Want to stay an influencer in your kid's life?
Want to stay an influencer in your kid's life?
The more they feel they belong, the more they listen to you, the more influence you'll have.
Parenting Matters #81
By: Catherine Lynch and Glenn Collins
Dear Awesome Parent,
You adore your kids and want them to have great lives. But there’s so many ways they can go astray - how in the world do you keep them on the right track? Here’s one of our favorite strategies: Boost their sense of belonging to your family.
Here’s how it works: The more they feel they belong, the more they listen to you, the more influence you have.
And your influence is how you help them avoid the all pitfalls of modern life, and have great lives.
So. Want more influence? Keep reading for strategies that boost their feeling of belonging to your family.
Join us in a casual conversation about belonging, the strategies in this edition, and all things parenting tweens and teens. We’re live on Wednesdays from 12-1 EST. We’ll answer your questions, customize our strategies to your unique situation, and help you get your family back on track. Here's the Zoom link.
Belonging is the key to influence with your kids.
We took our 14 year old granddaughter to her soccer game last weekend. When we arrived at the field, she jumped out of the car almost before it had even stopped and, without a word to us, sprinted off to join her team. As she ran toward her teammates, several called out to her, happy that she had arrived. It was obvious that she was a valued member of the team. That they were her friends. That she belonged.
Humans are born with a drive to belong. It’s a primal instinct that motivates much of what we do. For most of human history, belonging to a tribe was critical to your very survival. Finding food, staying safe, and overcoming obstacles were only possible if you were part of a group. If you had friends and companions to help you.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines belonging as:
Over the course of our lives, we’ll belong to many groups, but the first and most influential one we belong to is our family. The bond between children and their parents starts before birth and can last a lifetime - but that’s not a given.
Our modern lifestyle with it’s many stresses and distractions can make it hard to maintain and strengthen our kid’s sense of belonging to the family.
When kids are young, the focus of their desire to belong is to their parents. It’s a matter of survival. Little kids just can’t survive on their own.
At that age it’s pretty easy for parents to create a sense of belonging because they’re working with their kid’s natural drive to bond with them. Love, care, and attention are usually enough to create a strong connection. A strong sense of belonging. Their desire to be with us is so strong in fact, it’s a meme.
But….the older they get, the less you can rely on that natural bonding instinct to keep a sense of belonging and connection.
And once they reach the pre-teen years? Watch out. Parents and family are no longer the center of their desire to belong. Peers become increasingly more important and their focus is on fitting in with them.
Sometimes this transition is abrupt, and that makes it even more painful. It can seem like your loving little kid is replaced overnight by someone who barely wants to talk to you. Creating and maintaining a sense of belonging to the family can start to feel like work.
But just because your teen’s focus is on creating connections with their peers, doesn’t mean their need to feel a sense of belonging with the family goes away. On the contrary, it’s during this time when they’re creating an identity separate from the family that a strong bond to the family is especially important.
Why?
Because if they don’t find a sense of belonging with you, they’ll find it somewhere else. And you might not like where they find it. Wherever your kid feels accepted, wherever they feel they belong, that’s who’ll influence them. That’s whose values, beliefs, and behaviors your kid will take on. Not yours. You want to remain their main influencer. You want them to take on your values. Your beliefs. You want to be their main influencer.
Creating and maintaining a sense of belonging with your kid is an investment in your relationship and an investment in their future.
And that’s at least as important as their grades, a clean room, or anything else you fight about. That’s because their sense of belonging is what makes them care about what you have to say about all those other things. It’s what gives you influence with their hearts and minds.
And you really do want to maintain your influence.
So, what can parents do to keep their kids feeling connected to the family? To keep that sense of belonging?
We recommend the 3 F’s: Food, Fun, and Friendly Faces.
There are, of course, lots of ways to create a sense of belonging, but these 3 are about as surefire as you can get. Master these powerful fundamentals and you’ll be well on your way to building family bonds that will last a lifetime:
Food
Think fun, delicious, or new. Not nutrition or calories.
Plan food they like, or a food experience they want and can look forward to.
Give yourself extra points if you let them help make the food, play with the food (like making tacos or pizza) or be creative (like make cookies or pancakes with different shapes and decorations).
Fun
Make sure it’s their idea of fun, not just yours. If you’re the only one having fun, you’re not increasing their sense of belonging.
Surprises are fun. Risky or scary is fun. Spontaneous is fun. Speed is fun.
If fun seems out of reach, start small with a bit of play, silliness, joy, or lightheartedness. We (kids included!) have fond memories of the water fights that occasionally broke out while cleaning up from dinner.
The family that plays together stays together.
Friendly Faces
Friendly faces means putting aside all of the stuff that your kid has done that’s bugging you, be happy to be with them, and let your face show that you’re friendly and happy to be with them. For real.
Extra points if you start to gain more awareness of how your face looks to your kids. Ask your spouse to help you with this.
More important than an actual friendly face is the emotion behind it: Friendly. Accepting. Happy to see them. Interested in what’s going on in their life.
Each of the above are powerful, but If you can combine them often all you’ll be unstoppable at creating a sense of belonging with your preteen or teen.
Bonus: Fire supercharges everything. If you combine the 3 F’s with sitting around a fire, you’ll get even better results. There’s just something about a fire that creates a feeling of emotional warmth, togetherness, and belonging.
Pro Tip: Let them make and tend the fire to get even more good feelings and buy-in. 🔥🔥🔥 Because, lets be honest, most kids are little pyros who love to burn stuff. A family fire lets them indulge that under your supervision.
Home Practice:
Every day, choose one of the 3 F’s to concentrate on: Fun, Food, Friends Faces, or even Fire. Challenge your spouse or parenting partner to join you for extra fun!
Beauty before the storm
Tropical Storm Ophelia is pounding the Mid-Atlantic this weekend. And that means us. In fact, the current forecast from the National Hurricane Center has the center of Ophelia passing just south of us sometime Sunday afternoon. But before it arrived the outermost clouds made for a spectacular sunset.