Parenting Matters- May Article 1

WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW, YOU DON’T KNOW?

You are faced with a situation. It happens sometimes. You are asked to pop in and see your child’s teacher for a chat. You may or may not know what it is about. A friend pulls you aside and says her child has a problem and your child is part of that problem.

In such situations, whether you are caught by surprise or whether you had a sense that something was about to blow, one instinctively reacts in one of two ways: you go on the defensive and protect your child, or assume that you child must be in the wrong. In our hectic, pressurised lives we have a tendency to catastrophise, to think the worst without getting the full picture. Instead of reacting (or over-reacting), pause, take a breath and start asking questions for greater understanding. Finding out ‘what I don’t know, I don’t know?’ in order to go beyond the crisis-driven demand for answers is an important step in discovering what you need to know about the issue at hand.

The more facts you have at your fingertips the better perspective you will have. And don’t think you have to commit to a course of action right then and there. You can always say you will take all that has been said under consideration and get back to them shortly. That is, after all, what judges do before passing a verdict, so why can’t we?

So, forget the rush, there is usually plenty more time than you think to resolve issues. Pausing to fact find and understand, provides a way to shift from making decisions based on automatic reactions. The pressure to quickly do something to address the problem may provide relief but it may not address the underlying problem. Even if you are forced into providing some kind of band-aid solution, don’t let it stop you there. Keep digging until you are satisfied that you now know what you didn’t know. You may be surprised at what you find out. We owe it to our children and ourselves to discover what we don’t know, we don’t know.

NIKKI BUSH

Creative parenting expert, inspirational speaker and co-author of Future-proof Your Child (Penguin, 2008), and Easy Answers to Awkward Questions (Metz Press, 2009)

nikki@brightideasoutfit.co.za

http://www.brightideasoutfit.com/





Parenting Matters / May 2011