How You Talk To Your Children
By Peggy Gomula and Sally Kidder Davis, PCI Certified Parent Coaches
“Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?”
― Jane Nelsen
Jane’s quote resonates with us both and led to an interesting conversation about communicating with our children. How effective was humiliation in getting our kids to do better? How does humiliation affect our relationships?
For some people, especially people with ADHD, being humiliated is an incredibly painful experience. This is true for most people, but it may be more severe in people with ADHD. Many people with ADHD have Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD), which means that they have extreme emotional sensitivity in certain situations.
Many times, we, as adults, speak to our children differently than we would speak to another adult. Most of us would never intentionally humiliate another adult and yet we do it to our children, often without realizing what we are saying. We know that during our time as parents humiliating words came out of our mouths. For example, ”How many times do I have to tell you…” or ”You are a big girl now, you should know better”, or ”Why can’t you just remember to…”
We would never dream of saying to a friend, “How many times do I have to tell you to be quiet,” and yet we know we both occasionally said that to our children. For added emphasis, we usually followed with a BIG SIGH, to show how immensely frustrated we were (and to throw a bit more humiliation at them just in case they missed it the first time LOL).
We know this to be true: YOU WILL GET FRUSTRATED, ANGRY AND DISAPPOINTED IN YOUR CHILDREN. How you handle that frustration, anger and disappointment is up to you. Will you humiliate them to make your point or will you instead take a deep breath, relax a bit, wait until your thinking brain kicks in, and then talk to them in a calm and loving way? Think about how you would like to be talked to and model that for your children.
Here’s a funny video from the BreakWomb all about the way we often talk to our kids.
In addition to providing parent coaching, our parent coaches host online support groups for parents of children with ADHD.