How Do Your Kids Treat Themselves?
With compassion, or with contempt?
Greetings, everyone. It’s been a week — and it’s only Thursday! I successfully got over whatever virus I was harboring that supposedly wasn’t Covid, only to develop searing ear pain and lose pretty much all my hearing in my left ear over the weekend. An urgent care visit (Monday) and an hour-long-drive to an ENT (yesterday) later, I am now recovering from an impacted-earwax-induced ear infection. Although it was not fun to have someone use a small spoon to manually remove bloody gobs of hardened ear wax from my infected ear, I can now hear again and am not in constant pain which is really quite nice.
However, I also seem to have caught another mild cold. Thanks, January!
But wait, there’s more. On Monday, our Volvo, which we have loved and relied on for nine years, drove its last trip. As I was driving my daughter to gymnastics practice, I heard something dragging under the car. I told myself it was a branch, although deep down, readers, I knew it was not a branch. Turns out it was our muffler (muffers, by the way, are hella ugly!), and lots of people in the gymnastics parking lot were very excited to yell at me that part of my car was dragging behind my car.
Because we were told by a trusted mechanic a few months ago that this was likely the last winter we’d be able to drive the car without investing far more in repairs than the car was worth, because I hadn’t yet fixed my little side mirror problem, and because we suddenly had a muffler dragging behind our car, my husband and I decided to take Tuesday off of work to lease a new car. Having a new car is fun! But this was not an expense we were expecting to shoulder this month.
Tl;dr: I am fine, we are all fine (well, except for the Volvo, which the dealer offered us $100 for, LOL, poor lass).
Now I want to hear from you, and I have a specific question for you today. I have no good segue for this, so I’m just going to go for it. I’m wondering: How do your kids treat themselves? Are they gentle and forgiving, or do they berate themselves? How do you handle it when they ARE hard on themselves? Do you have any funny or meaningful anecdotes involving your kids and their self-compassion (or lack thereof) that you’d be willing to share? Truth be told, I am looking for short anecdotes to include in my book chapter on self-compassion. If you share something here that I might be interested in including, I will of course ask permission first. And I anonymize all anecdotes. If you’d prefer to share stories only with me, you can also contact me privately.
My kids are quite different from each other in how they treat themselves. My daughter is, at least outwardly, much harder on herself than my son is. It’s so hard to hear her say something like, “I hate myself,” or “I’m the worst person in the world” — I want to grab her and shout “No you’re not!” …. even I know that’s not the best approach. Instead I try to say something like, “It must be so hard to feel that way. I’m sorry. And I can imagine many people in your situation might feel the same way.” Still, it breaks my heart every time.
What kind of negative self-talk do you hear from your kids? How do you think about and handle it? Please share in the comments!
It's been interesting watching my kid on this process. She's 11 now and I think she's overall in a good place. She was very overconfident when she was younger--being an early reader at school kinda gave her the impression that she would be instantly good at everything without work and so when she encountered situations in which she would need more practice to build those skills, she sometimes would lose interest or sometimes feel defeated and hard on herself. We talked a lot about growth mindset and I think it's good that both my husband and I try to model that at home--showing that we get frustrated with ourselves too but then we come back and try again and learn from mistakes. I've coached her through building skills and I really try to emphasize, hey, it's okay you don't know how to do this yet, you're not supposed to. It's a skill that has to be learned and practiced--and that's for everything from time management to phone etiquette as well as math problems and essays. I think she's sometimes a little TOO blasé about her mistakes and so I worry she's not learning from them but I actually think that's more about me than about her. I think overall she treats herself with compassion and she's great at showing that same compassion to her friends.
She does try to label herself sometimes in a way that I don't think is helpful. If she decides something isn't her thing, she treats it like it's fixed (she used to feel that way about writing, she hated it, and this year she discovered she actually likes it.) She's into musical theater so this year she has been very focused on saying things "well, I can't sing that, I'm an alto" or "that's not a good part for me because that's for a soprano" even though she's 11 and her voice has lots of room to change and grow over time. What I realize is that even though she doesn't seem to believe me when I say that to her, I'll overhear her repeat a version of it when she's talking to her friends, like "I'm don't have a high range yet, but I'm working on it" or "I'm an alto now but who knows what will happen in a few years." So, I think it's gradually sinking in.
My kid is very hard on herself and I have definitely responded in unhelpful ways in the not-so-distant past. Two strategies that I have found helpful: 1. Modeling positive self-talk and making my thinking visible when I'm frustrated/disappointed with myself to explain where that frustration is coming from (this is really challenging and humbling as heck; after all that negative self-talk doesn't come out of nowhere); and 2. I've heard my kid say, "I'm dumb" (so painful to hear) in response to a low grade, and I've asked why she thinks that, and its led us to talk about the root concern: aspiring to perfection and being afraid to fail. And finally, its a day-by-day process of training her and myself to look for the good. Not easy at all. Thanks for this question, Melinda!