BR 27: Arming Your Children With Life Tools For Tough Situations...

Hi everyone! This is Connie Sokol, and you're listening to Balance Redefined Radio. I've spent over 20 years teaching people how to redefine what balance really is, meaning a more purposeful and joyful life.

They’ve paid off credit cards, lost weight, organize their homes, and created a meaningful life plan and they've managed their time, changed habits and experience greater success both at work and at home.

So now I decided to take the plunge and help about 100,000 new people who want to redefine balance in their lives. People ask me all the time, “How do I go from an overwhelming and chaotic life to more purpose and organization and joy?”

That's the reason why I'm doing this podcast, to give you trusted answers and create a space where you could find balance. My name is Connie Sokol and welcome to Balance Redefined Radio…

Welcome back to Balance reDefined. I'm Connie Sokol, and I'm so excited for you to be with me today to learn some more great things about how to redefine your balance in daily life.

We're going to talk more about relationships today, particularly with your children, and I've had some things that have come up from women asking me how to deal with difficult situations with their children.

Not from the her and her children, but in the situation of having an ex-spouse and how you deal with helping your children go into an environment that's dysfunctional or negative and being able to help them be able to be prepared to deal with that or deal with it.

Well, when they're there - and this is a really tricky situation and it's not just for divorce situations - but when your children are going into an environment at school or an extracurricular activity.

They're in a negative environment or there's negative things happening that you can't really control as much as you'd like, and trying to arm them with coping skills and with things that they can do and use so that they're not just feeling like they have no choice.

They just walk into this war zone and there's nothing on them.

They're just vulnerable.

That's what I want to talk about today…

I got a text yesterday, and it's like texts that I received from other women. She basically said, “Oh, help me know how I can help my children when they're going to my ex-spouse. How can I help them be able to negotiate this dysfunctional environment that they're going into?”

I want to share some tips today on that - specifically because I think this is something that as parents we have to walk a very fine line of making sure we're not being negative about an ex-spouse, but also being able to be kindly, candid and factual about actual dysfunctional behaviors and situations that will be potentially emotionally damaging for them.

So as I'm speaking, just keep that in mind that what I'm talking about is not trying to make a negative impression of an ex-spouse or have a administrative person in a school situation or something like that. It's really focusing on your child and helping them to develop confidence and understanding of how they can move forward in a difficult situation.

So hopefully that makes sense. So the first thing that I shared with this friend - I shared several things - but the first thing I said is help them use their voice. This is so vital.

Children of all ages need to know that they have a sense of control about a situation that they're in, especially when children know that they have so little that they can control in any situation.

So they need to be able to use their voice, and in your home, make sure that that's something that is validated.

Now, you may not always like the thing that they use their voice for and as long as they're being respectful, that's okay. They can disagree with you. They can not want to do the thing that you want. They don't have to want to go clean the bathroom. That's fine.

Who wants to really do that on a daily basis? Right. However, the rule is that they have to be respectful in the way that they use their voice. So teach your children that whatever they do, it needs to be respectful and that they can ask questions.

So when something's happening and they are feeling confused or in limbo because they're not getting things explained, and they feel like something's being done to them or said to them and they can feel it in their soul, but they don't have that ability yet to define it or articulate it, help them to be able to use their voice, to define it.

To be able to say something like, I'm not comfortable with what's being said right now, or I'm not comfortable with what's being done right now. I don't feel safe with what you're saying to me, or I don't feel safe with what you're doing to me or what I feel is being done.

They can even as Find Out Questions. “I don't understand why you're saying these things about my mom.” And I've expressed to my friend that as her children are able to just ask genuine questions, it gives the ex-spouse an opportunity for choice.

It gives them an opportunity to choose are they going to tell the truth or are they going to spin a story or do something other than what is truth, and children are able to then get better at being able to ask a question and then feel out if something is true or not - not just during a situation and all of these feelings are swirling and they're trying to put context to it…

But that they've actually asked a specific question and now they can determine what this answer feels like to that specific question. And that's really important...

It's so vital that they have the ability to use their voice to say, “I am not comfortable with this. I don't feel safe.”

As they can use those phrases, that puts the other spouse or the administrator or the bully at school - it puts them on notice that a teacher can know now that I don't feel safe when I am in a group with this person.

And this is the reason why - if your child can say something like that to a teacher or administrator, that person can help your child more so than if they just say, “Oh my gosh, I just had this anxiety attack.”

Whenever I'm around someone like this person, they're able to be able to define it and say, “When this person talks to me, they say it in a tone like this, or they use words that are demeaning.”

And they may not know how to say the word demeaning, but they can say things like, “They use words that hurt my heart. They use words that make me feel bad about myself.” Ad they can say it in those phrases.

If you can teach your child to be able to be articulate in that way, according to their age, that will help them be able to use their voice to say something is not right. That's a great phrase as well. To go to a teacher, to go to a parent and say something doesn't feel right.

Something isn't right about what's happening. And as they're asked questions, “Tell me what that feels like,” and help them to define certain emotions - that will help them to be able to further define it for themselves.

I know my six year old, when he would go into a certain situation, I did little emotion faces on the wall because he would just have a meltdown, and I couldn't understand what it was specifically that was really stressing them out. I had a clear idea, and I had some ideas of my own, but I wanted to understand from him, so I helped him.

We drew some faces of different emotions, so we did sad and happy and confused and scared and mad and all of these different faces, and he drew the faces and drew the emotion and colored them in that would represent that.

This was very helpful for him when he was four and five that he could point to those pictures and he'd say, “I'm mad. I'm scared. I'm confused.”

And he was able to do that. In fact, it works so beautifully that one time he came back from a situation, and and he was just having a meltdown, and I was holding him and I said, “Talk to me, please. Tell me what it is you're feeling.”

And he was able to settle down enough and he said, “Mom, we forgot an emotion face. We forgot one.” And I said, “What is that?” And he said, “Overwhelming.” He said, “I feel overwhelmed.” That was beautiful.

That was a beautiful moment that he was able to add on a new emotion and knew it and could define it and knew exactly how that felt and what that meant so beautifully. We can help our kids use their voice and be able to articulate what's happening and also their feelings about it in an appropriate way.

The second thing is to identify dysfunctional behaviors. So say your child is my friend. Her child was going into this ex-spouse experience and into that environment. This ex-spouse was apparently, “I'm undermining the mother and also I'm speaking poorly about her.”

So it's good to identify dysfunctional behavior without. I'm assigning it to a person so you can sit down with your children before they go into an environment and say, “Okay, let's talk about healthy communication and non-healthy communication.

Healthy communication means you say, ‘I feel, I see, I think,’ and you own your own feelings and you do things like say positive words. You don't cut somebody down with negative things or talk badly about other people in those kinds of things.

So unhealthy communication would be you're saying negative things about someone else, you’re talking badly or sharing experiences where they have been … sharing your thoughts about an experience that you feel are mean or bad or rude or whatever.

And especially just to anyone that wants to listen - that's not a healthy communication. Positive communication is to be able to try to find a resolution for a problem, to not just talk badly about someone but say, “Gee, I'm noticing that there's a problem in this situation. Here's what I'm going to do about it.”

Unhealthy communication just talks badly and complains about people and doesn't move to a solution...

So do you understand what I'm saying? You're identifying some dysfunctional behaviors, and then you can add on teaching a solution or a coping skill, and I'll talk more about that in a second when I’m done. Identifying those dysfunctional behaviors is really important so that kids can start seeing patterns.

They can start seeing why I feel weird when I'm with this person or in the situation - they can now apply it to not just one situation, but they can apply it when they go to school or when they're in an extracurricular activity, and they feel that same feeling.

Now they can attune to it and they can say, “You know what? I don't think that's a healthy behavior. I don't think that's a good behavior. This girl is gossiping about another girl. I don't want to be a part of that.”

Now your child will have the confidence because she's learned to use her voice to be able to say, “You know, I don't agree with that. I know Haley, and she's a really great girl. Let's go and do our dance practice,” or whatever it might be.

So you're teaching them to attune to, “Hmmm, that's a dysfunctional behavior.” Not just in this environment but in all kinds of environments.

And that works, especially if you don't assign it to a person right off the bat so you're not influencing them to look at an ex-spouse, a friend and administrator negatively.

You're identifying a behavior and saying, “Watch out for this behavior, and if you see this behavior, then you know that it's a negative.”

One of the things we talked about was if a child receives an expensive cell phone out of the blue from a parent, and they are all excited - “I wanted to give you this wonderful gift.” And the child is kind of feeling like, What? This is out of the blue, and this is so weird.

And that's not even something we talked about. And wow, that's a really expensive thing, and, oh, I'm really excited, but something feels weird here.” If that happens, then you can identify if you're feeling weird about this, here's something to consider. Good gifts don't have hidden strings. So good gifts will not require a certain behavior to come after it.

So if you're given this cell phone, there won't be any hidden strings attached because it's just a gift.

Well, of course, what happens with some of these situations - a child receives an expensive cell phone, and then the parents start saying, “Hey, why aren't you calling and texting me all the time everyday because I bought you the cell phone so that you would do that.”

That is a negative and dysfunctional behavior. The gifts should be freely given and shouldn't have hidden strings attached.

So that's a great thing to be able to analyze with your child and say, “Yeah, you felt weird about this because you have this gift that came out of the blue, and you were thinking it was just a gift, but now a requirement is being attached to it and that doesn't feel natural to you because that's not something you naturally wanted to do or felt like you wanted to do, but now you're feeling guilty that you're not doing it because it's now required as part of this gift.”

So does that make sense?

You're taking something, and you're being able to say - yes, this is the healthy behavior. You get a gift, and this is a dysfunctional behavior if it comes with strings attached, and emotional strings at that, so being able to sift that out with your children is so helpful because then they can see that in any situation. We know from research that people who particularly who want to predator children, especially for sexual abuse, they're going to start with gifts.

And they're going to try to make that soft in. So it's really helpful for children to see that and analyze, “Does this have strings attached? Is this something that it makes me feel weird? Why is that?” Go a little further and answer those questions for themselves with some of these key things. So that's helpful.

The last thing is to teach them coping skills, and I've shared a few along the way of course, but teach them coping skills.

One particular child in dealing with an ex-spouse had to work with being able to use her voice in a way that didn't engage. This ex-spouse particularly seemed to want to engage by getting kind of an emotional hit - trying to provoke the child to become angry and then being able to be angry themselves, and now they had a justification for being angry because the child got angry first even though there were being provoked.

So in that example, this child was taught to be able to stand their ground and to not engage, just not engage. They were able to remember to stay calm, not engaged, and to bring it back to the key point.

So instead of this provoking behavior that was taking them all over the map and trying just these little sort of - I call it velociraptor behavior, they're just poking at the fence trying to see if they can get an emotional reaction - this child was able to recognize that velociraptor kind of experience and be able to not engage in those provoking things and stayed calm and was able to pull it back to the main point instead of getting caught up in these side roads.

Kept bringing it back to, “Okay, but what I was asking you was X, Y, or Z. But what we were talking about was X, Y, or Z. So that the conversation would stop being on these provoking levels and would come back to what the original question was and the answer that was needed.

So again, these are just some coping skills that would hopefully help in a situation where you have to arm your children with being able to assess a situation mentally and emotionally and then make decisions in that moment of how they're going to respond. And this starts so young. I taught my kids 6, 13, 15.

I know my friends and women that I've talked with and helped. It's been kids that young and older adults, even children that have not learned these skills.

So this is all age appropriate. And that's the key is being prayerful and finding what is the best level of these sort of identifying behaviors and coping skills, that they are able to use these skills and these tools for their tool belt that is age appropriate for them to know.

And the truth is that in our day and age are children are needing to learn these younger and younger. That's just a reality. And we sometimes hesitate, maybe even avoid these kinds of conversations. But I invite you to have a family night.

Then take one of these points that I've made and try it with your children. Try helping them get some words, some phrases that can help them use their voice.

Get some things that you can have a family night that you can say, “Here's some functional behaviors. I've read up on them, and if you encounter them, here's a few coping skills that you can use,” and practice them right there is a family night.

It's fantastic. This will help and save your children. I know one lady I talked to who was enticed by candy for what was going to be a precursor for sexual abuse. The abuser got her aside, isolated her.

And there was a big family party that was going on in that house with neighbors and family members and everything and got her down in a basement where other kids were, pulled her aside, isolated her and treated her with candy and he was running out again. He gave her some and then ran out. He said, “I’ve got more.”

So he went to go get candy, and she said, “I threw it down, and I went right upstairs, and I went, and I told my mom. I grabbed her arm and I said, ‘we need to leave right now.’ And kudos to that mother. She did not blink an eye.

She looked at her daughter, and she said, “Okay, we can go.”

And as they were walking home, she told her mother what happened. That mother than pressed the issue and ultimately was able to find out that this was a serial abuser and was able to get action taken and was able to help save future children.

It tears me up because what was beautiful is this mother came back to this child and said, “You don't ever need to feel badly about saying something. You are a hero.

You were brave and because you spoke out, you have helped save other children, and you are a hero.”

So this is what we can do when we arm children as they go into situations, whether it's verbal, mental, emotional abuse, sexual abuse - whether it's just a very highly charged, difficult situation that they're in at school, at an activity, an event, or a particular situation that they're in.

We can do something to help them at any age level.

To have that confidence, that reassurance and that surety, that certainty of having some of these coping skills, life skills, these tools on their life tool belt that they can use when you're not around. Stay tuned for more of how to balance your life in a reDefined way.

You got it. Thanks for listening and remember to rate and subscribe. And if you are feeling the need for real balance in your life, get your free 3-Step Life Plan, and get started today! Just go to conniesokol.com/download.