Is trusting your child actually a parenting technique?

Have you heard of the concept of placing your trust in your children, even your teenagers, to bring out the best in them? No? I thought not.

Our traditional narrative on the parent-child relationship goes like this: We brought these children into the world and now it’s our job to make sure they behave at home, at school, and in society. If they don’t, we must make sure we give them all the reasons that they have to change their ways, and if that doesn’t work, we impose punishment to assure that they got the message.

This outdated message is undergoing a long overdue sea-change. Why? Because it rarely works to get us what we want. We deliver the lecture. Kids ignore it. We mete out the punishments. The behavior doesn’t get better. We punish again. It gets even worse. We get caught in a loop of negative behaviors that begins to feel like a noose around our necks.

How does trusting our kids come into this picture? As a former school psychologist and parent coach with 23 years’ experience, I can share that trust is a major tool in helping kids’ behaviors improve.

Think about how you feel if you’re new to a job with minimal training, you made a mistake, and your boss gives you a 15-minute lecture on why you shouldn’t have done that. You’re so rattled that you inadvertently make the same mistake again. Your boss calls you to her office and threatens probation if it happens again. You go on to make a different mistake and your boss puts you on probation with a week to get your act together. Now your fear of being fired and not having the safety of a paycheck is looming in your brain.

This is what happens with kids. The job they’re new to is being human. The minimal training is that they simply lack life experience and brain development. The lecture they receive doesn’t sink in because the part of their brain that processes logic is turned off while the part that signals danger is on high. (Incidentally, that brain part is fully developed well into their twenties.) The threat they feel is a huge disconnect from you when things go wrong; they need their parents to survive, and when they feel distant, their survival feels uncertain. The probation is the punishment that fails to teach a better way — time out, taking away electronics or the keys to the car — you know the drill. Like an adult with the threat of being fired, your child is now in a full-on state of fear instead of love, which never works to bring out the best in him or her (or anyone.)

So, let’s try trust instead. Go back to when she was an infant. You could trust her to do her developmental tasks, which were to cry when she had a need for food and comfort,; reflect your spoken language by babbling; and smile back when smiled at. You didn’t have to “make” any of that happen. It came naturally.

When she was around 4 months old, she turned over with no instruction from you. At 6 months, she sat up on her own steam, at 8 months she crawled, at 12 months, she stood and walked her first few wobbly steps. (These are average ages, as you realize.)

At two she discovered she had a will that wasn’t yours and she could exert it. At three she embellished on that theme with more vocabulary skills. At four she helped around the house because her urge to learn life skills and be like you just surged. At five she learned to go to formal schooling and listen to the teacher and get along with her friends, etc., etc.

You didn’t work hard to make any of this development happen. It unfolded on its own unless trauma or illness interfered with it. The key to raising a healthy child is to trust that in the past, now, and in the future, this process is ongoing in a beautifully orchestrated way.

So if you see a child acting out or displeasing you, remember that he or she is in a process. The behavior is communication that the training for the current situation needs a boost. And it’s a readable signal to which you can respond with compassion and gentle guidance, not ineffective, unrelated artificial consequences.

Children are always, always communicating their internal state. They may be tired, hungry, confused, anxious, worried, grateful, loving, cooperative, appreciated — they will let you know. You can trust their communication. And you can respond like someone who trusts their process and understands that they are children in progress, not fully-formed little adults. Whew, the difference this makes is monumental!

Happy parenting with trust!