Imagine your 4-year-old child returning home from kindergarten with a picture. Your child said that he made this picture, and as a sign of pride, you hung it on the refrigerator door together, so that your child can be proud to have his picture displayed in a visible corner of the house. In the following days, a group of her friends from kindergarten and their mothers came to you for a playgroup invitation you were hosting at your home. What is this! One of the children says that the picture on the refrigerator door belongs to him and wants it back. And the picture is indeed his! He did his painting at school diligently and then thought he had lost it. He was upset and cried a lot at school and at home. You felt ashamed and ashamed of this situation, and maybe, as a parent, you felt unsuccessful in being able to convey the correct values to your child in the face of this incorrect behavior. Maybe even deep down you felt angry at your child for causing this or thinking that he did not receive the education you gave him. As you can see, you can feel many different emotions about a situation. But how will you solve this problem? "This is a child. He doesn't know yet, he will learn over time."
"How can he embarrass me? Is this how I raised him?"
"How can he take possession of something that belongs to someone else? This is outright withholding, even Maybe theft." "Oh my God! Or am I not educating my child correctly?"
Many similar thoughts may accompany your emotions. However, rather than getting lost in emotions and thoughts, taking a step back and determining a routine that you can follow for every problem you encounter will yield much more permanent and qualified results in the long run. While developing a possible solution plan to the problem in this example, let's examine together a problem-solving routine that you can follow for almost any problem during your child's development process.
When you encounter a problem: :
1. Define the problem.
Try to understand what could be the cause of the problem. Understanding the reasons correctly allows you to develop the right solutions. When you approach the problem in this way, you protect yourself from being reactive and switch to responsive mode, which is a more pedagogical approach. Incidentally, reactive-responsive f We can also talk about the arc.
When you are reactive, you focus only on visible behavior. Since you do not try to see the underlying reasons and needs, your relationship with your child remains at a more superficial level. However, when you choose to be a responder, you focus on understanding the reasons and needs behind the apparent behavior. Thus, every step you take towards solving the problem with your child strengthens our relationship. You can set limits on his behavior, but you also understand the feeling and reflect to the child that he is understood.
The child in this example may have liked his friend's picture very much. He may have wished that he could have drawn the same picture himself. He may have wanted to see the light that would shine in your eyes when he heard that he had drawn this picture that he found wonderful. There may be many reasons. As you try to understand your child, it will become easier for you to see the real reason behind it and develop a solution for this reason.
2. Set the goal.
Desires and actual behaviors are not the same thing. You may desire something very much, but doing it is a whole different matter. Since we are social creatures, we think about the consequences and possible effects of our desires before putting them into action. This is exactly why we don't do everything we desire.
Understanding the difference between desire and reality is a developmental skill. Children learn this skill in social life with our help. The child in this example may not yet have made a clear distinction between what belongs to him and what belongs to someone else. Even though he is aware of the distinction, he may not have the maturity to filter his desires through reality. In this way, trying to understand the real cause will help you determine the right goal to solve the problem.
3. Find alternative solutions.
You have defined the problem and determined the possible causes, then determined the goal. At this stage you are clearly aware of what you are dealing with and what you are trying to solve. If so, you can start thinking of solutions.
Going back to our example, this child does not yet have the capacity to fully distinguish between fantasy and reality. Do So let's assume that you want to make him/her gain this awareness over time. In this case, your goal may be to teach your child the difference between desire and behavior and between fantasy and reality. In this way, you can achieve your goal of raising a virtuous person by preventing him from taking over someone else's property in this way.
Your goal is clear, but you may still be confused about how to achieve it. The key phrase here is “respond to the emotion and set limits on the behavior.” A sentence like this can help your child develop awareness of his feelings and desires. "I think you really liked that picture. You would love to draw a picture like that too. I understand you." You created the sentence that will raise awareness of the child's desire and accepted his feeling with compassion. "But do you know? If you like this picture very much, you can ask your friend to draw another one for you. Or we can sit down with you and draw a similar picture that you will like very much. Because I am aware that you liked the picture your friend drew very much and you wanted to have the same picture." At this stage, you made the child think of alternative solutions to realize his desire. Is it over, of course it is not over :) Now you have to convey your own moral family values to him as to why he cannot own someone else's things as he wishes. "Everyone has their own things. For example, do you remember the picture we made on your birthday? You made it, it belonged to you. Just like this, your friend's picture also belongs to him and truth is very valuable to us. Our family rule is to always tell the truth and not to touch other people's things." not to touch without permission.” Bingo, you made the child realize his desire, embraced his feelings with compassion, offered alternative solutions, and conveyed your family values about why he should never do this again. No embarrassment, no shaming, no punishment, just communication and trust.
4. Consider how these alternative solutions would work.
Think about these problem-solving steps you created. If you want your child to be an individual who can think about his own feelings and desires and organize his actions accordingly, you must be able to do this first. you are. What emotions did you experience since the moment you publicly learned that the picture was not his? What did you want to do in the first place? Did you want to embarrass him because he turned around and embarrassed you? Did you think about your family values and want to punish him immediately for fear that he would do wrong things in the future? Or did you want to say "this is a child, it will learn on its own over time" and ignore it?
5. Choose a solution to try.
Apply these steps above to each problem, one by one. You can also benefit from helpful children's books, games or digital content of age-appropriate duration and theme.
6. Evaluate the outcome and if the solution doesn't work, try something else. Based on the example mentioned here, we have determined the steps you can follow when your child has a problem. Applying these steps consistently every time will be a great gift you can give to your child. The way you approach problems will turn into the way he approaches his own problems over time. However, if you show an attitude that does not show up when faced with problems or quickly lashes out and spreads your emotions around, it will both weaken your relationship in the long run and make your child insufficient in problem-solving skills. For this reason, when you feel that your plan is not working, restart the process by thinking again about the possible causes of the problem. Your child needs to see a parent who is not wrong at all, but who is wrong just like him, but who makes an effort to find solutions to his mistakes.
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