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I worry about generalizations in this regard, but consistently my daughter's peers in college who had helicopter parents were less functional. May simply be cor

I worry about generalizations in this regard, but consistently my daughter's peers in college who had helicopter parents were less functional. May simply be correlation of course so drawing conclusions would be bad. That said, it's super hard to experiment on kids without getting in trouble :-). As a parent unfortunately you have to pick a path. My eldest had the tendency to only learn through experiencing the negative side effects of choices directly, called "natural consequences" in parenting books from the turn of the century. That led my wife and I to help get those experiences in early before they could do real harm and to try to give experience with things not going well, and then going back and taking a different route and experiencing things going better. Was that what helped them become functional adults in college? Or was it my wife insisting they did their own laundry once they turned 10? Three times a week one of them was asked to prepare dinner for the family once they were old enough to reach all of the appliances and use kitchen utensils with proper care. You don't get multiple universes to try out different techniques to find the best one. Talking with other parents of similarly aged kids helps and is reasonably cathartic. Exposure to lots of different choices helps surface things that are similar and things that are different. Conflict management is something else entirely. Both my and my wife's family of origin were "conflict avoiders," which really had a hard time growing beyond their specific complexes. When we found ourselves doing that with each other we recognized it and got some help with working through it. Our kids benefited by our modeling and all of them have remarked at one time or another that their friends have said something positive about their ability to negotiate touchy subjects. I count that as a win. Bottom line is that parenting is a tough job and its good to seek out advice.

leonhard 4y ago
How did you improve your conflict management skills and do you have any particular lessons to share?
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  Practice empathy and active listening. Really listen to what someone is saying, repeat back to them what they are saying and then ask clarifying questions (as appropriate). This will deescalate conflicts and allow them to resolve.
- ChuckMcM 4y ago
  I suspect it is different for different people. In our case it really helped to sit down with a third party (a counselor) while we "conflicted." That gave the counselor an opportunity to stop us in the middle of a sentence and explore where our head was and what we were thinking. It took doing this once a week for a bit more than a year to both unravel the core knot and to develop and practice the skills of listening and reflecting and not assuming. Again, in our case it seems like it wasn't "one" conflict, but dozens that colored everything we said to or heard from, each other. In hindsight it is easy to recognize this is where you get to after years of "go along to get along" kind of thinking. And resolving one doesn't resolve the others. So we had to practice getting to the bottom of things and that takes trust and understanding. Bottom line was we needed someone to teach us the tools for dealing with conflict so that we could teach them to our kids. Neither of our parents had taught them to us so no help there. We also recognized that the third party really helped us because there is a level of sharing and exposure during our sessions that we didn't want to share with our friends. And no, I don't have a magic bullet for finding a good counselor. You'll know it when they are good, and with some honest evaluation will also know when they are not working out for you. We went through the family health center at Stanford, but there seems to be resources like this in the US at least and possibly elsewhere.
  - leonhard 4y ago
    Thank you!

leonhard 4y ago

How did you improve your conflict management skills and do you have any particular lessons to share?

theGnuMe 4y ago
Practice empathy and active listening. Really listen to what someone is saying, repeat back to them what they are saying and then ask clarifying questions (as appropriate). This will deescalate conflicts and allow them to resolve.
ChuckMcM 4y ago
I suspect it is different for different people. In our case it really helped to sit down with a third party (a counselor) while we "conflicted." That gave the counselor an opportunity to stop us in the middle of a sentence and explore where our head was and what we were thinking. It took doing this once a week for a bit more than a year to both unravel the core knot and to develop and practice the skills of listening and reflecting and not assuming. Again, in our case it seems like it wasn't "one" conflict, but dozens that colored everything we said to or heard from, each other. In hindsight it is easy to recognize this is where you get to after years of "go along to get along" kind of thinking. And resolving one doesn't resolve the others. So we had to practice getting to the bottom of things and that takes trust and understanding. Bottom line was we needed someone to teach us the tools for dealing with conflict so that we could teach them to our kids. Neither of our parents had taught them to us so no help there. We also recognized that the third party really helped us because there is a level of sharing and exposure during our sessions that we didn't want to share with our friends. And no, I don't have a magic bullet for finding a good counselor. You'll know it when they are good, and with some honest evaluation will also know when they are not working out for you. We went through the family health center at Stanford, but there seems to be resources like this in the US at least and possibly elsewhere.
- leonhard 4y ago
  Thank you!