How to Raise Children Compassionately

I put one group in one room, and the other in another room, and I give each group the task of writing down a dialogue between themselves and another person in a conflict situation. 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 neighbour.

When we reconvene 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 neighbour. (And incidentally, I don’t allow the groups to discuss who the other person was in each situation, so 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 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 neighbour. This painfully reveals how easy it is to dehumanize someone by the simple process of simply thinking of him or her as “our child.”

Dehumanizing children
I had an experience 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 time 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 the door at home, 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?” In the moment, I dehumanized him in my thinking. 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 labeled him as a child. Fortunately, I saw that going on in my head. Maybe I was able to see it more clearly because of the work I had been doing between the street gang and the police. I’d spent the weekend witnessing the danger of labeling people instead of recognising their humanness.

So instead of seeing him as a child, 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 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 couldn’t 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.

Let me show you another example of how the label ‘child’ can lead us to behave in a way that’s quite unfortunate. When I first became a parent I thought that it was my job to make children behave. I believed that an authority - a teacher or parent – had a responsibility to make people labelled a “child” or a “student” behave in a certain way.

I now see what a self-defeating objective this is. I’ve now learned that any time we’re trying to get another person to behave in a certain way, they’re 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.

Trying to get other people to do what we want them to do, threatens their autonomy, 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, it stimulates our resistance. It happens any time someone acts like they think that they know what’s best for us. Any time someone doesn’t allow us to make our own choices.

Power and parenting
My children 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 powerlessness, 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.

Whenever I used my power over them to make them wish they had done something, they taught me a second lesson. I learned that if I made 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.

The limitations of punishment (and reward)
I like to help parents see the limitations of any kind of punishment with two simple 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 or application of punishment, we can at times influence a child to do what we would like.

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 behaving as we would like them to? 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 that are intrinsically motivated.

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. Even when children behave in ways that are not in harmony with our values. There are other approaches besides permissiveness. (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.

Creating connection
There is another approach besides doing nothing or using coercive tactics. It requires an awareness of the subtle difference between getting people to do what we want or fostering connection.

When we see the difference between these two objectives, and we are consciously trying to create a quality of mutual respect, we can create resolution quite quickly. When both people are conscious that their needs and the other person’s well-being are interdependent - it is amazing how conflicts which otherwise seem unresolvable, are easily resolved.

Shifting away from moralistic parenting
The kind of communication that creates the quality of connection necessary for everybody’s needs to get met is quite different from 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 behaviour 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.

Empathy and presence
How can we respond when a child says something like, “Nobody likes me”. I believe the child needs an empathic kind of connection. The child needs to feel that we are there and really hear what they are feeling. 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 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.”

Many of us jump in when a child says something like that, with the response, “Well, have you looked at what you’ve been doing that might have been affecting your friendships?” Or disagree with the child, “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 we need to realize is that all human beings, when they’re in pain, require presence and empathy. They may want advice, but they want that after they’ve received the empathic connection.

Some people believe that it’s more humane to use reward than punishment. But both are a kind of power over others, and Nonviolent Communication is based on power with people. Power with is 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 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.

I’ve 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.

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 trying 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.

Through the practice of NVC, we can learn to clarify what we are observing, what emotions we are feeling, what values we want to live by, and what we want to ask of ourselves and others. We will no longer need to use the language of blame, judgment or domination. We can experience the deep pleasure of contributing to each others’ well being, whether our child or neighbour!

RESOURCES

VISIT cnvc.org to find articles and trainings in Non Violent Communication

DOWNLOAD the four part communication worksheet at nonviolentcommunication.com

READ Raising Children Compassionately Parenting the Nonviolent Communication Way by Marshall B. Rosenberg