Fools rush in
There is a problem with one of the kids. He’s been
smoking up again or down in his school grades or roughing up one of the
others; she’s not talking to her mother or has angrily cut up someone’s
jeans or told destructive lies about her former friend. You have been asked
by the team to "have a talk" with this youngster.
What to do? The easy thing is to get right to the
point, to state unambiguous expectations, lay down the law, make clear
demands about cleaning up acts and "getting your head right", right?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
To go into any encounter with a youth having
already made up your mind as to the outcome you want, is to make a mistake:
- The kid doesn’t get to feel heard.
- You have heard only one side of the story.
- You don’t get to understand the needs behind
the troubling behaviour.
- You impose your solution and don’t give the kid
a chance to build his/her solution.
- You forget that you are meant to be building
internal, not external controls.
- You don’t get a picture of the resources and
skills you could be building in this youth.
- You assume that this is the one problem, and
the kids is not going to have more problems in future.
- So you’re not teaching problem solving; you are
wanting to solve only this problem.
- You forget that it’s the young person, not you,
who owns the problem.
- You are limiting the possibilities which exist
in this encounter, and in this kid.
- You don’t get to see where the youngster might
get to in dealing with this problem; only where you think you can get.
- And maybe you have a personal need to go back
to your colleagues on the team with this problem " all sorted out" ...
- Here we are already with twelve reasons to take
it slow, to listen, to spend the time, to try to understand, to create
possibilities, to build rather than bully, to give information and
skills, to encourage, to wait upon the child ... to see where things
might go ...
Always better to talk with kids, not at
them.
Listen
