Meeting Needs vs. Changing Behavior

We discussed the importance of active parenting. How it's important as a parent to address the NEEDS of a child, rather than the BEHAVIOR. Behavior is a result of needs. Brother Williams gave a very interesting perspective on parenting I hadn't really thought of before. He said can you imagine having your vulnerable child that you love so much handed to someone else to take of? He was relating it to Heavenly Father and how He entrusts us to watch and take care of His children. So we need to do the best we can because we're just taking care of them for the time being.

When we parent it's important to realize that we don't know enough. Even if you "believe" a certain way, in the end you should really always be striving to do what's best by the Lord. We need to follow His guidance. It's important when we parent that even if we feel a certain thing needs to be carried out, we should first ask the Lord in prayer if this is right because He knows best. Not to mention, He's the perfect parent.

Have you ever met a child that is so annoying you have no idea how to handle them? Have you ever considered that the reason they are so annoying is because they have needs that aren't getting met so they're acting a certain way to try to meet those needs themselves? Many times when kids are really obnoxious, it is due to undue attention seeking. They're being that way because they don't know how else to get the attention they crave. In this scenario it's important to not just focus on the behavior. It's important to realize that maybe they need something and that's the reason for the behavior. Brother Williams gave an example of a boy who would chew on his shirts. No matter what his mom did for punishment for this, he would always chew on the collar of his shirt. Finally she took him to a doctor to see what the problem could be and he couldn't find anything wrong, but he suggested giving the boy bananas every day. In a couple days the boy stopped chewing on his shirt. The reason for this is because he was lacking potassium. He didn't know why he chewed on his shirt, just that he couldn't help but do it. Laundry detergent has trace amounts of potassium in it and so he was getting as much as he could. Once he started eating bananas however, he stopped chewing. His need was met and he was fine. The mom was focusing on the behavior that she didn't want him doing, rather than trying to meet a need.

Elder Groberg said, "You can never get enough of what you don't need, because what you don't need cannot satisfy you."

This makes me think of poor food choices.Sometimes I'll just sit and eat a whole bunch of hot cheetos and it seems I never get full of them because they're not satisfying a need of mine. They're not nutritious or in anyway helpful to my growing, but I keep eating them because I want them to fill me up or satisfy me, but they won't. I'll end up eating a whole bunch and then find myself needing to eat something more.

Brother Williams knew this hyperactive kid who would always touch people and get in your face and was just really obnoxious to most people so that people would try to avoid him. After some thinking, Brother Williams decided to give him what he needed. Instead of waiting for the "attack" he would approach the young kid and be super friendly. He'd basically do what the kid was doing. He'd be right there, and touch his arm and interact with him like the kid was interacting with everyone else. The kid eventually calmed down enough and didn't annoy people anymore. It was because his need was met. He just wanted attention and contact with people but didn't know how to get it without being annoying. Once he was getting attention and contact, he calmed down and was fine. It makes me think of little kids who will repeat the bad behavior, because any attention is good attention.

Teenage sex a lot of the time is because of a need for contact and belonging from someone. However, it's not satisfying enough because they're still not getting what they really need. A very interesting study has shown that dad's who hug their daughters makes them less permiscuous. They're not out looking for bad attention for contact and belonging from someone else because they are getting the feeling of belonging and love at home.

It's important to teach your kids to contribute. Typically you don't feel connected or belonging with someone if you aren't contributing. For example, if you were at a friends house and they wouldn't let you help with anything and just wanted you to sit there and watch a movie while everyone else cleans. Do you feel a part? Or do you feel more like a guest and uncomfortable? It's the same with a sports team or young women's for example. If you show up to games, but are just standing there and aren't helping to score or work a little, do you feel you've bonded with the team and a part? Probably not.

When you're dealing with kids it's important to treat them with just as much respect as you would anyone else. Brother Williams gave an example where he was in charge of an all boys group home. It was just him and 35 other boys that he had to be in charge of. These were kids where they were so bad they weren't allowed to live at home anymore. Well he made it a point that when he'd come to work he would bond with them. He would talk to them and treat them politely. Then when it came to working with them, it was simple because they were shown the respect they deserved. On the other hand, he had colleagues who were working with other groups of boys and they had severe problems. The boys were always getting out of hand and they'd have to wrestle them down or something. Brother Williams was meeting the needs of his boys.

An interesting thing was pointed out. When you have a child with a mental illness, you're not supposed to treat them differently than your other kids. Of course sometimes adjustments have to be made, but overall they should be treated as normal as possible because that's how they learn what normal is. A girl in class pointed out how she knew someone who had an autistic kid. They had other kids as well, but the autistic kid was treated much differently than the others. Since the other kids weren't getting the same type of attention, a lot of them started to exhibit autistic behavior so they would get more attention. It doesn't have to be necessarily a mental illness either. Kids will act however they feel will get them what they need. Needs are SO important when parenting and it's not about a change in behavior, it's about addressing a need.. which WILL change a behavior.

Staying Home

This week was a little cut short because of Thanksgiving, but we had to read an article about homemaking and if it makes you dumber or is mind-numbing to stay at home instead of "experiencing" the world. It kind of bothered me that women's rights are saying how it's mind-numbing for women to stay home when they should be out having careers in the world. The most important thing you can do in your life is to bear children and raise them. I think you can learn so much from staying at home with your children. They are so curious about the world and ask so many questions you would have never thought of. Their perspective is so different I think you can learn new things every day. I learn so much from my little girl. I know some families need both parents to go to work to make ends meet and that's fine. You can keep up with the world and learn new things and still stay at home. Plus just because you're in a career doesn't mean your job allows it so you can be learning new things all day, you're probably just doing the same mind-numbing things at work.

However, it is important to pursue your education I feel because you can help teach your children.

Communication

This week we discussed the topic of communication. How it is so important to be able to communicate effectively. In the beginning of class our teacher had an object lesson. He had us take a "pop" quiz but all of the questions were written in Danish. He wanted us to answer the questions, even though none of us knew how to speak it. Some of us were able to kind of guess what was being meant just by the words themselves. He then went on to explain how in communication sometimes we can infer what we are hearing, but that doesn't necessarily mean we know what is being said. When you are communicating there are three things; Tone, words, non-verbal. They don't even all of the time relate. For example, you can be saying something that's pleasant, but your tone in how you say it can come off unpleasant. That's how sarcasm is. What you're saying doesn't always mean the same thing if you inflect a certain tone or body language with it.

President Harold B. Lee said that we need to communicate so we can't be misunderstood, not just so we can be understood. This was really profound to me because sometimes you feel like what you're saying makes perfect sense, but someone else could be decoding it differently. Decoding is the biggest problem in relationships. Brother Williams gave a little diagram to help us see this visually. We have our thoughts/feelings and based off of how we feel we encode some type of message. Then the other person then has to decode what we've just said and gets thoughts/feelings based on what they think was said. In other words the person you are talking to could be decoding what you're saying MUCH differently than you were intending.

He gave an example of a husband and wife he knew. They were having marital problems because she felt like he was cheating on her or wasn't completely honest with her. She thought this because she would hear from her friends (who happened to be attractive) how funny her husband was because they ran into each other in the grocery store. She thought he was flirting with other women because he had never told her the stories of seeing these women in the stores so she felt he was trying to hide it from her. In actuality, he didn't tell her he'd see the women because he knew his wife felt insecure and he was trying the whole time to get away from talking with them anyway so that his wife wouldn't get upset. He loved his wife so much that he didn't want her to feel insecure so he wouldn't say anything, and when she would find out she felt betrayed because she felt he was trying to hide things from her. She was decoding what he was doing as being sneaky, when that wasn't what he was doing.They were both trying to solve a problem, but unless they have good communication and a shared meaning then it can just create conflict.

It's important to not only have good communication, but to understand a shared meaning. Teaching better communication skills to couples in the short run worked, but in the long run was actually detrimental because they can still misunderstand each other. Unless you both are on the same wave length and really understand each other, relationships won't improve by just better communication.

Family Stressors/Crisis

This week was about stresses and crises in the family, and how you respond to them. There's a model called the ABCX and it breaks down a stress in a way. This is how Brother Williams presented it to us. A=the actual (stressor) event. B= both resources and reactions. C= cognitions and X= the total experience. We talked about how what you think about your situation has in large to due with what you get from the experience. Usually people will say that events trigger your emotions, but in actuality, events trigger your thoughts which trigger your emotions.  There is a saying which I'm going to totally butcher, but in essence it says how nobody (or event) can make you feel a certain way. We choose how we respond. We tend to be aware of things consistent with our emotional state. He gave the example of watching a scary movie. After a scary movie you come home and all of the sudden you hear little noises in your house and freak yourself out even more. When actually your house probably makes those noises all of the time, you are just more aware of those noises now.

Families that are strong typically do better in high stress situations. They do well because typically there is more communication, there is cohesion, flexibility, and resilience. Families that aren't that strong will typically fall apart after a huge crisis instead of come together. Families need to be flexible at times. We had the example of spatulas. There are the ones you use for flipping eggs lets say, and then the rubber spatulas you use. The one you use for eggs is pretty useless in scraping out a bowl for example because it's not flexible. I feel like there needs to be more of an effort in every family to be flexible with each other. More fights are prevented when a family can be flexible. The excuse of you need to act a certain way with someone because "that's just how they are" is a poor excuse because in order for a family to really be strong then EVERYONE needs to be willing to bend at some point. Not saying at all that you should just go with the flow of everything and not have an opinion, but it's important for there to be leeway between people instead of one person always catering to the other.

Physical Intimacy

This week we talked about physical intimacy in class. I'm not going to go into details all about this, but I did want to touch on a few things. Men and women are wired differently when it comes to arousal and so it was said how before marriage you are taught that you need to have self control. Well this is a really important thing to learn for after marriage to. That sounds wrong, but it's true because since men and women get aroused differently you have to be willing to have self control of your desires so you can both feel pleasure. Marriage takes a lot of selfish behavior away, if you are happy. I don't think you can be genuinely happy in a marriage without being selfless and always wanting what's best for your spouse. If you're still really selfish in your marriage I guarantee your spouse isn't as happy. 

There's a circle. It's interesting because women tend to need safety and security before they can be physically intimate while men need sex in order to feel secure and safe. My teacher pointed out that a lot of times girls think guys only think about sex and that's all they want, but it can be true that guys want sex in order to feel close to their spouse and since it's different for girls it can get complicated at times. The most important sex organ is your brain. If you don't feel good in your brain you can't have a satisfying experience.