Being there for your kids - Promoting Positive Attention

Episode Date: May 10, 2019

Your kids will get your attention, one way or another. Sadly, negative attention is often easier to get. It's more immediate and all-consuming. Punch your sister when she's not playing fair? Mom will be on you like white on rice. Positive attention usually takes longer and can be set aside with a brief response. Come home with good grades and showing mom? "That's nice, honey," as she continues on the phone with her friend. So, the key is that what you pay attention to grows. If you want to give your child more positive attention, make a bigger deal of it to her and to others in her earshot. Because attention has an absolute quality, the more positive attention you give her, the less negative attention she will seek. Promote positive attention with your kids.

Hey mom and dad, pay attention. I'm Dr. John Robinson, and this is Teachable Moments. My daughter was four years old a long time ago. I was talking to my neighbor over the fence in our yard. Rachel came up to me, tugged on my pant leg, and announced, I need some attention. Whoa. I stopped my conversation with my neighbor and gave Rachel the attention she asked for. Now, wouldn't that be nice if our children asked our attention in that manner all the time? Alas, not so. Molly was on her cell phone. with the mother of one of nine-year-old Alexa's friends. They were just gossiping. Alexa guessed who her mom was talking to and decided that she wanted to talk to her friend as well. She proceeded to Paul at her mom dramatically, asking her to give her the cell phone so she could say hi. Molly got mad. She asked her neighbor to hold on a second, turn to her daughter. If you don't stop bugging me while I'm on the phone, I will pop you so hard you won't be able to sit down for a week, she threatened, wagging her finger in Alexa's face.

Alexa stopped, turned dejectedly, and shuffled away, whimpering about how mama just doesn't understand. In teachable moments building blocks of Christian parenting, I note that the concept of attention has absolute quality about it. That is, either positive attention or negative attention will fill the bill. Sadly, positive attention seems to be much harder, longer getting, and less frequent than negative attention. So, kids naturally find negative ways to fill their intentional needs. Another visual image that I share with readers in chapter 4, children never mean what they say, is this. Imagine that children have 100 parts to them. Whatever type of attention they seek, it will always add up to 100.

So if a child has 12 parts positive attention, by definition she has 88 parts negative attention. Now here's where you come in as a parent. Whatever part you pay attention to grows. So if you talk to your daughter about the good choices she is making, the positive parts grow from 12. to 14. By definition, her negative parts shrink from 88 to 86. Conversely, you're yelling, discounting, ignoring, causes the negative to grow and the positive to shrink. Mom and dad, pay attention. Focus on what your child is doing and saying right while ignoring as much as possible what they are saying and doing wrong. Where a correction is called for, talk to your child after

all has settled down with a prompting comment such as, golly, sweetheart, that wasn't like you at all. What else is going on here? How do you think this might have turned out better? Such questions, get your child's brain moving in a positive direction. Paying attention to these details will lead to many teachable moments. I'm Dr. Jonathan C. Robinson, licensed clinical psychologist and Christian author, and this has been Teachable Moments. Teachable Moments, building blocks of Christian parenting, is available online at AmazonBooks.com and in local and national bookstores. More on Dr. Robinson, at TMC-P-I-N-C dot com.