Palejowe ABC - Mildness

"Our job is not to toughen up our children to face a cruel and heartless world. Our job is to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless."
LR Knost

Imagine that your friend is visiting you. You are eating cake, talking, drinking hot tea. At one point, your friend wants to take a sip of the delicious brew, but the mug falls out of his hands and shatters into a fine poppy. Overwhelmed, he apologizes and begins to clean up. He blames himself and reproaches himself for how clumsy he is, and that he always has to break something. You have known this man for years. You disagree with his critical words. After all, it can happen to anyone that he drops something. That doesn't mean he has to talk about himself in such an unflattering way.

Are you sure?

If you or your child were in your friend's place - how would the situation look then? Or would you assure that after all, nothing happened and the most important thing is that you were not injured by shrapnel, or would a flush of anger appear on your cheeks and a torrent of words flow out of your mouth that you would later regret?

We can be understanding and gentle. Mostly this comes more easily to us towards strangers than towards those closest to us, including ourselves. And yet we consciously don't want to hurt people we care about. By judging ourselves harshly, we may convince ourselves that it's for our own good. We want to motivate ourselves to do things, rebuke ourselves for failures so that they won't happen again, scold ourselves for tardiness, compare ourselves to someone better than us. The other side of the same coin is to judge other people in order to distract ourselves from judging ourselves. However, these critical remarks do not have a positive effect on our well-being. On the contrary, they are followed by feelings of guilt, lack of self-confidence and the feeling that we are insufficient.

We live in a world where it is easier to see the failures themselves than the causes of those failures. However, behind every failure hides a flesh-and-blood person, who usually does his best, and for various reasons does not achieve the desired results. If you yourself have repeatedly experienced a sense of injustice, you may find it easier to understand other people and relate more gently to their difficulties. You treat their stumbles and failures with greater understanding. Be the kind of friend to yourself that you are to others. It will pay off. Especially if you want your child to deal constructively with problems and difficult situations.

Think for a moment about how you address your children. The way we speak to them becomes their inner voice after a while. You've probably caught yourself sometimes thinking about something, and it feels like you're hearing your parents or significant others in your head - their advice, criticism, evaluation, but also their uplifting words. Although many years have passed, these voices continue to resonate and resonate within us. Sometimes we are not aware of them. Perhaps the repeated to yourself "but I'm a failure", "time is slipping through my fingers again", "and I told you it would be like this; it had no chance of succeeding" are not your thoughts at all, but words you once heard regularly from people important to you and began to treat them as your own and true.

When you think of your child, how do you envision his future? Do you want it to be criticized at every turn for stumbling or for being able to give more of itself, even though it has already almost fallen from exhaustion? Or would you prefer it to realize its shortcomings, but work on them with peace of mind and a sense that it can do it? Would you like it to have supportive thoughts accompanying it on its journey through life, which used to be your words, or would you like a voice resounding in its head saying "you won't succeed anyway, it's not worth it for you to even try".

There is a lot of truth in the saying that "out of the void and Solomon does not pour." While we want to set an example for our children and teach them to be gentle with themselves and others, we will not succeed if this gentleness is lacking in ourselves. How many times, looking at the mess in your apartment or serving cheese sandwiches instead of a hot lunch, have you thought of yourself that you are messing up again and failing? Or that something is your fault, even though your influence was negligible or nonexistent? Habits established over the years, including harshness towards yourself, are something that cannot be changed overnight. However, you can slowly move toward greater gentleness for yourself, your child and other people. If you'd like to bring a little more gentleness into your life, invite your child to the game below and see together how you'll fare in the experience.

Exercise 1.

Sit across from each other and ask your partner to clench his fist. Your task will be to encourage your partner to open his hand. First, one person tries to encourage the other to open his hand. Then you switch roles.

Two rules apply: nothing can be done by force - tickling is also forbidden and the task must be done without words.

Discuss the exercise afterwards. How did you feel about it? What was difficult about it? What was easy about it?

Exercise 2.

For this game you will need "water bomb" type balloons.

To prepare for the game, fill the balloons with water and put them in a large bucket.

Hand each participant a water balloon. Place the bucket away from where you are standing. Try to throw the balloons into the bucket as hard as you can. After throwing the first balloon, take another one and this time try to put the balloon in the bucket without breaking it - gently placing it in the bucket.

Then talk about the differences between the two ways. How can you use this experience in your daily life in dealing with other people and yourself?

Sources of knowledge and inspiration that led to this article:

Flook, L., Goldberg, S. B., Pinger, L., & Davidson, R. J. (2015). Promoting prosocial behavior and self-regulatory skills in preschool children through a mindfulness-based kindness curriculum. Developmental Psychology