“You just don’t understand!”
One of the most unique gifts of parenting is our ability to understand our children like no one else can. Why is it, then, that kids so often say, “You just don’t understand!” to their parents?
How did we go from understanding them completely in their younger years — their expressions, their sounds, their body language, their mumbled-jumbled first words — to them saying, “You just don’t understand?” Did we really stop understanding them at some point or do they just think that we did? What does the word “understand” really mean? In the world of parenting, I think the word “understand” is an adaptable one. The way we understand children depends on their age.
At their youngest (until they start talking around age 2), we need to understand all of their pre-verbal signals: body language, behaviors, sounds, and then early words. Parents can translate from these modalities into understanding needs, feelings, and perceptions. As the child enters toddlerhood, they are likely to express their needs and wants even more creatively!
Once they primarily use words to tell us what they want, need or feel, we start to rely more and more on these words. We also teach our children how to use words well in order to develop their expressions and their social and emotional skills. For example, “I am really mad at my friend, because she didn’t want to play with me today.” The parent then responds with comforting the child and telling her what to do to handle the issue in order to protect her. This phase of telling children “what to do” is a phase that lasts a number of years. In fact, one of the major challenges for parents is to move OUT of this phase! Of course, it springs from the need to protect and direct our children, but somehow we tend to get stuck here — ALWAYS TELLING OUR KIDS WHAT TO DO! In this protecting and directing of our children, we often forgot to listen to their thoughts and opinions causing a disconnect!
This is exactly what children mean when they say, “You just don’t understand!” They mean that we are disconnected with what they are thinking and feeling and trying to say. They feel that we are not listening to them and hence cannot relate to them. Furthermore, when we continue to tell our kids what to do, we disengage and deactivate their ability to make decisions, resolve issues, be resilient and self reliant–all of which hurts their self-confidence and self-esteem. In the short and long run, this is detrimental to both the future of our children and our relationship with them.Our role as parents is to empower our kids to be able to make decisions and to protect and direct themselves so that they can grow to be healthy teenagers and young adults. Our hope for them is to be good role models for themselves, their friends, their peers, and eventually their own children. We can do this by simply staying connected with them while we protect and direct them. Stay connected and support them by:
1. Listening to what they are trying to say.
2.Watching their expressions and body language and really “feeling” what they are feeling.
3. Encouraging them (kindly!) to resolve the issue on their own. For example, by asking, “What do you think you should do?”
This is how we can under-stand our kids instead of over-standing them. Under-standing our kids is supporting and empowering them by listening, learning, connecting, and helping them make decisions. Over-standing our kids is weakening and over-powering them by interrupting their thoughts and telling them what to do.
This is how we can empower our children so that they FEEL and KNOW that we do understand them! This is how we can empower ourselves to be true to our responsibilities as parents.
“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”
Albert Einstein
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