I was going through my blog and found an old draft from 2019 that I wrote but never finished. The recent post I wrote had such positive feedback it had me sitting and rereading old ones I enjoyed sharing. I hope this one finds the right readers who needed to hear this:
I recently posted about creating positive health and body image with kids and I've worked so hard to find that balance, the line at which you are creating a positive health outlook for kids and yet not overly focusing on it to the point where they become obsessed or turned off. Then, just two weeks after writing that piece, my own child tells me they think they're "fat" and need to watch what they eat. I thought to myself, are you kidding, we literally discuss healthy choices all the time and how did he not get the message? Why was his line skewed? Then I realized that he doesn't only hear what I'm saying, he hears what siblings, friends, other adults - everyone around him - are all talking about and no matter how hard I try, the balance isn't necessarily going to be set by my own approach.
Same is true with any topic, we could just fill in the blank. There is always some line we will need to tow where a few steps to the left or right means trouble. When is it safe to let your kids walk alone and when will they defy you if you hold out too long and they disagree with your safety recommendations? When is it ok to let your teenager watch their food intake because they need to learn how to be healthier and when do you cross the line and open the door to an ED? I could think of a million iterations of the same idea.
The question I've been thinking about is - can we help kids self identify their line and learn to respect it and ask for help when they feel they've lost it?
As always, I don't presume to have a one size fits all answer. I think, however, there are certain skills we can help kids acquire and once they have those skills it will come more naturally to them to find their lines.
The most essential skill any parent can give their child is learning how to listen to themselves. To trust their instinct. To be open and understanding of their own personhood. This, of course, has limits - they aren't fully developed cognitively until a certain point so I wouldn't let them trust themselves to drive a car before they've learned to or cross streets when they feel ready - but this is more about listening to your inner self and not quashing your feelings. How many times have we told our kids, as they're crying and in pain, "you're ok." Or when they are worried about something we say "there's nothing to worry about!" Without realizing it, I think we inadvertently ignore our kids feelings and try and supplant our own feelings onto theirs. We know there's nothing to worry about or that it will only hurt for two minutes and they'll be back to playing - so we try and push that onto them. Instead, we could try to acknowledge their feelings and then guide them to the next step. Subconsciously, we are giving them a very different message. You are allowing them to acknowledge and trust their own feelings while still helping guide their responses to those feelings. It is subtle but over time, I think very important. Kids who can learn to listen to the signals they are getting from their bodies and minds are going to eventually learn to respect and trust themselves and their lines.
Take a kid who finds themselves anxious or shy in the presence of new faces or situations. Some parents try to push them into it and assume they'll just learn to adjust eventually. Others let them completely stay away from these situations and assume they'll eventually grow out of it and learn to cope. But some take a more middle of the road approach. They help the kid put a name or word to their feelings (scared, nervous...) and they talk before these situations about how to approach them. What are things you can do when you feel that way? How can we make these situations easier. This gives them the skills to approach a situation and hear what their body/mind is telling them and coach it through. It puts them in touch with their inner voice. Once they understand that voice, they can help guide themselves through different situations.
Ok, I know what you may be thinking - it isn't that easy. And it isn't. And what about those kids whose inner voice is forever telling them to do crazy things - do we teach them to listen to that one too? Of course this has limits and exceptions. But yes, in a way, we do teach them to listen - and curb it. The same way you can teach the anxious child to overcome their anxiety, you can teach the wild and reckless child to hear the inner voice and curb it to a reasonable degree.
How, then, once they can put words to their feelings and listen to themselves, can we help them use these skills to learn how to set the lines? I think that the more in touch we can get our kids with their feelings, the more they can see when something isn't in balance. They will always need our guidance, that is why they are the kids and we are the adults. But as they mature and grow toward adulthood - they gain some of our knowledge and some of their own experience and it helps them re-balance those inner voice and recreate the lines they need to redraw.
Lets try and look at this from our own perspective. How do we find that balance? Have you ever watched someone who was the YES person, no matter what and at some point they just melted down or lost it. The mom who is forever scrambling to do every extra curricular for the kids, volunteers for PTA, makes meals for people when they have new babies, and somehow also works full time? I use moms because I think women tend to martyr themselves and have a harder time finding this balance than men do (I don't see myself as sexist, I am actually a staunch feminist, but I still notice women have more of this tendency than men do...sorry). Well, the mom in our example has no balance, she just wants to be everything to everyone. And I've noticed with moms like that how they somehow drop off the map for a while cuz they realize by being everything to everyone they were actually not really much good to anyone (least of all themselves). So instead of doing this, most of us actually find some sort of balance - we volunteer a certain amount (or not at all if it is too hard on the rest of the pieces), we say yes to some but not all after school activities, we find a way to attempt to take on a reasonable amount without overloading to the point of breaking. This is us, as parents, finding our own balance.
Our kids can and need to do the same in their own lives. Whether it is with friend time, food issues, schoolwork, extracurricular activities, we can help guide them through the same steps we would take to assess the situations and listen to themselves to find this balance. And, especially when they are younger, we need to find the balance for them and include them in the process so they can see how and why we did it. If they want to do after school sports but they are struggling to complete their homework each night, we say no, but with an explanation to help them understand how to do it for themselves the next time.
Modeling this process towards finding balance should hopefully lead to them mimicking the process and steps and eventually hopefully finding a balance of their own - one they will constantly be recalibrating.
Post script - when a topic comes to me it seems to be coming from all angles. As I was running with a few friends last week one showed up with a stroller and another with his dog - we refer to him as the stallion - I commented to one of us in the group that the stroller will keep our pace more doable when she said but the dog will push us faster - and there was my balance playing out right in front of our eyes. We did go way faster than I expected but it was reasonable fast - love that balance.
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