Parenting: Why normalising can protect our children from future shame

 

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.