Note: This post originally appeared on Gary's School Leader blog.
As regular readers know, my wife and I have a new baby, our second child, born just two weeks ago. Our daughter Lydia is two and a half, and has had some inevitable adjustment issues. Working through some of that has given me some new insights, not just on parenting, but on the work of education as well.
Specifically, we probably rushed our daughter's transition to the big girl bed, giving her just a couple of weeks to adjust to a new bedroom and new bed (and the freedom to get out of it) before her little brother arrived and added even more changes. Now, when we most need to maximize our sleep to deal with the infant's nighttime feedings, Lydia is having an enormously difficult time going to bed. She gets up multiple times, and we've tried a kind of Ferber method of just returning her to the bed over and over again, to no avail, until finally she works herself into an emotional frenzy and we have no choice but to comfort her until she falls asleep in exhaustion, often at 10 p.m. or later. Then, she's always awake at 6 a.m., grouchy and restless for the entire day.
It isn't working, and so last night I turned to a website that has become a great resource for me in recent months. I discovered Dr. Laura Markham's Aha Parenting website via Twitter connections and have been impressed and inspired by her recommendations and insights. Dr. Markham, who is a child psychologist, suggests that toddlers need lots of reassurance when making an enormous transition like moving to a big bed. She recommends that parents stay in the room with their child until she falls asleep, reading or listen to an iPod, gradually moving farther away from the child and eventually leaving the room for longer periods of time until she is successfully falling asleep on her own.
This could take many nights, even weeks, but I'm willing to try it because our current method is failing and we're all emotional wrecks by the time our daughter falls asleep. And Dr. Markham's approach intuitively makes sense to me.
Markham is an advocate of "empathic" parenting, an approach that emphasizes continual emotional availability to your children. While to the uninitiated this may sound like indulging a child's every whim, it actually means setting normal limits and structures, but empathetically assisting her through the frustrations and disappointments that come with discovering one is not, in fact, the center of the universe. Markham argues that a child's emotional outbursts reflect her feelings of being overwhelmed and insecure, and she needs loving support to negotiate those powerful feelings.
I was skeptical of some of this at first. Our daughter is very bright and capable of emotional manipulation. It seems sometimes she just wants power (but don't we all?). Despite my reservations, I've tried Dr. Markham's approach when Lydia has temper tantrums. I express my support for her, giving voice to her frustrations, and offer hugs and a gentle voice, while maintaining whatever limit that has given rise to her anger. The vast majority of the time, I'm able to short-circuit the tantrum or at least minimize its intensity. This gives me hope for using Dr. Markham's approach to helping her learn to sleep.
When I reflect deeply, we adults have tantrums too, though they often take different forms than a child's. And in every case, our adult acting out is a reflection of our fear, anxiety, frustration, anger, and general sense of being overwhelmed. When we find ourselves in these places, it won't help us if the people we love ignore us or tell us to get over ourselves. In fact, it will make our loneliness and frustration even worse. We need the love, support, encouragement, and above all the presence of others in these times of upsetting emotion.
Reflecting back on my years as an educator, I can see other times when just this kind of strategy helped students who were acting out. I spent several years as principal of an alternative school for at-risk high school children with severe academic and behavioral problems. Frequently I found the best way to diffuse an upset student was simply to listen and be present, suspending the judgment and authority that naturally came with my role, and trying to help give voice to what they were feeling. This didn't always work out well. Frequently the student would still refuse to accept responsibility for his behaviors, but this was probably due, in part, to my own lack of skill and experience in using this method as well as the enormous emotional wounds these particular children had accrued in their 14-18 years of life. In retrospect, I wish I had used more empathy in my dealings with these students rather than the law and order approach that was my go-to strategy.
These days I spend my professional time training teachers to become effective school administrators. And in this realm, it seems the philosophy of empathetic listening has great potential as well. Especially in this era of high-stakes school reform, many school leaders feel compelled to "lay down the law" in an effort to improve teaching performance, and the emotional dimension of teaching and administration is ignored or stifled. (The resurrection of a more humane approach to school administration provides the foundation of our work with contemplative leadership).
Certainly, adults need structures and limits, just as children do. They need goals for improvement and high expectations for performance. But effective leaders are keenly aware of the intense emotional component of life - and of work - and they abide with their teams through those difficult emotional passages, offering encouragement, support, and above all an open, listening heart that allows people to feel and express the full range of their experiences. Abiding with others in this way offers far more promise for meaningful school improvement than the heroic leader who, like the sheriff of the old West, rounds up the bad guys and saves the day through the stoic implementation of force.
So I think there are lots of implications to the use of empathy in our work, and I look forward to exploring this topic more in the future. But right now my main focus is on helping my little one negotiate the emotional mountain of sleeping in a big girl bed. I'll keep you posted on how it turns out. Right after I get a nap.
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