On cooperation:
Family culture develops whether you want it to or not. If left unchecked, who knows what the result will be. Putting the effort in to create the atmosphere in your home may be the hardest thing you ever do.
And it is every bit worth it.
Although there is no end of values and practices to try to put into place there are a few things that are necessary and often overlooked. Creating a space where cooperation, instruction, and peace is foundational to guiding your family to a healthy place of interactions.
Many parents have spoken with me about cooperation. They just want their children to cooperate. They just need compliance. Although compliance is the goal, the foundation is cooperation. From toddlers to teens, kids don’t understand all the things parents do to keep the house running. Their version of cooperation is going to look a lot different than ours.
Pause for a second and think about the sacrifices your own parents made. We all need perspective in order to understand how much parents give. Children struggle to understand just how much parents are sacrificing because it’s not required of them. As parents, we cannot count on them to see how we are trying to sacrifice, cooperate, provide, give, and forgive. Just like you, they will one day.
Chris wrote the above paragraph… this is Dree’s version now… This dynamic of kid’s cluelessness to my workload used to frustrate me to no end! As a homeschool mom, I would list on our whiteboard what each child was responsible for that day… and then I would write my list out next to theirs. Ha! I wanted them to grow in understanding of what the world was like for everyone around them including their siblings and parents. And then there was that one time when I read Hunger Games for three days straight and that was the only thing on my list and I was busted big time. I still hear about that and they are adults now! Needless to say, I wouldn’t endorse this method! I just wanted to show some real life understanding of the process for kids AND adults. All learning together. All growing together. All making each other better as we go.
Now for Chris again…
Cooperation, instead, requires repeated, overt displays and feels pretty one-sided. This is a hard one for me because I want kids to accept my way of doing things as soon as possible. Questions, although time-consuming and cumbersome, are important to answer. Young brains need an opportunity to explore different options, even if they are obviously wrong, before being shown how to think about the problem and come up with a solution.
Taking time to listen to your children sets an example that they will want to follow. Kids respond when the people they look up to treat them with patience. Not immediately, the emotional system of the brain does not stop on a dime. But they do respond and they remember how they were treated.
Each time you are patient, their ability to be patient grows! Read that again. Your behavior affects the neural development of your child. And what more, you don’t have to be perfect at this in order for it to take a deep root in your little one. You don’t have to be good, you just have to be good enough. A good measuring stick to keep is to work towards cooperation 80% of the time.
Although the benefits are not prompt, they run deep. Children listen more because they feel like they have to fight to be listened to. Children calm more quickly because they don’t have to guard their ideas tooth and nail. Stress is not piled upon the stress that is inherent in the situation to begin with.
Establishing an atmosphere of cooperation in your home creates a more calm environment and sets the stage for instruction to happen. Emotional minds are not reasoning minds. Lessons are more likely to be soaked in because the receiver is calm and therefore more apt to engage in logic.