Interact Respectfully

This broad Guiding Principle gets at the heart of supportive, effective ways to engage with your child, your world in general and yourself. It is born of the key insight that children and adults are fundamentally the same, that each of us wants to be seen and valued for whom we are. That kind of deep appreciation implies reciprocal respect and communication that is open, kind and truthful. Drawing these notions together suggests trying to interact with others in ways that are respectful and honest and trying to act with integrity in daily life.

The word integrity has a number of meanings, each very relevant. It implies things like honesty, decency and a good character, which is probably the first sense that comes to mind in this context. Notice though, it also carries the meaning of stability and soundness, both of structural sturdiness and well-reasoned thinking. In this way, integrity implies helping your child build strength of character and strength of thought, as well as bolstering these qualities in yourself. A third meaning of integrity suggests unity, wholeness or togetherness, bringing to mind the interconnectedness of parent and child, of individuals and society and of people and their planet. Thus, it is actually a very powerful word that encompasses many important features.

Two of the qualities parents generally want their children to have are respect and honesty. If anything, the desire for these seems to grow as children grow, becoming vitally important during the teen years. It’s hard to imagine a good relationship between parent and child without them. And of course, these qualities also support general well-being and help children find a healthy place in the social world.

One sense of respect is that you probably want your child to respect you. You certainly can’t parent effectively if your child doesn’t. Your child needs to see you as a loving guide, invested with responsibility and authority, whom he can truly trust. So of course, one facet of respect is children’s recognizing and accepting the well intentioned authority of parents, teachers and others who provide care, guidance and support. But there is a much broader meaning as well. Respect spreads to having consideration for the needs, feelings and property of all. It extends to caring for the planet with all its resources. It also implies self-respect. Respect for oneself leads children and adults to choose safe activities, to protect themselves from abuse of all kinds and to comfortably love and care for themselves.

A companion quality is truthfulness. Parents need to know their child will be honest and open about events and feelings, just as a child wants to know he can trust his parents to be truthful. No meaningful guidance or successful solutions to challenges can exist when reality is obscured by lies. No loving relationship between two people is possible when it is shrouded by deception. The fear and confusion that underpin dishonesty cause suffering for everyone. In a broader sense, honesty suggests acting with fairness and decency as well as truthfulness. Acting untruthfully, or without integrity, leads to anxiety, stress and defensiveness. It is actually a major source of stress for children and teens. Even young children feel nervous, sick at the stomach or concerned when they conceal the truth. It also leaves them unable to get help managing the problem they lied about in the first place. In contrast, acting with integrity, or simply telling the truth, opens the way for a child to learn solutions to problems and to learn to make amends. Together, acting with integrity and interacting with honesty and respect lead to a sense of peacefulness, openness and lightness. This has been wonderfully described as the “bliss of blameless.” It simply feels good to act with integrity.

You can guide your child to act with respect and honesty if you interact with respect and honesty, both with your child and with your world more broadly. In this way you become a role model, but you also create an atmosphere in your home that rests on these notions. This is the essence of the second guiding principle.

These ideas are lofty. They basically rely on staying connected to the truth, not concealing nor exaggerating, and to consciously guiding yourself to interact without deception and without reacting thoughtlessly. Open communication is partly expressing supportive honest thoughts. The other part is listening with an open mind and open heart.

The material below offers some very concrete suggestions for using this guiding principle.

Try to say what is true

You build a trusting relationship with your child by kindly and comfortably saying what is true, beginning when your child is tiny.

Here are some examples

• When your child does something you don’t like, tell her, but do so kindly. Think about how you would like to be told. Rather than shaming, yelling or creating an environment that makes your child want to hide or lie to avoid you, create a space that is non-threatening. Say what you feel and suggest ways for her to act differently in the future. Even better, help her think of better future strategies herself. You may want to make it a practice in your family to reflect on unskillful actions. Teach your child to think, “What can I learn from this that will help me do things in a better way next time?”
  • Feeling badly or guilty about something builds a useful moral compass, but wallowing in guilt does not.
  • Starting from where you are and moving forward develops inner strength and reduces stress and anxiety.
  • Development begins wherever your child is at the moment.
• When your child does something you do like, tell him. Try to notice good efforts and acts and when you do, comment on them openly and truthfully. Kindly expressing approval or gratitude is very powerful and does much more to support a child than do comments about shortcomings. Say things such as, “I saw you emptied the dishwasher. Thank you.” Or, “You’re working really hard on your spelling. Do you want to test me on the words?” (Notice the fun twist — your child gets to test you. You can make a few mistakes for him to catch). Or, “Wow did you make your bed? High fives.”
• If your child asks your opinion, be truthful. You can say you like a drawing without saying it’s a masterpiece; or say that a ball was thrown “pretty good,” without saying a wobbly toss would score a game-winning point. Children generally know when they’ve done something well.
  • If you tell them everything they do is outstanding, you leave no place for growth and your child will lose faith in your opinion.

It’s important to understand that in our society, we talk a lot about bolstering self esteem by noticing and praising accomplishments. In fact, it is actually much more supportive to notice and compliment effort than outcome. For example, rather than always praising victories and successes, you might say: “I saw you serving balls over and over yesterday before that great game you had,” or “You really studied hard for that test,” or “I love hearing you practicing that piece you’re performing in the recital.”

• Try not to promise something that cannot be delivered. Even if you offer a bribe, be sure to follow through. If you say you’ll give your child an ice cream cone if he stops fussing and puts on his shoes, be sure to deliver on the ice cream cone. It’s more important than your realizing it wasn’t a great idea to offer a bribe in the first place.
• Don’t hide your own bad mood or negative feelings. Parents are human and much as we’d like to be patient, open, kind and happy all the time, we aren’t. If you’re feeling down or troubled, say so. Simply say, “I’m not feeling very well today” or “I feel stressed today” or “I’m worn out and I’m sure snapping a lot.”When you’re honest about your moods and feelings, you do several things for your child.
  • You’re living authentically, so your child realizes that going through different moods is normal.
  • You open the way for your child to offer you kindness, or when old enough, to be helpful and empathetic.
  • You give your child a context for understanding your behavior. If you realize you’ve snapped or yelled or withdrawn or done something else to dump your frustration, tell your child you’re sorry and then move on. In doing this you are showing your child how to accept responsibility and be truthful.
• When you’re feeling happy and peaceful or content say so. We are often advised to express our down feelings. We rarely think to express positive ones. Of course your child will sense lightness and happiness in the atmosphere, but by saying we’re happy today or feel good today, we draw attention to positive inner feelings. Noticing and proclaiming these pleasant states can incline us to them and raise them in our consciousness.
  • Think about this: if we only announce our bad moods, then that is what we focus on and enhance. It teaches children to notice the negative. It also leads children to use negative feelings as excuses for poor behavior or laziness. Conversely, expressing good moods draws awareness to them and can make positive feelings more frequent.
• Be truthful about difficult situations. If a family member is ill or a parent loses her job or a neighbor hits a dog in the road, don’t conceal the truth. These events are already present for your child. State facts simply and honestly. Young children don’t usually want much information. Older children will ask questions until they have the amount of information they can handle.Your child learns to speak and act honestly and with integrity by hearing and observing integrity at home. Together, you and your child forge a secure honest relationship with one another that supports your ability to parent wisely. Being truthful is one of the ways we act with respect toward one another.

Listen with openness

Interactions are reciprocal. Between parent and child they begin in the earliest weeks with a gentle dance of connection in which a tiny infant and its parent gently engage and disengage with one another, gazing into each others eyes, touching and soon exchanging smiles. This beautiful universal interchange grows quickly into a close bond that broadens to include language and communication of many sorts. As transactions become increasingly verbal, they can fall prey to a kind of partial attention or even inattention.

If you observe people interacting with one another, or reflect on your own interaction styles, you will notice people often only half-listen to what others are saying. The listener’s mind may wonder or may focus on what they would like to say next, rather than what the speaker is saying now. We enjoy being around people who actually seem to hear us, who ask relevant questions, who invite us to elaborate, who don’t always assume they know just how we feel.

Speaking truthfully has a complementary behavior: listening openly. By that I mean attending with an open mind and trying to hear what the other is truly saying. In the normal course of daily life there is a fairly continuous stream of language, casual exchanges that keep people connected. Young children are notorious for keeping up a seemingly endless string of comments and we easily, and perfectly reasonably, respond with a pattern of “Uh-hmm,” “He did?” “That’s nice,” and so on. Teens are sometimes notorious for the other extreme, holding things inside or sharing thoughts with friends rather than parents. The idea of listening with openness refers to the times when your child is actually trying to tell you something or is sharing thoughts and events with you. We sense when these more significant interactions appear. I am suggesting here that you notice these shifts more consciously and when they occur, make a point of paying attention. Suspend preconceived notions and make an effort to hear what your child is trying to say. Sometimes this may mean stopping what you are doing for a few minutes to focus. Find out what is important, find out how your child interprets things and feels about things. Try to listen with curiosity and hear your child clearly. In doing this, you learn how your child feels and understands. You also create a relationship in which your child knows he can express things to you, and you demonstrate the skill and importance of listening attentively and openly to others.

Listening openly, trying to hear the other’s truth, is another aspect of reciprocal respect and is the natural partner of speaking truthfully.

Acting with respect and expecting respect

Respect means sensing and valuing the worth of someone, or even some thing, such as the planet or personal property. Respect is an attitude of appreciation. It is a sense that someone or some thing matters. It opens the mind, releasing preconceived ideas about how someone should act or look. The Latin root for this word is re spectrum, meaning to look again or to look more carefully. To respect someone means to take the time to get to know someone, to look more carefully, to watch as they reveal themselves and their many qualities. Implicit in this meaning of respect is being open to accepting what is there, rather than looking for things you’d like to be there. When we dream of a child-to-be, we have a mixture of thoughts – sometimes we wonder what our child will be like, other times we imagine the personality, skills, and features we’d like our child to have. If you let go of this latter image, you can better see who a child is. This letting go underlies respect. In this sense, respecting means coming to know and honor the inherent strengths and interests of yourself and your child. When you respect someone or some thing, you value it. When you value someone or some thing, you take care of it. Therein is the importance of respect.

Some key outcomes from acting with respect

If you recognize and nurture the good qualities in your child, and in yourself, these qualities will grow and endure.

• When you respect your child, you show your child how to respect you. If your child respects you, he or she will be much more able appreciate, accept and value your support and opinions.
• When you respect your child, you teach your child she or he is worthy of respect; both respect from others and self-respect.
• When a person has self-respect, he or she cares for and protects both body and mind. Self-respect is a natural defense against abuse (physical, emotional and substance-abuse) and of being treated disrespectfully.
• When a child is treated with respect, he or she extends respect to others and to the world more broadly. Someone who was taught to “look carefully,” as in the root meaning of respect, looks and finds value in others.

Act with respect—don’t surrender authority

Respecting your child does not mean giving up your authority. You are the parent and obviously you have more information, experience, knowledge and understanding than your child has. It is useful to recall the image that you and your child are traveling along the same broad path, but that you are farther ahead. We have come a long and healthy way in our society from the old standard that children are to be seen and not heard, to a new view that gives space for children to explore views and express opinions. It is very helpful to remember though, that children need and want guidance. Respecting your child doesn’t mean letting your child decide everything for himself any more than you would let your child do everything for himself. Your child would fail miserably.
It is actually terrifying for children and teens to feel they are in a situation where no one is in charge, where no one is protecting them. Moreover, if children cannot trust their parents to help them and guide them through challenges and difficult situations, they become disconnected from their parents. So respecting your child actually means that you have the courage to act as a loving authority, handing over responsibility gradually.