When your toddler won’t let you change her clothes, when your five-year-old won’t brush her teeth, when your seven-year-old calls you, “dummy pants,” what is your most effective strategy to bring about cooperation?
Many of us tend to go to one way or the other. In the first, we get blinkers on about getting our own way and lose contact with our child. Perhaps we get serious; our tone gets louder and harsher; perhaps we start getting a bit desperate and a bit ‘threateny’ or ‘punishy’. Or perhaps we go the other way, and start to give up on our own needs; perhaps we get a bit ‘whiny’ and ‘pleasy’ and desperately ask our little one to help us, or even just give up on getting our own needs met altogether.
For me, those two directions are like sides of a see-saw. Both sides come from a kind of fight-or-flight mentality. One the one side, I start believing that my needs are most important, and I stop being able to see things through the eyes of my child. I get desperate and believe that the only way of getting my needs met is by being more forceful in some way.
When the see-saw goes the other side, I give up on my needs and believe that they cannot get met if my child is going to get her needs met. The quality of desperation and then depression come in.
Each of these perspectives is based on the belief that if one person gets their needs met, the other one doesn’t. It’s either us or our child. We tend to get serious in these places. Firm serious on the one side, and pleading serious on the other.
I love it when I remember that there is the place in the middle of the see-saw. A place where both my child and I get our needs met. A place where possibilities open and connection blossoms. First of all I need to let go of any beliefs that get in the way of this happening, such as any thoughts of wrongness in either of us. Instead I need to choose to trust that all human beings, whatever our age, are always only acting to get our needs met or to have our feelings heard.
Then we can drop into a win-win zone. In that win-win zone, there are a few different ways we can take things. In this article, I am going to focus on laughter and play.
“Play? Laughter?” you may ask… What’s that got to do with my child not brushing her teeth!!?
Did you notice back there that I mentioned how we often get serious when things get challenging? So, how many times do you find that the serious approach elicits real cooperation from your child? If you are like me, it won’t be that often!
So, we need to look underneath. We need to understand why our child won’t brush her teeth, or go to bed, or get into her car seat.
There are usually two reasons. (Remember that we need to let go of those beliefs that she is doing it deliberately to annoy us, or that there’s something wrong with her).
The two reasons are; that she is needing connection, and/or she has some feelings that she needs to be heard.
And do you know one of the fastest ways to create connection with our children? It’s through what I call laughter play.
Laughter play is known by other names too. Aletha Solter, founder of the Aware Parenting Institute, calls it ‘Attachment Play’. Patty Wipfler, founder of Parenting by Connection, calls it ‘Playlistening,’ and Lawrence Cohen calls it ‘Playful Parenting,’ the same as the title of one of his books.
What I love about these approaches is their deep understanding of the power of play.
Often we parents can see play and laughter as something that just happens sometimes when we have kids; sometimes we can see it as pretty annoying, especially when our five-year-old keeps jumping on her bed at bed-time.
Yet laughter play is deeply connecting. Whenever we connect with our child and play, and especially when they are laughing, and even more when we are laughing too, deep connection happens.
Not only that, but remember that I said that the second reason for children’s lack of cooperation was a need for their feelings to be heard? Well, laughter (as long as there is no tickling involved) has a little-known, yet amazing capacity to help release feelings related to fear and powerlessness.
This helps us understand those times when we are feeling fed up and talking to our child in a particular way, and they are smiling or laughing. They are not laughing at us or being disrespectful; they are actually trying to release the feelings of fear or powerlessness that are bubbling up in their body.
So, when our five-year-old daughter won’t leave the room with daddy so that we can talk with a friend or client on Skype, we can choose to connect with these things. We can explain beforehand what we want. But if she doesn’t cooperate when the moment comes, we can remember the mid-point of the see-saw; our desire and willingness for everyone to get their needs met, and that she probably needs to feel really connect and to have some feelings be heard. In that moment, we can choose to say something like, “whatever you do, don’t chase daddy down the hall!” and watch, surprised, as daddy runs out with your daughter following close behind, giggling.
There are a few different types of play that work most effectively to create the kind of connection and emotional release that lead to easy cooperation.
One of these is power-reversal games. In these games, we play being less powerful, and we let our child have the more powerful position. These games are so effective because children, however aware we are, have much less power and choice than we do as adults. When we put ourselves in the less powerful position, and act a little surprised, our child can laugh a lot, and in doing so, let out feelings of those times when they didn’t get to choose what happened. The chasing game described above was one of these kinds of games. We chase but go slower than our child, or act surprised when they catch us up and we let them knock us over. Each time we are smaller and less powerful, they get to laugh and let go of more feelings about being smaller and less powerful.
At this point, some of you might be thinking along the lines of, “but if I start being fun as a kind of discipline, won’t my child get more rowdy and less cooperative?” The answer is a surprising one. The paradox is that when we meet the needs underlying why our child is not cooperating – connection and expression of feelings – then their natural desire to cooperate shines forth and they become naturally more cooperative. They don’t need to learn to be cooperative, or be punished or rewarded; rather, their natural desire to cooperate, which had been hiding underneath a sense of disconnection or painful feelings, comes back to the fore. They simply love to cooperate. It feels really enjoyable to them. All children have a core desire to cooperate and contribute. When they aren’t doing so, it’s generally because either they have a need for connection or other unmet needs, or feelings that need to be released.
What are the other types of play? Well, nonsense play is one. When your three-year-old son won’t let you take his pyjamas off, you could start speaking in a goofy voice, and pretend to put his clothes on yourself. Pretend to put his t-shirt on your foot, and say something like, “it goes here, doesn’t it?… hmmm, no, perhaps it goes there on my ear…. no, okay what about my arm, oh yes it goes here,” and then look pleased that it fits on your arm. You will probably find your son is laughing and laughing. Whenever he is laughing, you know you have found what I call the ‘sweet spot,’ which is the point where healing is happening. Then follow the game along and let your son join in. Perhaps he will say, “no, mummy”, and start putting it on himself, perhaps he will join in trying to put his clothes on you, but it is very likely that, following the play like this, that he will willingly take off his pjs and help with putting on his clothes.
Another type of laughter play are separation games. You can play these with a child who has feelings around separating. Chasing games, like the one before, work on this level, as does hide-and-seek. For example, perhaps your daughter is reluctant to get in the car to go to school. You could pretend that you don’t see her anywhere and are wondering where she is. Bring her in on the game, for example, say in a loud voice, “I wonder where Stephanie is. I don’t see her anywhere.” Then she might start hiding in various places as you make your way to the door and then out of the door to the car. You might pretend that you don’t see her, and then suddenly ‘see’ her, and jump in the air in mock surprise. If she is laughing, you know she is releasing feelings to do with separating from you.
There are many categories of these types of play, and a multitude of games that you can play. I highly recommend Aletha Solter’s book Attachment Play – there’s a picture of me and my son on the cover! The Playlistening booklet is for sale from Hand in Hand Parenting, and I also enjoy Playful Parenting and The Opposite of Worry by Lawrence Cohen.
So, laughter games can be used strategically – when you are in the middle of a ‘discipline issue’, as I’ve talked about above. They can also be used as a preventative measure. In other words, regularly having this kind of play builds deeper, stronger emotional connection with our child, which means a greater likelihood that they will want to cooperate with us when we need that. Remember that a sense of not being connected is one of the reasons why children do not cooperate. Another way of putting it is ‘filling up their love cup’, a term coined by Lawrence Cohen. When we fill up their love cup with connection and laughter play, their love cup is less likely to be empty when we want them to do something to help us.
There’s an important thing to add here. Sometimes, after these periods of relaxed play, a child may start to cry about something seemingly small. We might start thinking things like, “Hey, we’ve had all this lovely connection; you are supposed to be happy now.” To answer that, have you ever noticed that after having some warm connection time, perhaps with a partner, then you end up having an argument, or big feelings come up? It’s the same with children. When there is a lot of relaxed connection, then they feel emotionally safe. Sometimes this means that they feel comfortable to let out some feelings that they have been holding in up until then. So they might have a cry or rage, perhaps focussed on something that seems little. So, instead of thinking that they are overreacting, or feeling angry that they are not appreciating the play and laughter we have had with them; if instead we can welcome their feelings, and listen to them whilst they cry or rage, then we will generally find that after crying, they will be more relaxed, more cooperative, happier, more relaxed, and yes, wanting to cooperate with us more.
So, to sum up, this approach to discipline means that connecting with our children, practising laughter play with them, and listening to their painful feelings, leads to children simply being naturally more cooperative.
Not only that, but laughter play is really helpful for us too. It helps us to fall in love with our children all over again, to let go of our pent-up feelings, and simply have more fun as a parent.
More fun, more joy, more cooperation, and more ease. What more could we want!?