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FAMILY MATTERS
Rick Hanson, Ph.D. and Jan Hanson, L.Ac., © 2004
Essential Inner Skills for Kids and Parents
Raising children is about love and nurturance, playfulness and enjoying each other, encouraging good values and virtues, providing reasonable limits and discipline -- and helping kids learn how to do things. From that very first moment that a newborn roots for the nipple of a breast or a bottle and figures out how to latch on, life is a thrilling journey of discovery for a child, cheered on by loving parents, as he or she acquires the skills and knowledge needed to make one's way in the world.
Outer and Inner Skills
Usually we think of this learning as it's applied externally, whether toward a child learning how to roll over and crawl, get a spoonful of mashed potatoes into her mouth instead of her hair, share toys at preschool, read and write, hit a baseball -- or, goodness gracious, drive off to college.
Those outer skills are certainly important. But really, it is the inner skills that make the greatest difference in one's life, whether in terms of worldly accomplishments or inner fulfillment, happiness, and peace. Whatever we may do in the outer world, we live in our own interior 24/7, and our capacity to work with that inner landscape -- its terrain and climate, its storms and rainbows, swampy stuck places and high clear vistas, its cast of sub-personalities and their conflicts and alliances, the volcanic passions and the cool voice of reason, the whole teeming bubbling amazing stew of it all -- shapes both our experience of life and our functioning at work and at home.
Curiously, the inner skills usually get little attention unless a person's wheels start to come off, perhaps in the form of a child's inability to sit still or his dad's drinking problem or his mom's lingering depression. Think of all the effort made in school to teach long division or dividing by fractions - which most people rarely use in adulthood - compared to teaching children to relax their bodies, let go of upsetting thoughts or feelings, or encourage themselves to keep going when it's hard . . . all of which have much more impact on happiness and accomplishment across the lifespan.
But it's actually straightforward, and usually quite easy, to learn the inner skills. In this column, we'll summarize the five essential inner skills, listing both their elements and examples of ways to get better at them. You can use this summary as a kind of checklist to see where you and your children are already quite competent, and where some improvement just might be useful. Then, in later columns, we'll go through each one in detail, emphasizing how parents and kids can get better and better at them.
Here we go!
Awareness
This is basic self-awareness, sometimes called mindfulness, and its elements include:
Wanting to be in reality, to know what is objectively true, both inside yourself and in the outer world.
Observing your experience and external events exactly as they are (sometimes called "bare witnessing"); separating yourself from your reactions to things; resting in an inner sanctuary of peaceful, interested, benign awareness.
Accepting the whole spectrum of your experience, including body sensations, emotions, desires, thoughts, memories, and images.
Clearly seeing your temperament, personality, and dynamic interactions among parts of the self.
These are some ways to cultivate mindfulness, for both parents and children:
Adjusting your feedback to the age of the child, mirror back what he or she is experiencing - whether it is exuberantly saying "Wheee!" in tune with an infant breaking into a smile or sighing in quiet sympathy with a teenage daughter who's frustrated with one of her friends. Children come to know themselves in large part through being known by their parents.
Understand - and communicate to kids - the difference, the separation, between the world as it is and the world as we wish it to be.
Take a moment at meals to be aware of the food before diving in.
Meditate, whether for a single mindful minute or a whole hour; just keep returning attention to the physical sensations of the breath and let thoughts, etc. come and go as they will.
Simply describing your experience to someone, without justifying or apologizing for it.
Letting Go
If we don't let go, we become psychologically constipated and full of you know what. Letting go means releasing stress, painful emotions, negative thoughts, and old traumas. Here's how:
Take some big breaths. Even little children can be encouraged to blow out hard, which makes them inhale fully; just a few of these will be noticeably calming.
Deliberately relax the body. It's nearly impossible to be upset when the body is relaxed. You (or your children) can tense and then rest the arms and legs, or progressively focus on the different parts of the body, moving from the feet to the head. Or imagine that the hands are very warm, like a holding a cup of hot cocoa. Or imagine that you're V-E-R-Y H-E-A-V-Y, sinking down into the embracing earth.
Use images to let go, such as imagining that worries get put on a rocket ship which blasts off the earth, flies into the sun, and completely burns up. Or visualize that you're standing in a lusciously cool mountain stream on a hot sunny day, and that painful feelings are being cleansed, washed out of you, and carried away.
On paper, out loud, or simply inside your mind, get on your own side and argue against needlessly negative, limiting, or inaccurate thoughts, beliefs, expectations, and assumptions. Treat the thoughts that make you (or a child) upset as propositions that may or may not be true, and then list three or more ways that they are totally wrong. For example, if an 8-year-old is afraid that bad guys could break into your home, together come up with a list like this one: All our windows and doors are locked. Your bedroom is next to ours. I'm a real light sleeper. There's never been a burglary in our neighborhood. We leave a light on. Crooks look for easy targets, not houses like ours. The dogs next door bark at anything, and they'd sure scare a burglar away. Besides, we're not rich, and burglars go where the big jewels are: we don't have anything they want!
Insight
This is understanding the why behind one's reactions, seeing the factors that make a child or parent feel bad so they lose their force, like waking up from a bad dream. It means recognizing one's deeper wants and yearnings, the softer and more vulnerable feelings beneath exasperation or anger, and how experiences from childhood shape our feelings and actions today.
It also means coming to terms with the nature of life, understanding that it's constantly changing, that everything always does fall apart in the end - even the earth itself, someday - and that fame and fortune are the booby prizes of this existence, not to be confused with the true gold of love, friendship, gratitude, and inner peace. Perhaps the Dalai Lama put it best when he said, "Sooner or later you will find a limitation of resources and will have to adopt a more contented lifestyle."
Adults and children can cultivate insight through:
Noticing how the intentions attributed to others affect how we feel about them; maybe we're assuming that they're deliberately doing something to hurt us when in fact they are simply unaware or clueless.
Observing how things can build up inside, like firecrackers piling up until a small spark triggers a big explosion; for example, big brother can start to notice how getting frustrated with his homework inclines him to pick on his little sister.
Mirroring back to a child both the surface expression of her emotions and your best guess about what he might be feeling underneath; for example: "OK, your brother really made you mad, right?, when he took your cool rocket ship out of your room. And maybe also it hurt your feelings that he didn't seem to care about what you wanted, that you had already told him a million times to leave your stuff alone. I'm not sure, but did you feel hurt as well?"
Consciously looking for the impact of the past on the present. For example, notice how feeling criticized when you were little can lead you to get overly defensive or angry about mild criticisms today, reacting at the level of a "6" or a "7" to provocations that are really just a "1" or a "2."
Taking an active stand of compassion and kindness toward the younger layers of the self, and resisting any tendency to be shaming or critical toward them. This attitude will help you to hear the voice of the child within your own mind - that sweet, innocent, and vulnerable being you once were.
Taking a few minutes each day to see that everything is always changing, that clinging and getting stuck on things just make us feel bad, and that a fixation on me!-me!-me! always brings tension, anxiety, and pain.
Taking In the Good
A single scary moment with a dog is more memorable than a thousand enjoyable times - an illustration of the way the brain instantly registers negative experiences to help us survive, but tends to move quickly past positive ones. In a profound sense, we are what we remember, both the explicit memories of specific events and the implicit memories of past feelings and relationships. If we don't consciously help ourselves to savor and retain positive experiences, they are all too easily outnumbered by negative ones. Besides, you've earned the good times: the meal is set before you, it's already paid for, and you might as well dig in!
Cultivate the attitude that it is alright to relish both pleasant moments in life as well as your good accomplishments or qualities. Resist any sense that it is vain, selfish, or arrogant to do this.
Look for opportunities to have a pleasant experience or to recognize something good about yourself. For example, a child could notice that other kids want to play with her, that she is liked and valued.
Try to have positive thoughts become positive emotions. For instance, if you know you had a success at work, allow that conceptual knowing to become a felt sense of worth, satisfaction, confidence, etc.
Focus on extending the duration of good experiences. Stay with them rather than jumping onto the next thing. (This is particularly important for kids and grownups with a spirited temperament.) Let them fill the body and the mind. Let them be big, let them move in and occupy your consciousness fully. Savor them. Yum yum!
Imagine that they are sinking in to your body, into your face and belly and back, and soaking deeply into your emotional memory banks. A young child could visualize the experience going into a treasure chest in her heart.
Using the Will
There's a quasi-joke about counseling that's actually quite profound: "Question: How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Just one, but the light bulb has to want to change."
By helping ourselves and our children continue to want to do the right thing, to keep pulling weeds in the garden of the mind and planting flowers and fruit trees in their place -- yes, that's how we stay on track in life, and there's nothing more central to inner fulfillment and worldly success. Easier said than done, to be sure, but here are a few ways to cultivate positive goals, tenacity, and the will:
Identify basic virtues for you and your children to live by, like generosity, honesty, forbearance, courage, and grit. In previous generations, virtues were discussed routinely at school, church, and in public life, but these days we need to make them explicit. Without shaming or self-righteousness, talk with children about virtues, both ones that are already strengths and ones that could use some developing. Frankly, kids are naturally egocentric and selfish, so be prepared to offer a good explanation as to what's in it for them to practice a particular virtue; for example: "If you are generous and share your toys, other kids will share their toys with you. Plus you will probably feel good about yourself inside."
Cultivate the attitude that you are for yourself, that you are on your own side. For some, this comes naturally, while others - especially those who were criticized, neglected, or shamed a lot as children - have to work at it. Think about universal standards or ideals of fairness, compassion, and kindness as they would apply to anyone - and then apply them to yourself. Evoke the sense of caring you feel toward your children, or even any child, and then extend that caring attitude toward the very little child you once were. Reflect on the ways that being for yourself will benefit others.
Keep setting positive purposes and goals before your mind, like carrots in front of a horse. In a deep sense, real will is surrender to a higher purpose. For example, periodically take time to reflect on your life and where you want to be going. Or start each day with a few minutes of writing down a couple of fundamental purposes you want to keep in mind, such as being patient with others, not dithering around at work, or bringing love to an exasperating child. Rick often makes a collage around his birthday with pictures and words representing his hopes and intentions for the year, and our daughter has sometimes done the same, starting when she was quite young; the new year is another great opportunity to do this.
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While these five inner skills cover a lot of ground and might seem a little overwhelming, getting good at them is just like getting good at anything else, whether it's learning how to bake a turkey, change a tire, or program the VCR (actually, they're probably easier than the last one!). Like most things, if you keep banging away at it, you and your children will steadily get better at them. Just keep planting a few seeds of skillfulness each day, and you'll harvest the fruits for the rest of your life.
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(Rick Hanson is a clinical psychologist, Jan Hanson is
an acupuncturist/nutritionist, and they are raising a daughter and
son, ages 12 and 14. With Ricki Pollycove, M.D., they are the
authors of Mother Nurture: A Mother's Guide to Health in Body, Mind,
and Intimate Relationships, published by Penguin. You can see their
website at www.nurturemom.com or email them with questions or
comments at info@nurturemom.com; unfortunately, a personal reply may
not always be possible.)
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