Understanding What Your Child is Really Saying

When your child communicates with you, she’s speaking in two languages.
One is the language of the left hemisphere-- you hear the words and the information of those words and interpret their meaning with your left hemisphere. “I can’t make this Lego snap on.” This left hemisphere message lets you know that your child is having trouble snapping the Legos together.

The other language is the language of the right hemisphere—this information is in the form of emotion and non-verbal messages. For example, how loudly, energetic, or intense was the message, what tone of voice was used? The right hemisphere also communicates through facial expressions, body posture, and movement. When your child says “I can’t make this Lego snap on” with their teeth clenched, hands in fists, in an intense and loud tone of voice, and brows furrowed, it clearly communicates frustration and probably a plea for help. If the same words are said in a deflated quiet tone of voice, head hanging, it clearly communicates discouragement and perhaps even the message of “I can’t do anything.”

Sometimes we act like we only speak and understand left-hemisphere-ese. But we’re missing at least half of the message when we ignore the right-hemisphere-ese. The challenge is for us to use our whole brains and listen to and VALUE EQUALLY the languages of both sides of the brain. To do this well, we have to listen and pay attention with our right hemispheres, too. Pay attention to the non-verbal clues and ask yourself, what is my child saying beyond the words? This may be challenging for you if you grew up in a home where the external events of life were discussed, but the internal mental life wasn’t given attention. You can begin developing your own right hemisphere by paying attention to people’s nonverbal communication and just by being aware of this new way of seeing the world.

When we listen with both sides of our brain, we can then begin to respond with both sides our brain and have the emotionally connecting communication with our children that they need to thrive.

What’s it really about?

In the book Parenting from the Inside Out, Siegel and Hartzell write: “[At times] we’re not really listening to our children because our own internal experiences are being so noisy that it’s all we can hear. . . We often try to control our children’s feelings and behavior when actually it’s our own internal experience that is triggering our upset feelings about their behavior.” An example of this would be when your child is being really clingy, and instead of seeing that she’s communicating that she needs your comfort and attention, you get furious with her. Your fury is not really because of her developmentally appropriate need for you—it’s because you feel smothered because you haven’t done anything for yourself in a long time, or because you had a parent who relied on you to meet her needs, and in this moment, you feel resentment again at being needed.

So what do we do? Siegel and Hartzell encourage parents to pay attention to what’s going on inside of ourselves when we are upset with our children so that we can flexibly and loving respond to them in ways that we feel good about and that are good for their development. Now this isn’t easy. When we’re upset, our brains are often in a more primitive mode of functioning, and we have to intentionally force our minds to pay attention and reflect on what’s really happening under the surface. But with practice, we get better and better at moving from rigidly reacting to flexibly paying attention to what’s really happening inside of us in the moment. Then we can appropriately respond to our children, instead of reacting to our own feelings or to something being triggered from the past.

I strongly suggest journaling your answers to the exercises in the book on page 29, but if you don’t have the book, start with their 3rd question, which is: “Think of an issue in your life that is impairing your ability to connect flexibly with your child. Focus on the past, present, and future aspects of this issue. Do any themes or general patterns come to mind from past interactions? What emotions and bodily sensations emerge when this issue comes to your mind now? Are there other times you have experienced these feelings?”

Funny Kid Quote of the Week

[Funny Kid Quotes (FKQs) appear here every week. Check back next week, and if you have one of your own, email it to me at parenting@tinabryson.com.]

This one comes from my friend Ilsa:

My 2-year-old: "Mommy screams at me and makes me nuts." I screamed at him twice in 6 months. But I once told him that when HE screams at me it makes me nuts. So for a month, he freely announced "Mommy screams at me and makes me nuts" to several people. So I told him, "Even if mommy gets mad and screams, she loves you." So naturally, for sometime after, he'd repeat "Mommy screams at me" every time I said "I love you."

At about 19 months he started announcing, "Sometimes mommy drinks wine." Luckily, not at the local church.

Another current quote: "I prefer that I do." is his answer to "Mateo, please don't do x or y."