Children don’t listen to their parents, but they never fail to imitate them.

I recently spoke with Regina Pally, M.D., Co-Founder and Assistant Director of the Center for Reflective Parenting about how and where children learn to do what they do and beyond that to where they get their sense of security or insecurity.

Goulston: Regina, how and where do kids learn to do what they do?

Pally: Childhood is so much about learning. Kid’s brains are literally sponges for soaking up new information. But HOW they learn can often surprise and frustrate parents. Kids are phenomenal imitators. They are keen observers of what people are doing, and they are excellent at copying it. And in fact it turns out children learn much more by imitation than they do by instruction.

The easiest example of this that people can relate to is learning how to speak. Kids just pick it up. You don’t have to teach them vocabulary or grammar; They just absorb by imitation, the language they are exposed to.

So when it comes to learning other behaviors it is not much different. As imitators they are more likely to do what they observe than what they are taught. When parents say do what I say not what I do, it is a recipe for failure. Because kids do what the adults around them do, particularly their parents. It is a kind of osmosis so to speak, in which they soak in and internalize what others they care about are doing.

 This is the main way they learn how it is they are supposed “be” in the world- what the rules are at home, and at school, how they are supposed to get along with other people, and also how they are supposed to control their behaviors and how they are supposed to control and express their feelings, and even things like how they are supposed to work hard for what they want.

Goulston: So telling your kids what to do is not as effective as many parents would hope?

Pally: Parents should keep in mind its more ‘Do what I Do’, and less ‘do what I say’. And when I say Do, what I mean is how parents behave toward their child as well as with other people. Do they get easily frustrated with their child and impulsively lash out with hostility. Are they patient and listen carefully to what their child is feeling? Do they impose their power over the child or do they allow the child some autonomy in making decisions.

As much as parents wish they could teach kids how to behave simply by instruction….’Now listen to me young man, you can’t just go around the house yelling you have to think about other people in this house too.’…more often than not they will be more successful in getting their children to learn these important lessons by how they behave themselves.

Goulston: Can you give some specific examples?

Pally: If Dad does a lot of yelling himself, and gets easily frustrated when he does not get his way, it’s no surprise if his child acts that way. If Mom gets hyper-anxious when her child is frustrated or disappointed, the child will get hyper-anxious as well in the face of these strong emotions. A mom who is able to be a little calmer will be more likely to be able to help her child internalize calmness in the face of frustration and disappointment. I am not saying that parents have to do this perfectly. But when parents misbehave in ways they don’t want their kids to misbehave, I encourage them to at least be honest and apologize…because that is after all how they want their children to act when the child misbehaves.

Goulston:  That’s a good point about children imitating either parent, especially how that parent reacts to upsetting situations. I also remember from my psychiatric training how destructive it can be to a child’s development to live in a highly conflicted household. What are your thoughts about that?

Pally: You’re right about that.  Children learn how to act and react and even what to feel from watching what their parents do. And this can be particularly important when kids are watching how their parents handle conflict with each other.  Not only are they learning but it also affects their sense of well-being.

Goulston: What happens when a young child watches their mother and father having a difference of opinion and it escalates to a disagreement, an argument or worse (with either leveling hyperbole, screams, sullenness, “you never’s” and “you always” at each other)?

Pally: Kids in families with this kind of tension and unresolved conflict, feel anxious and insecure but end up learning this is how to deal with conflict.  These kids can then pass on to their kids this tendency to go from purely rational to explosively emotional within seconds.

Goulston: Can you describe what parents who deal with conflict act like?

Pally: A good example of healthy parents are those who respect and treat respectfully the differences in their spouse. And when they do have conflict and the emotions flare, they are able to finally talk it through and make sense of each other’s point of view.  Then they can see how reason (not to be confused with coldly, disdainfully and dismissively delivered logic) and emotion cooperate. This way that child is internalizing and then hard wiring into their brain how their own thinking and talking things through and their emotion will cooperate with each other. This is what some people would call the left brain and right brain working together in an integrated fashion.

Another example is a couple who shows mutual respect and valuing of their differences by suggesting their child go to their spouse if the other can provide what that child needs most. For example a father who is better at solutions than emotional comfort might say to an upset child, “I can see that what you want and need most now is someone to make you feel less upset and feel better.  Your mom is terrific at that.  Go talk to her to help you feel better.”  And alternatively, the mother who may be better at comforting than solutions might say to a child who needs a plan, “You know, your dad is terrific at figuring a way to deal with the situation and help you come up with what you should say or do to make it better.  Go to him and he’ll be great at helping you figure that out.”

When a young child sees parents respecting, appreciating and utilizing the different strengths in each other instead of shaming the child if they need something that each parent is bad at, it fosters a sense of security within the child.   Following that they will internalize it and turn to it unconsciously during times of conflict in their later life and know that things will turn out and that differences don’t make you wrong.  They just make you different.

Goulston: You’re preaching to the choir.  What about parents who think this is a bunch of hooey and then talk about how their parents argued and it wasn’t so bad?

Pally: Show me a parent who thinks this is a bunch of hooey and I’ll show you a parent who would rather be right than make a situation better.  And you’re right, those are the people we need to be speaking to.

Goulston: I don’t know if this would make the point, but many years ago during my training I remembered hearing about a study conducted at a psychoanalytic child study center in Philadelphia in which parents were interviewed and the researchers made some correlations between what the parents said and their disturbed children’s behavior in the playroom.  Since it was a psychoanalytically oriented center they asked parents about their dreams which the parents hadn’t told anyone about.  To their amazement they then discovered that some of these parents’ children were acting out the dreams in their play.  So if a parent had a dream about a plane crashing, their child was crashing planes in the play room.  What do you think that means?

Pally:  It means your children are always watching you and taking in not just what you say and do, but what you feel.  Kind of makes the hairs on your neck stand up, but it doesn’t surprise me. I can’t explain how it works, but we know kids feel and intuit somehow, even things that parents are completely unaware of feeling.

Goulston: And the takeaway from that?

Pally: If you want your children to feel good about themselves and life from their inside out, get yourself better from your inside out… and learn to handle conflict better.

Goulston: Thank you for helping us better understand how parents can raise their children be secure in anxious times by turning a conflicted home into a more loving one.

Pally: My pleasure, thank you. Maybe that’s why we used to refer to it as “home sweet home.”

Goulston: Amen.

Shortly after 9/11 I was asked to speak or rather calm down a group of service professionals and offer words of reassurance.  Something I had learned from >30 years as a psychotherapist turned Fortune 500 executive coach when helping people to calm down is that it is much less important what you tell others than what you enable them to tell you and in the process tell themselves that results in them calming themselves down.  When you do the latter, people vent, then exhale, then relax and are then more open to engaging with you to discuss their options.

Therefore when I met with this group of 30 tense individuals that included bankers, lawyers, insurance brokers, accountants, real estate agents and others, I asked each person to take two minutes to tell the story of a time in their life that they never thought they’d get through, but did and became the stronger and wiser for it.

One by one each attendee spoke about a very tough time for them.  One of the most memorable stories for me was when a very civil female CPA who because of her being so well mannered was seen as “lightweight” calmly told about how on the day she graduated college and was about to be able to start paying back her sizable loans, she was given total custody of her 12 year old brother.  She wasn’t impressed by it, but you could see the room collectively realize what a “heavyweight” solid person she was.

An equally memorable story came from a very smart and very dry humored criminal defense attorney, not known for showing much emotion or vulnerability.  He told us how his last child had been born very premature and how each day he would visit the intensive care unit and sit by her and reach in to touch her hand.  He then started to choke up – as did the entire room – when he said that when his daughter would grab onto his baby finger with all the tenacity of a little living thing fighting for life, he told himself that if she could be that strong, so could he.

Interestingly, after everyone finished their stories, everyone in the room had a >90 % recall of what the others had said, whereas that group would be hard pressed to remember what each other did professionally despite meeting every month for years.

The most important outcome of that meeting was a collective emotional exhale, deep bonding and a true belief that all of us were strong and would make it through.  Furthermore, in that collective exhale, people felt bonded by both their vulnerabilities and strengths.  Being alone with negative emotions nearly always makes them worse.  Being alone with fear can rapidly turn into panic; being alone with frustration can rapidly turn into anger; being alone with disappointment can rapid turn into discouragement and even worse, despair.  Being open with others by sharing stories of what I refer to as the “road back from hell” can prevent a bad situation becoming worse.

If you want to calm the fears of others around you and you, yourself, have everyone share such a story of making it through a difficult time that they didn’t think they would.  Build upon those stories by having people deconstruct what were the key components that they can now use to help them through their current fears.

What would also help the experience is for people to share the name of someone they’re grateful to that helped them through that time and what that person did.  There is something calming and emotionally restoring when you focus on gratitude for a known deed that helped you, instead of fear of the unknown.

Doing this exercise can help restore a sense of calm and re-center you and the people around you.

* During the funeral procession of FDR, one man was overcome with emotion.  The man next to him said, “You’re so overcome with emotion, did you know President Roosevelt?”  The first man replied, “No, but he knew me.”  Isn’t that something we could all use from our elected officials?

Anxiety is the state of having your brain, mind and behavior
– and as you get older your values –
be out of alignment with the task in front of you

Consider someone in their early forties or older who has a, b and c skills that have earned them a living. Skills that they do masterfully and nearly automatically and ones they now need to replace with something altogether new.

A few years ago I worked with the controllers of a large international bank that was beginning to outsource many of their functions overseas. Many of these people were CPA’s and MBA’s who hadn’t thought strategically in decades and now had to think that way, because all the auditing and actuarial functions they had been doing could be done less expensively abroad. Their brains, minds and behaviors as auditors were completely out of alignment with thinking strategically.

And then there was the case of a large insurance company whose independently owned franchisees had been selling auto, home, property and casualty coverage (i.e. protection from risk) that had been told to sell (risky and complicated) financial instruments.

In both cases, the push back was enormous. The list of explanations and excuses from the bank and the insurance company was long and extensive. The bank controllers claimed that services coming from India would upset clients and the small insurance office owners claimed that selling financially risky products would turn everything they did for their customers upside down.

Every counter explanation of the need to move forward to the new platforms and new offerings was met with, “Yes, but.” And every “Yes, but” was clearly fueled by anxiety.

The only thing that eliminated that anxiety was listening. When managers were trained on how to listen without an agenda and instead keep asking out of genuine concern “what’s really going on?” the resistant controllers at the bank and mom and pop insurance franchise owners opened up and revealed it.

In the cases of the controllers and insurance office owners, both were embarrassed to admit that they had become so comfortable doing what they did — that was no longer sufficient to be competitive — that they hadn’t learned anything of this scale in decades. The controllers hadn’t thought strategically in many years and the insurance agents had never sold financially risky products. Both groups were scared that they couldn’t learn new things and felt too embarrassed to admit that they felt too stupid to do so.

However, once they both owned up to this, they exhaled and breathed a huge sign of relief and were able to get this humiliating weight off their chest. An interesting thing occurs after people are able to talk from what they’re really scared, ashamed or frightened about and feel not just understood, but — as I write about in my new book, “Just Listen” — “feel felt.” At that moment not only do they physically relax, but it is as if their brain relaxes and as if the three parts of their brain (the “fight or flight” lower reptile, the emotional middle mammalian, the rational upper human brain) relax the way they are bonded/neurologically welded together and can realign with each other in a way more aligned with the present situation. Nearly every break though that most people have had with another person is preceded by their stopping talking over or at each other, beginning to truly listen and hear the other person and then begin talking with each other. It’s only after that point that they realize they had misunderstood (i.e. their brains, minds and behaviors had been misaligned) each other.

After that it was easy to point out to them that they had each learned many new thinks with regard to technology, with regard to new rules and regulations and with regard to new sales approaches and that learning these larger items — which they could do in a step by step fashion — would utilize the skills and abilities to learn that they already had.

The second thing that eliminated their anxiety was their learning to listen more deeply to their clients and customers and find out what was really on their minds, much as their managers had just listened to them. That enabled them to stop being so self-absorbed and do the thing that makes any service or sales person more successful, which is to stop selling and instead listen to what is truly on your client or customer’s mind and help them with that.

***

Catch Mark on October 7, 5 PM PDT on “This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis”

Sign up to see Mark speak live, October 7, 5:30-8:30 PM at the Professional Mentors and Coaches Association in Santa Monica, CA

If the above speaks to you and you were listening and would like to pick up some tips on how to do that better and more effectively, please visit the Just Listen website and sign up for the exclusive FREE RESOURCES..

Also if you’re a working mom and anxious and would like to find out how to become less anxious and even happier, you’ll want to check out my good friend, Cathy Greenberg‘s great new book, What Happy Working Mothers Know. I was pleased to have contributed to the large body of research Cathy used to write this cutting edge book.

When you can’t say, “Yes,”
because you don’t have anything left to give;

When you can’t ask for help,
because you can’t hear someone give another excuse for why they can’t
and because you wouldn’t know what to ask for anyway;

When you deal with the above by withdrawing
and becoming sullen and irritable with your family;

AND when the cycle repeats itself daily
and every day is Groundhog Day;

YOU are depressed.

If this speaks to you, what do you do? If’s it’s about someone you care about, how have you helped them?

Read More at: Are You Anxious or Depressed?

Depression and Suicide see: “I’m going to kill myself”

Don’t isolate, reach out and share your hurt and what you’re doing about it at: Are You Depressed

Resources for Depression:

NIMH
WebMD
NAMI
Mayo Clinic
Wikipedia

Nervous breakdowns come in twos. A first trauma causes the first one and leads you to feel utterly defenseless. When as sure as you thought you were is as wrong as you turn out to be, it can cause you to doubt all your past decisions and any upcoming ones, at which point you are frozen in limbo.

When you’re in such a state of feeling exposed and at risk, you live with the constant fear of being re-traumatized. You think that if the first trauma caused a severe crack in the porcelain of your well-being (that you turn away from your public face, lest others see), a second one will shatter you completely and you will never recover.

This is what PTSD victims, many concentration camp survivors, rape victims, financial collapse, and prolonged unemployment have in common. All of these traumas introduce you to an extreme vulnerability that on bad days you can barely live with. The world may think you got over those traumas, but the secret you keep inside is that you never did; you merely got past them.

All subsequent behaviors following such traumas — from social withdrawal to excessive alcohol/drug/prescription abuse to moodiness and irritability (when pushed to do something you don’t want to do) to rage (when cornered or provoked) to suicide — can be viewed as an effort to avoid re-traumatization at all costs.

Treatments from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (re-evaluating your thinking and perceptions in light of reality) to interpersonal therapy (helping you stay involved in relationships and more effective in them) to biological (from anti-anxiety, to anti-depressant to anti-psychotic meds) and other modalities are an effort to intervene with people living in this psychological abyss and help them manage their emotion and land back on the track back to a functional life.

Sometimes one step in the right direction is to talk and walk a traumatized person back from the edge, as for example recently happened when I spoke with a financially ruined person teetering on the brink of psychologically falling apart (and something you might try with a traumatized person you know

Dr G: How big a trauma has losing all this money been?

Client: Big.

Dr. G: How big?

Client (now beginning to cry with upset and relief): I can’t even think about it.

Dr. G: What does it make you want to do?

Client: I don’t know. I guess, just hide. (He then continues to speak about this for several minutes).

Dr. G: How well do you think you could handle another trauma with your wife, children, parents, health?

Client (looking at me incredulously): Are you nuts? I couldn’t.

Dr. G: What do you think you’d do?

Client: I couldn’t even imagine. (He continues to speak about this for several minutes).

Dr. G: So, you’re as scared as you’ve ever been.

Client: More than I’ve ever been.

Dr. G: Tell me about another time in your life that you never thought you’d get through, but that you did.

Client: I remember when my dad abused everyone and he got so angry I thought he was going to kill someone… (He continues to speak about this for several minutes)

Dr. G: Yes that. Tell me about that incident, how you never thought you’d make it through and how you did.

Client (continuing to talk at length)

As the client began to talk and answer these questions and tell the story (of another trauma he made it through) he visibly calmed and realized he’d survived bad times in his life before. As he continued to relax, he became more open to talk about his options in his current crisis.

For more information check out my book, PTSD for Dummies.