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CYNTHIA ARMSTRONG

Again, Seriously?

By Cynthia Armstrong

Children and adults sometimes do those same unhelpful behaviors over and over again. Today, we're going to discuss why that might be. For our children, this might be hitting their brother or grabbing a toy from their sister or playing video games to the exclusion of their homework. Despite the fact they said they would get to it. For parents, this will often fall in that group two, where we don't see our child's greatness, or that group three, where we are really struggling with our own problems, making us less available for our children. So, this might look like us yelling at our children, even though we said we weren't going to do it again. Or it could be us hiding in our rooms or hiding in doing chores, cooking dinner, doing the dishes or whatever those chores might be so that we don't have to deal with the homework battle with our child.

These are just a couple of examples. There are so many, but where we get into behaviors that are not helpful behaviors that we do over and over again, we want instead to have helpful behaviors we do over and over again. So it's not the repetition of a behavior that's not helpful for us. It's the repetition of those non-beneficial ones, the ones that don't lead us where we really want to go, that is a concern. And we might say, we've tried everything, which is one of those over-generalized conclusions. Right? We haven't tried everything. Yes, we might have tried punishments. We might have tried rewards. We might have tried affirmations, positive statements. We might have tried a lot of different things. But I've noticed in myself that they're the things that I want or think might be helpful. And there's no way to know all of the possibilities out there. So we might ask, why doesn't it work? Why aren't they getting this? Or even, why am I not getting this?

To demonstrate this, I'm going to go a little off topic, but just stay with me, okay? Just imagine you're in the grocery store. And all of a sudden, you turn down an aisle and there's somebody you know, and they say “Hi,” and they greet you enthusiastically. And they're talking like they know you really well and you're thinking, “Oh, I do know you, but wait, what's your name? And where do I know you from? Is it at school? Is it at church? Is it in our neighborhood? Where do I know you from? And what's your name?” And even during that whole conversation, you might not be able to remember or place them, but then you get home and you’re sitting on the couch or you’re just doing dishes. And all of a sudden it pops in your head, “Oh! That’s Samantha, that I know from that one school activity,” or whatever it is. I want you to stop and think, was it that your brain didn't know her name when you were talking to her at the store? No, your brain did know her name and where you knew her from, but you just didn't have access to it. And so it's really that lack of access, not the lack of knowledge or understanding that created the problem.

Think about that when it comes to those repetitive behaviors. It is not that we don't know better and we can get frustrated with ourselves or with our children: “Seriously? Again?” “I did that,” or “they did that,” or “why didn't they learn,” right? We just didn't have access to the things that we do know, because we do know, we know that this is going to be helpful, and this is not going to be helpful, but we just kind of go down those same paths. So that's one of the reasons that this happens.

One of the reasons we have these repetitive behaviors is because it is a habit, for whatever reason, from when our brain was developing and growing and connecting neurons. And so it shoots us down that path of those responses and reactions without us consciously choosing it, it happens so fast. We say, “It was just a reaction, I didn't choose it.” But we've chosen it in the past, even before we could think about our thinking. And so we created those pathways, or our children have created and are deepening those pathways. And so that is one of the reasons it is a habit.

The second reason really, truly plays into that. And that is, we are simply trying to meet our needs and yes, we might know we need water and food and shelter and things like that. But do we really understand all that goes into meeting our emotional or psychological needs? There are some things out there that kind of get lumped together, but without clarity and detail, we really aren't able to meet our needs. One of the ones I hear a lot is that children have an attention bucket and they have a power bucket. Unless we fill those two buckets every day, uh, then they're going to have behaviors or things. That's true, to a point, but that's too over-generalized. If we can meet those two needs, then those are two of the needs. But inside each of those buckets there's more, and what we're doing is we've set these paths, these connections in our brain, ourselves, or our children, because we feel like doing that will help us to meet our emotional or psychological needs.

But we have no idea, or we have only a general idea, of what those needs are, so we're not able to meet them effectively. We kind of meet them enough that we say, well, maybe if we do this enough or more often, or I've got to keep trying, I've got to do it again and maybe I can meet my emotional and psychological needs this time. That's kind of why we have those repetitive behaviors or why our children might have some of those repetitive behaviors.

Again, I wasn't taught this at school. I wasn't taught this in my family or even at my church. I was just suffering. I felt pain and it led to my suffering and I couldn't figure out why I was depressed. Why was I experiencing these things that I was experiencing? And then seeing my children and feeling that I didn't have this information, or this knowledge, or this beneficial way of looking at things and learning and growing and changing my behaviors for the path that I wanted.

And so I wasn't able to teach that to my children. And so then I started seeing them suffer and that really led me to look and to search. And as I was looking and searching, I was then seeing that yeah, I'm experiencing this, my children are experiencing this. Then, I could see how some of those behaviors in my classroom really were the exact same thing that my children and I were going through. And then as I was talking to parents and parent teacher conferences, and asking, “How can we help your child at school?” I was noticing that this is super, super common. This isn't just me, and I don't know why sometimes when we're suffering, we really feel like it's just us. Even if we know that yeah, somebody out there is probably also experiencing this, it's got to be few and far between. It's not, this is really common.

This is not stuff that we are taught. And yet these are essential skills to help us to get to the life we want. Yes, there are some people out there who just accidentally have discovered this or their neurons just happen to connect in beneficial ways because of those situations that they had. But for most of us, this is not common stuff. And so this is kind of what I want to share with you as we on this podcast, as I continue to find and discover those things that actually help us to teach ourselves so that we have what we need so that we can teach our children.

All kids are great by their very natures, and it is our privilege and our responsibility to teach them. So thank you for being here with me and for going on this journey, for learning and growing together with me.