Much of what we feel comfortable
talking about stems from our home environment.
What was allowed and what wasn’t. Parts of our bodies smell bad sometimes, it
is normal and part of being human. But
what if, when we start to talk about the weird smell, we immediately get shut
down “no more of that talk please” or “that’s private and not something you
share.” Many of these comments are made
from a place of good intention, we want our children to follow the social norms
of whatever culture we live in. But when
our children voice valid experiences and these valid experiences are hushed up
or ignored this creates feelings of shame and isolation. If our body smells bad and we can’t talk
about it we have no way of knowing that everyone’s body smells bad from time to
time. If on the other hand we take a
normalisation approach and say something like “tell me a bit more about it, my
body sometimes smells bad too” …. This normalisation massively reduces shame,
it shines an accepting bright light on the problem and basically says “me too”.
Brene Brown suggests that the
opposite of raising children full of shame is supporting them to recognise that
all of them – their bodies, their emotions, their relationship ups and downs -
are all normal. All part of being
human. And it is our job, as parents, to facilitate
the conversation “tell me more about it” and normalise the situation “it’s
hard, everyone struggles with that sometimes.”
Sometimes this is not so easy, particularly
with a teenager who answers “fine” to all our questions. While we all know this is developmentally appropriate
(we can normalise for ourselves too) it is hard to navigate. Remaining
calm and curious is probably the most helpful stance we can take. One lovely way of being curious is a
technique from Louise Bomber called Wondering Aloud. This generally involves three steps:
·
Noticing a change in our teen’s behaviour
·
Describing this change
·
Making a very tentative remark about why
your teen might be feeling this way
It might look something like …
“It looks like you had a pretty
tough day at school, it’s always hard to go back after the long summer break”
Sometimes you will be in the
right ball park and sometimes you wouldn’t, that’s OK. Even in those moments where you are way off
the mark your teen will still experience their struggle being seen and
recognised by you – even if this is not something they are able to acknowledge in
that moment.
Finally, we can use
ourselves. We can facilitate normalising
by normalising our own situation. We
can feel very grateful for the opportunities we have in our job and we can also
feel overwhelmed and not want to show up some days. We can feel grateful for
the opportunity to support a good friend through a tough time and we can feel exhausted
and frustrated about how much time it takes from our own family. Supporting our kids to know that we can feel
many things about one thing is so protective.
Our kids need permission to accept all parts of themselves – the mean
part, the kind part, the ambitious part, the lazy part, the smelly part. We do this by normalising. This does not mean they are not accountable
for their mean behaviour towards their friend, they are, but it does mean that
they recognise that making bad decisions and getting things wrong is normal and
part of being human.
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