do differently? If we ask only that question, it can certainly
seem that punishment sometimes works, because certainly through
the threat of punishment or application of punishment, we can
at times influence a child to do what we would like the child
to do.
However, when we add a second question, it has
been my experience that parents see that punishment never works.
The second question is: What do we want the child's reasons to
be for acting as we would like them to act? It's that question
that helps us to see that punishment not only doesn't work, but
it gets in the way of our children doing things for reasons that
we would like them to do them.
Since punishment is so frequently used and justified,
parents can only imagine that the opposite of punishment is a
kind of permissiveness in which we do nothing when children behave
in ways that are not in harmony with our values. So therefore
parents can think only, "If I don't punish, then I give up
my own values and just allow the child to do whatever he or she
wants." As I'll be discussing below, there are other approaches
besides permissiveness, that is, just letting people do whatever
they want to do, or coercive tactics such as punishment. And while
I'm at it, I'd like to suggest that reward is just as coercive
as punishment. In both cases we are using power over people, controlling
the environment in a way that tries to force people to behave
in ways that we like. In that respect reward comes out of the
same mode of thinking as punishment.
.
There is another approach
besides doing nothing or using coercive tactics. It requires an
awareness of the subtle but important difference between our objective
being to get people to do what we want, which I'm not advocating,
and instead being clear that our objective is to create the quality
of connection necessary for everyone's needs to get met.
It has been my experience,
whether we are communicating with children or adults, that when
we see the difference between these two objectives, and we are consciously
not trying to get a person to do what we want, but trying to create
a quality of mutual concern, a quality of mutual respect, a quality
where both parties think that their needs matter and they are conscious
that their needs and the other person's well-being are interdependent
- it is amazing how conflicts which otherwise seem irresolvable,
are easily resolved.
Now, this kind of communication
that is involved in creating the quality of connection necessary
for everybody's needs to get met is quite different from that communication
used if we are using coercive forms of resolving differences with
children. It requires a shift away from evaluating children in moralistic
terms such as right/wrong, good/bad, to a language based on needs.
We need to be able to tell children whether what they're doing is
in harmony with our needs, or in conflict with our needs, but to
do it in a way that doesn't stimulate guilt or shame on the child's
part. So it might require our saying to the child, "I'm scared
when I see you hitting your brother, because I have a need for people
in the family to be safe," instead of, "It's wrong to
hit your brother." Or it might require a shift away from saying,
"You are lazy for not cleaning up your room," to saying,
"I feel frustrated when I see that the bed isn't made, because
I have a real need for support in keeping order in the house."
This shift in language
away from classifying children's behavior in terms of right and
wrong, and good and bad, to a language based on needs, is not easy
for those of us who were educated by teachers and parents to think
in moralistic judgments. It also requires an ability to be present
to our children, and listen to them with empathy when they are in
distress. This is not easy when we have been trained as parents
to want to jump in and give advice, or to try to fix things.
So when I'm working with
parents, we look at situations that are likely to arise where a
child might say something like, "Nobody likes me." When
a child says something like that, I believe the child is needing
an empathic kind of connection. And by that I mean a respectful
understanding where the child feels that we are there and really
hear what he or she is feeling and needing. Sometimes we can do
this silently, just showing in our eyes that we are with their feelings
of sadness, and their need for a different quality of connection
with their friends. Or it could involve our saying out loud something
like, "So it sounds like you're really feeling sad, because
you aren't having very much fun with your friends."
But many
parents, defining their role as requiring them to make their children
happy all the time, jump in when a child says something like that,
and say things like, "Well, have you looked at what you've
been doing that might have been driving your friends away?"
Or they disagree with the child, saying, "Well, that's not
true. You've had friends in the past. I'm sure you'll get more friends."
Or they give advice: "Maybe if you'd talk differently to your
friends, your friends would like you more."
What they
don't realize is that all human beings, when they're in pain, need
presence and empathy. They may want advice, but they want that after
they've received the empathic connection. My own children have taught
me the hard way that, "Dad, please withhold all advice unless
you receive a request in writing from us signed by a notary."
Many people believe
that it's more humane to use reward than punishment. But both of
them I see as power over others, and Nonviolent Communication is
based on power with people. And in power with people, we try to
have influence not by how we can make people suffer if they don't
do what we want, or how we can reward them if they do. It's a power
based on mutual trust and respect, which makes people open to hearing
each other and learning from each other, and to giving to one another
willingly out of a desire to contribute to one another's well-being,
rather than out of a fear of punishment or hope for a reward.
We get this kind of power, power with people, by being able to
openly communicate our feelings and needs without in any way criticizing
the other person. We do that by offering them what we would like
from them in a way that is not heard as demanding or threatening.
And as I have said, it also requires really hearing what other
people are trying to communicate, showing an accurate understanding
rather than quickly jumping in and giving advice, or trying to
fix things.
For many parents, the way I'm talking about communicating
is so different that they say, "Well, it just doesn't seem
natural to communicate that way." At just the right time,
I read something that Gandhi had written in which he said, "Don't
mix up that which is habitual with that which is natural."
Gandhi said that very often we've been trained to communicate
and act in ways that are quite unnatural, but they are habitual
in the sense that we have been trained for various reasons to
do it that way in our culture. And that certainly rang true to
me in the way that I was trained to communicate with children.
The way I was trained to communicate by judging rightness and
wrongness, goodness and badness, and the use of punishment was
widely used and very easily became habitual for me as a parent.
But I wouldn't say that because something is habitual that it
is natural.
I learned that it is much more natural for people
to connect in a loving, respectful way, and to do things out of
joy for each other, rather than using punishment and reward or
blame and guilt as means of coercion. But such a transformation
does require a good deal of consciousness and effort.
I can recall one time when I was transforming
myself from a habitually judgmental way of communicating with
my children to the way that I am now advocating. On the day I'm
thinking of, my oldest son and I were having a conflict, and it
was taking me quite awhile to communicate it in the way that I
was choosing to, rather than the way that had become habitual.
Almost everything that came into my mind originally was some coercive
statement in the form of a judgment of him for saying what he
did. So I had to stop and take a deep breath, and think of how
to get more in touch with my needs, and how to get more in touch
with his needs. And this was taking me awhile. And he was getting
frustrated because he had a friend waiting for him outside, and
he said, "Daddy, it's taking you so long to talk." And
I said, "Let me tell you what I can say quickly: Do it my
way or I'll kick your butt." He said, "Take your time,
Dad. Take your time."
So yes, I would rather take my time and come from
an energy that I choose in communicating with my children, rather
than habitually responding in a way that I have been trained to
do, when it's not really in harmony with my own values. Sadly,
we will often get much more reinforcement from those around us
for behaving in a punitive, judgmental way, than in a way that
is respectful to our children.
I can recall one Thanksgiving dinner when I was
doing my best to communicate with my youngest son in the way that
I am advocating, and it was not easy, because he was testing me
to the limits. But I was taking my time, taking deep breaths,
trying to understand what his needs were, trying to understand
my own needs so I could express them in a respectful way. Another
member of the family, observing my conversation with my son, but
who had been trained in a different way of communicating, reached
over at one point and whispered in my ear, "If that was my
child, he'd be sorry for what he was saying."
I've talked to a lot of other parents who have
had similar experiences who, when they are
trying to relate in more human ways with their own children, instead
of getting support, often get criticized. People can often mistake
what I'm talking about as permissiveness or not giving children
the direction they need, instead of understanding that it's a
different quality of direction. It's a direction that comes from
two parties trusting each other, rather than one party forcing
his or her authority on another.
One of the most unfortunate results of making
our objective to get our children to do what we want, rather than
having our objective be for all of us to get what we want, is
that eventually our children will be hearing a demand in whatever
we are asking. And whenever people hear a demand, it's hard for
them to keep focus on the value of whatever is being requested,
because, as I said earlier, it threatens their autonomy, and that's
a strong need that all people have. They want to be able to do
something when they choose to do it, and not because they are
forced to do it. As soon as a person hears a demand, it's going
to make any resolution that will get everybody's needs met much
harder to come by.
