Hello!
Would you love to help your child to be freer to be willing to cooperate with you?
In order to help them, we need to understand WHY they don’t cooperate at times.
From my perspective, a child’s true nature has what I call the 3 ‘C’s – they naturally want to connect, contribute and cooperate.
But if that is their true nature, why do they sometimes not cooperate?
What are the main causes of a lack of cooperation?
1. They have other needs that they’re wanting to meet.
2. They have a need for choice and autonomy.
3. They have pent up feelings, particularly around powerlessness and helplessness that come up when we ask them to cooperate, which get in the way of them being able to cooperate.
If those are the main reasons, WHAT can we do to help them be willing?
First of all I’m going to talk about what we can do in the moment, then I’ll share about what we can do preventatively.
IN THE MOMENT:
1. Check in with our own willingness
The first thing we can do is check our own willingness. As I shared in another article, checking on our own willingness for our children to cooperate with us means that we have a whole lot of compassionate, contagious energy with which to use these next strategies.
When we’re REALLY willing for them to cooperate with us, we’re able to connect with them, listen to them, and have the maximum capacity to help them be free to be willing to cooperate.
2. Listen to what they might be needing and find a way to meet their needs as well as ours.
For example, if they’re on a screen, and you want them to get off, we could connect in and see that they want to finish watching until the end of the programme, which is another ten minutes, and coming and watching that ten minutes with them so that they get a sense of their needs being valued, and then helping them get off after that.
Or if they’re enjoying playing a board game and you want to go out somewhere, joining in and being engaged whilst they finish the game and then all going to the car together.
Finding ways of meeting everyone’s needs can sometimes help create cooperation, but not always. What else can we do?
3. Make a request rather than a demand or threat
Remember that need for autonomy and choice in children?
If we ask them with a “you should,” or, “you have to,” or we threaten or demand, a child’s need for autonomy and choice means that they’re far less likely to be willing to cooperate, even if they actually would quite like to do that thing.
Whereas, if we say, “are you willing?” or something similar, giving a clear sense of choice (when we really are willing for them to choose), can help them be much freer to be willing to cooperate with us.
4. Giving them choices wherever possible.
This also meets their needs for choice and autonomy.
For example, “I’d love for us to get in the car now. Would you like me to carry you or shall we run to the car like wild animals?”
Or, “I’d love to brush your teeth now. Would you like the blue toothbrush or the red one?”
5. Making things fun wherever possible.
Just like us, children are far more likely to be willing to do something if doing that thing is full of connection and fun.
For example, if you want them to help tidy up, how about coming into the room with a pirate hat on saying, “ooo arrr pirate Susie, we have all this treasure to put in our treasure chest so we can bury it before those other pirates get here.” The more silly and goofy you are, and the more fun you can make the activity be, the more likely they are going to be willing to join in. The wonderful thing is that you’re also much more likely to feel connected and have fun too!
6. If we need to set a loving limit, we can do that and listen to any feelings that arise.
Listening to their tears and tantrums means that they get to release any new feelings of powerlessness, plus old ones too.
All these things can help our children be freer to be willing to cooperate.
PREVENTATIVELY
Well, all these things can help preventatively too, because they help our children’s willingness channel be relatively free-flowing.
Their willingness channel gets silted up by painful feelings, particularly feelings of powerlessness and helplessness. These feelings can arise when they don’t have choice about what happens to them.
Those can be anything from small events when they don’t have choice about what they do or we use our power over them, to bigger things like dentist visits, to divorce in the family, and medical procedures (even in infancy).
Feelings like this sit in their bodies and can come up to the surface when we ask them simple requests, or ask them to stop doing something.
This is the way our psyche is designed to work. The silt of past feelings sits in their willingness channel, and when a similar situation arises (around choice), those feelings come up to be heard and healed.
That’s why power-reversal games are so powerful. Whenever we play the less powerful one, and they get to be the more powerful one, and we mock protest, and they laugh, they are healing and releasing old feelings of powerlessness.
That could be us pushing them in the swing and pretending each time that they are knocking us over, and us being surprised, or them chasing us and us pretending we keep falling over and they catch us, or any game where they’re being more powerful.
When they’re laughing during these games, they are releasing old feelings of powerlessness which prevent them being free to cooperate.
When they have big cries and tantrums, they’re also letting out feelings that are silting up their willingness channel.
When we stay with them, loving them, giving them empathy, and saying things like, “I’m here with you, I”m listening, I love you,” then they get to free up their willingness channel a little bit more.
And the more we give them choices, make requests rather than demands, and find ways to meet their needs rather than our own, then they aren’t adding any extra silt to that willingness channel.
Children WANT to cooperate, and that’s most likely to happen when their willingness channel is relatively free, when their needs are being valued, when they’re being asked rather than demanded of, when things are fun and when they have choices.
And if you’re feeling fed up or overwhelmed when you read this list of things, I want to remind you that this doesn’t mean you HAVE to do ALL of these things every time!
It DOES mean that generally aiming to keep these things in mind is going to mean that your child is going to be freer to be willing to cooperate, because their willingness channel is going to be freer!
If you want to learn more about willingness and the willingness channel, in both adults and children, you might like my new book, “Are You Willing? which is on Kindle (you can download a free Kindle app for your phone or iPad or computer).
I’d also love to invite you to my new course, The Wonder of Willingness.
For this first live round only, I’m offering 4 Zoom calls to go with the course, so you get the opportunity of either being facilitated through The Willingness Practice, or seeing other people being facilitated through it.
And it’s only AUD$50! And the first Zoom is THIS SUNDAY!
You can find out more HERE.
Love,
Marion
xxx