Written by Efrim C.
As caregivers and parents, we recognize the very real, internally driven need for children to run, yell, climb, jump, throw, hit, tackle, push, pull, grab, rip, roll around, get dirty, taste everything, break things, and display sometimes very, very, very big emotions.
And we know that, as challenging as these kinds of behaviors can be sometimes, simply stifling them summarily serves to also stifle a child’s spontaneous expressions of curiosity and passion, exploration and wonder. So, one of the trickier matters for us as caregivers to navigate is finding ways to both accommodate these behaviors while also helping children develop a sense of appropriate limits, and ensuring they and those around them are safe, and feel secure. It is not always easy.
At an in-service training day earlier in the year, we received instruction on a tool to help us more effectively accomplish this. FLIP IT is a method developed by the Devereux Institute for Resilient Children that describes four steps to addressing challenging behaviors while still honoring the feelings and internal drives of our children.
F-Feelings: Identify and validate a child’s feelings; help the child to identify and build a language to describe their emotions.
L-Limits: Set positive limits, letting the child know what they can do, instead of naming what they cannot.
I-Inquiries: ask questions to help the child find their own solutions to challenging situations (after all these years, I am still amazed by the unexpectedly novel, and very achievable solutions that children can dream up).
P-Prompts: provide suggestions that help guide the child to solutions when they are struggling.
I realize that there is a lot to unpack in all of this, and doing so lies very much at the heart of the work I am doing at CCB, but for now I simply want to take note of one aspect of this method that I think can be too easy to get hung up on.
All too often it can be easy to measure the success of our approach to addressing challenging behaviors by whether it succeeds in putting an end to the behavior. If the approach manages to inhibit the behavior, it was the right one; and if it did not, we can be quick to look for another.
But what I want to emphasize here is that this approach is successful in-and-of-itself, regardless of the outcome. The measure of our success, rather, is our ability and willingness to do these things for our kids, sometimes over and over, even when it does not bring about our desired, intended outcome. This method, whether we call it FLIP IT, peaceful parenting, or just our own intuitive way of caring for children, (FLIP IT is, at the end of the day, a tool to describe what many teachers and parents do all the time anyway) is intended to honor the whole child, in all their often messy, unwieldy beauty, and this is never the wrong thing to do.
Share your thoughts, questions, comments, anecdotes, or disagreement in the comments below.
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