Tag: emotional intelligence

reaching out ~ what to do with a truant teen

Zane buggered off again today ~ skipped school and bailed on meeting us to drop his uniform to him. We found him, but boy has it brought up a lot of stuff!

My conditioning dictates that I should be angry, but I’m trying to be positive and bring a compassionate perspective.

This is all in the context of me trying to rediscover my place in the dynamics of the family, so I’m feeling very unsure about what my part should be in responding to this truancy again.

I’m a step-dad who has minimal-to-no relationship with Zane, and therefore limited agency for either discipline or influence. The only part I know is supporting Nikki, but she insisted I stay at the library while she drove around looking for him.

At least if I’m not there for the potential confrontation when Zane decides to show up and face the consequences of breaking our trust again, maybe I’ll have the chance to calm down a bit and play the part of compassionate supporter ~ I do want to understand why he’s making these decisions, but in which parallel universe is a 13-year-old boy going to share this with his step-dad?

In which parallel universe does a 13-year-old boy know himself why he behaves one way or another?

We need the skills of introspection and emotional intelligence to know the nuances of our internal motivations ~ skills that are not taught in our sausage-factory schools.

This gap in our education culture is a huge part of why I’m doing Kokoro 心 Heart: we need to learn how to manage our own psychospiritual wellbeing enough to stop perpetuating a culture that results in 13-year-old kids wagging class to smoke bongs down the creek. (That’s just one specific symptom of the cultural malaise I hope to address in the posts here and in the work I’m doing in the business around Kokoro 心 Heart.)

I spent my whole high-school career smoking bongs down the creek, and my decades-long drug and alcohol dependency left me in my late 20s with the emotional development of the teenager I was when I started using drugs, because I didn’t have the mentors to help me learn how to deal with my emotions any other way.

We are letting down our children and our future by allowing these gaps to remain in the upbringing of the emerging generations.

Nikki and I are doing all that we can to access services that will make up for the deficits in our own and Zane’s development.

If you’re going through or have been through this, let me know in the comments. We need all the guidance we can get, lest our son become like Trent from Punchy.

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the importance of connection in parenting

connection in parenting — obviously important, difficult to achieve

We spoke to a parenting coach today through an organisation called ReachOut, and it was very helpful — she validated and confirmed a lot of what we’ve been learning about some changes we’d like to make in our approach to parenting, as well as gently challenging some of those ideas.

For example, I had started to understand and experiment with using “I” statements if I want to intervene with Zane’s behaviour. Say, “I don’t like it when you swing the cat by her tail,” instead of “Don’t do that!” This is more of a boundary statement than a disciplinary action or a criticism.

We were advised recently by our counsellor that discipline is not my role: I am not his bio-father, Zane is therefore not individuating from me but from Nikki, his bio-mother; and my attempts at discipline without much of a relationship through other interactions were mostly just contributing to conflict.

The coach agreed that using “I” statements is a healthy way to assert a boundary without crossing … well, the boundary between discipline and boundary-setting. But after talking about where my relationship is at with Zane, the coach encouraged me to pull back even from making “I” statements at this stage, until Zane and I have got our relationship into a condition where boundaries will be respected.

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