How often do our children have “behaviors” that are disruptive, annoying, frightening, inappropriate, or destructive, and how many of our children have a DSM label for those behaviors? “BEHAVIORS” are overwhelming families and schools.
What if we had the deep understanding that these so called behaviors are cries for help, for deep listening, for support, for understanding. What if we came to realize that children are telling us in the only way they can, that they are in pain and distress? What do we do when we don’t have words? We “act out” our cries for help.
NDM® practitioners have the core understanding that children want to belong, want to participate, want to cooperate, want to love and be loved, want peace in their own hearts.
How would our parenting experience change if we simply stopped to figure out what kind of cry for help underlies these BEHAVIORS, rather than trying to program them out of the children with behavior therapy, creating consequences, and isolating the child? How might our parenting look different if we were to look differently at behaviors?
Now for a silly example: Imagine you have a headache, maybe a migraine, with pulsing, throbbing pain, nausea, disorientation, all made worse by any sound above a whisper, any light above a dimmed room.
Then imagine your partner or spouse opens the door, letting light flood in and tells you, “We need to figure out this discrepancy in our accounting right away. I need you to get up and work with me on this.”
If you were to throw the nearest hard object at your partner’s head at that moment, would it make sense? Or would we call that a “BEHAVIOR”?
Perhaps your partner goes away and comes back with a large piece of paper on which they have a list of expectations and says: “That was really inappropriate and I have a star chart here. If you can do three nice things for me on this star chart, I will take you out for brunch at your favorite restaurant.”
If you were to take the next available hard object and throw it, again, in the direction of your partner, would we not start to realize that you are in pain?
What you need at that moment is someone to hear, see, feel your need, find out how to help and support you, listen to you describe how hard it is, or give you the space to not talk at all.
These are our children in a tantrum, a rage. These are our children throwing toys, screaming, slamming doors.
Can we support our children while we also work to find the source of their distress and pain? I think if we did this, we would give our children tools to create a better world.
An understanding of injuries and gaps in the Developmental Sequence can give us many insights into the nonverbal distress of children with challenges. We have to listen more deeply with all the tools we have.