When Needs Appear to Conflict

"How can I provide the support and attention my three-year old needs from me and help him to be more independent at the same time?" is a question that many parents face. (See Aceiatx's question in comment #1 on CAN DOs Work for All Ages)

The short answer is:  Provide support and attention when it's OK with you, and model independence when it's not.

SWYS:     "You are done eating and want me to play with you right now, and I need 5 more minutes to eat. Waiting is hard for you."

CAN DO:   "Must be something you can do so I can finish eating on my own and come play with you."

The child can come up with something to do to make waiting more fun, or you can change when the child waits. For instance:

CAN DO:   "You can start eating after I do so that we finish at the same time."

Then after the child has shown patience or independence while you eat, point that out when you join him in play:

STRENGTH: "You played by yourself while Mommy was eating. That shows you are independent."

or

STRENGTH: "You waited for five minutes while Mommy was eating. That shows you have patience."

The trick here is setting your boundary of finishing your dinner and sticking to it. That is one way of modeling healthy independence that sends the message to your child that he is OK on his own for a while, too.

CAN DOs give you a way to meet your child's needs within your boundaries. Children have three basic needs: experience, connection and power. To know which CAN DOs will work, look for the need. Your biggest clue to the need is what the child is already doing. For instance, the goal of whining and demanding, even at a low level, is control. That points to a need for personal power and explains why support and attention may not be enough and why the Mommy-time children crave often gets pushed beyond connection toward control.

To give a child permission to experience his personal power, you have to give it to yourself first. This is big. The importance of clean, clear, feel-good-about-yourself-boundary setting should not be underestimated in raising kids to be able to do the same. 

Meanwhile, since self-control and self-determination are the root of all power in our lives (not control of others), that is the direction to go with your CAN DOs. You decide what you will do, and he can decide what he will do inside your boundaries until he is old enough to set boundaries for himself.

CAN DOs Work for All Ages

You don’t have to psychoanalyze your child to offer CAN DOs. Just ask yourself, “What else would work?”

For a young child breaking things, you might try: “You can build a block tower and knock it down,” “You can stomp some bubble-wrap,” “You can stomp on this shoe box or tear up this cardboard tube,” “You can flatten some cans.” You can probably think of many more depending on exactly what you see the child doing.

That’s why objectively SAYing WHAT YOU SEE is such a great place to start. When you say, “That came apart,” “You smashed that,” or “That made a loud sound,” the rest is much easier. You can state the boundary, “That’s not for breaking,” and add the CAN DO; or if the child already knows the boundary, go straight to the CAN DO.

CAN DOs arise from neutral observation. You simply try to match the child’s experience in a more acceptable way as in, “What can the child break that's OK with me?” Certainly it needs to be something that requires force. That alone tells us something about the need since force communicates, “I was here! I made something happen! I have power over my world!” Seeing the child’s perspective reveals the child’s need.

By putting yourself in the child’s place you can almost feel the need. The trick is often in giving yourself permission to feel it. The more you allow yourself to feel those childhood feelings, the better you will be at figuring out the “need.” If the CAN DO works, you got it; if it doesn’t, try again, or better yet, turn it over the the child with the empowering phrase, "Must be something you can do!"

When kids learn the CAN DO pattern, they come up with their own CAN DOs. When my niece was two, her mother had been bitten by a brown recluse spider and had gotten extremely sick, so the child was very afraid of spiders. Having learned the CAN DO pattern, when she saw a spider on the sidewalk she didn’t scream to crush it. Instead, she said, “Spider, you no bite my mommy. You can eat the grass!” By the age of five, she was still using CAN DOs naturally. When she saw me fussing at her dog who was digging in my garden, she came up and said, “Where can she dig?”

From these real life examples, it’s not too hard to imagine an elementary school child who wants to break something coming up with a CAN DO like, “I could build a balsa wood tower and crush it with my bare hands!” Just the thought of it might do the trick. If not, what a great project for a kid who feels he always has to be careful -- you don’t need to be careful with something you are going to break! Besides all the other great STRENGTHS you will see along the way as he constructs the tower, in the end when he crushes it and you see the satisfaction on his face, you can add the STRENGTH, “You found a healthy way to get your strong feelings out.”

CAN DOs apply to teens as well. I remember one mother's CAN DO for her 16 year-old son who had recently gotten his license. She had approved his plans for driving his date to a neighborhood restaurant then on to a school dance, but at the last minute he and his date were invited to join a group of friends at a different restaurant farther away. The problem was that it required him to drive on the interstate. He was sure he was ready, but Mom was not. She offered this CAN DO instead, “Dinner with friends sounds great. Must be some way you can eat with them without driving on the interstate. Hmmm... You can ask them to join you at the local restaurant or I can drive you to the other one.” Her son and his date rode in the back seat to join their friends at the restaurant on the interstate. Mom waited in the car reading a book, drove them home, and gave them the car to go on to the dance.

CAN DO opportunities are endless. What CAN DOs have you offered? What CAN DOs have your kids come up with for themselves?