The Magic Detour to a Loving Relationship with Your Child
“She’s seeking sexual contact with strangers online and I don’t know what to do to make it stop. I’m so worried for her.”
“He’s failing in school and I am so afraid for his future that I keep nagging him about his assignments. He’s getting more and more aggressive toward me.”
“She’s shutting me out and it hurts so badly that I cry every night. I adopted her to help her life be fulfilling and loving, but it’s not working. I feel like a failure.”
These are the stories parents share with me as I serve them as their coach.
Heartbreaking as the stories are, I am able to steer these parents to a new path that brings incredible results. What’s the secret? It’s a detour. A Magic Detour, made of love instead of insistence on compliance. And it works for kids of all ages, from preschoolers to young adults.
The typical, and fully understandable, child-raising road that parents take is, “I have to get him to understand why his actions are not OK, and then issue consequences to make sure he gets it and improves his behavior.” Or “I need to keep her safe, so I have to limit her activities with grounding and taking her phone.” Or “Lying cannot be tolerated … he has to learn to tell the truth or else!”
What’s the Magic Detour? It’s acceptance of the child just as they are in the Present Moment (Present Moment Parenting is my book.) This is hard when you’re so afraid. It’s reflecting what you hear your child say, pausing to allow their hearts and brains to register that you’ve truly seen, heard and felt them, and then (only then) engaging in logical discourse. It’s asking questions instead of issuing edicts. It’s including the child in the problem-solving process, from “how to get this room in order” to “how to stop endangering your safety.” It’s love. Parents who come to me desperately want to love their kids, but they just don’t know how. They’re stuck in the old authoritarian ways of dealing with unwanted behavior, and they often think that addressing the behavior directly is the answer.
But it doesn’t work. It only creates more of the unwanted behavior. Desperation sets in. Fear overtakes the parents, and the children feel their parents’ lack of faith in them, so they set out to “live down to” their expectations. It’s the road to more conflict, more anxiety, more anger and more fear.
The fact is that every “act of defiance” is a call for love. And only two things exist: fear and love. Leading parents to that love is my heart’s greatest calling, and I am utterly honored to help make the healing happen every day, using a Magic Detour from “getting children to …” to “freeing children to ...” by infusing love and watching the magic unfold. Parents get to their destination of better behaved children, just down an entirely different road than they thought.