It was like a title bout today in my office. Every once in a while I spend lunchtime with my daughter, one of the perks of working at the church where she has daycare. Most days that lunch is leftovers, but as I was rushing to get out of the door this morning, I realized that the only thing we had in the fridge was some rice and veggies. So that’s what she got.
Now don’t get me wrong, she usually is good about vegetables. She ate them pretty well today, at first. But then she got a mouthful of broccoli that she refused to swallow. Now, she had already downed several bites of broccoli so far today, but for some reason this was the broccoli that broke the camel’s back. She refused, and I pulled out every parenting trick in the book.
We started with the happy voice, mimicking the action of chewing and swallowing. Then there came the threats of a spanking. Then the actual spanking. Then we tried the lovey-dovey voice to get chewing out of sympathy. Then a time out. But she resisted at every turn, nothing I could say or do was getting through to her. By the end, she wouldn’t even look at me.
What worked was the classic “hide-the-yucky-food-in-something-good” trick, and we got the broccoli down with the help of some pears. But as we were in the middle of our twenty-minute ordeal over one bite I realized that we were approaching this situation from two opposite worlds with two opposite understandings and goals in mind. I think we do this a lot as grown ups in the way that we talk to people. We don’t try to put ourselves in their shoes, but we stubbornly push for what we want. Sometimes I think we need to step back from who we are and see things through the other person’s eyes, and then we will see more clearly what the issue really is, and often it’s no where close to what we really thought.
For more on communication issues, visit our OASIS service at 6:30 at Calvary
Now don’t get me wrong, she usually is good about vegetables. She ate them pretty well today, at first. But then she got a mouthful of broccoli that she refused to swallow. Now, she had already downed several bites of broccoli so far today, but for some reason this was the broccoli that broke the camel’s back. She refused, and I pulled out every parenting trick in the book.
We started with the happy voice, mimicking the action of chewing and swallowing. Then there came the threats of a spanking. Then the actual spanking. Then we tried the lovey-dovey voice to get chewing out of sympathy. Then a time out. But she resisted at every turn, nothing I could say or do was getting through to her. By the end, she wouldn’t even look at me.
What worked was the classic “hide-the-yucky-food-in-something-good” trick, and we got the broccoli down with the help of some pears. But as we were in the middle of our twenty-minute ordeal over one bite I realized that we were approaching this situation from two opposite worlds with two opposite understandings and goals in mind. I think we do this a lot as grown ups in the way that we talk to people. We don’t try to put ourselves in their shoes, but we stubbornly push for what we want. Sometimes I think we need to step back from who we are and see things through the other person’s eyes, and then we will see more clearly what the issue really is, and often it’s no where close to what we really thought.
For more on communication issues, visit our OASIS service at 6:30 at Calvary
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