Robert J. Strock discusses parenting a son who broke a financial agreement. The conversation focuses on how your tone matters more than your words when addressing discipline, and how balancing empathy with accountability helps kids develop honesty and take responsibility.
I'm working hard with my son, who violated a financial agreement with us, took not a huge amount of money, was aware of it, felt bad about it, promised to himself, but didn't get it done at the time that he would pay it back and didn't. And a year and a half later, I discovered it. I'm working on myself as best I can to be patient with it. I have to confess, I hit him pretty hard with disappointment. Not so much anger. But what I'm aware of now is I want to understand him. And we spend a lot of time talking and we get to a point where he says the right things. He says, yes, I want to understand myself. I see this pattern. I see that I want to keep my word, but I don't always do it. At that point, I don't know how to help him. We're at that point where we agree we. He wants to be better, and I want him to be better, but I don't know how to get to another level in him where he can say, I'm committed to this and I mean it.
Well, I think all of us as parents need to put the primary challenge on our own attitude, much more so than on helping our children. And so the focus needs to be much more on, as you said earlier, hitting them with disappointment. It needs to be much more with shifting that to, okay, I know, I'm disappointed. However, I'm really curious as to what your thought process is. We need to get out of our own ideals and work with our own attitudes. And if it's about changing the other, the odds of it happening are about 1 or 2%. Whereas if we're really primarily working with taking a greater interest in how our children are experiencing things, and we can acknowledge what we're feeling, but it's not a matter of having 10 exchanges with them where we keep sharing our feelings with them. So the disappointment needs to be secondary. The primary thing needs to be the curiosity about what he's thinking, the caring for where his present state is. And then after you've really, hopefully been able to lure him into sharing his reality, then you know what you're dealing with. Now, if he won't come out at all, like, let's say that he won't really share where he is, then you know that you're. You have even more of a challenge than what you thought. So you need to continue to ask yourself, how am I going to support my child to actually share his inner experience? Because the main difficulty is that the link isn't there yet. To be able to have him share his inner experience. And, and until he does, you're impotent.
And I feel in this case he didn't keep his word. I keep my word with him, I keep my word with him. If in this case I'm supporting him at college, he gets the money to get him through college. Now if I didn't have the money, that'd be different, but if I have it and I've promised it, he gets it. He didn't keep his word. And there's a part of me that wants to penalize him, that wants him to experience a consequence that is not simply being a therapist with him, you know, to be this empathic person and understand him. I want him to feel a consequence for his action and feel that if he doesn't have a consequence, he's not going to learn, he's not going to get the point, he's going to feel like he can talk his way or manipulate his way through.
I'm not questioning that. Ultimately you might need to give him a consequence. I'm talking about the process of a much longer term benefit for him, which is that he can share his inner experience with you and other people. If he's in a lifestyle where he's not going to share his inner thought process and you give him a consequence, the healing is going to be way more short term. Whereas if he starts to reveal, well, I thought it was really okay and not that big a deal, and then he starts to see that, you know what it really is a lack of integrity on my part. And I do feel shame. And you're not just the one telling him that's what's going to have a longer term healing. So the primary effort needs to be, I would say, 90% on supporting the child to be able to express themselves and 10% on sharing your feelings. Ultimately the consequence is probably the same, but the process is completely different.
And it's almost like if I consequence him, he'll clam up.
Exactly.
And there's no, I mean that. But again, I feel this frustration, which way to go? Am I just being a pushover wimp? Where he's behind, laughing, saying, hey, well I can do this again because yeah, I'll talk for an hour or two and that's probably worth it, assuming I'm effective. Maybe not, but maybe he's good at not being that communicative.
So what kind of questions could you ask him?
I think the one you said before is the key is how do you feel when you do this? You know, when you knowingly violate our agreement, which you said you did. He's already acknowledged that. What is your experience at that moment? What happens at that moment? How do you reflect on yourself? How do you feel that is, as a way of being.
So. You probably will notice that even as you ask those questions, they're tainted with your morality.
Actually, I didn't notice.
So there's a big difference between, well, how did you feel when you were doing so and so and so and so.
How did you feel when you were ripping me off.
Versus, you know, screw me, screw my morality. I want to know what you feel. You're old enough now where you're in your own world. I don't have that much influence over you, so tell me what you think. I don't want to lay a trip on you now. I ultimately might need to set my boundaries wherever they are, and I will. But you're the power. I need to face the fact that you're an individual and I need to treat you like an individual. And so, yeah, I have my strong points of view. And you know what? They are already. You already know what I'm going to say to you, so I'm going to contain my own feelings. I'm much more interested in what you think. So you're not coming in with those questions that are tainted with morality. You're actually really curious and you allow a silence. You allow him to squirm a little bit. And when he doesn't really share anything that's meaningful, you just let that gap hang there. And then you work with your own frustration, your own helplessness, your own morality. And then you come back with some version of, I'd still like you to think more about it because I recognize you're going to be the one that decides the fate of your life. Yeah.
