Listening and Dreaming

When Dana was 6 years old, she came home one day, very sad.  She said, “I wish I look like other girls in my class (she was the only Asian girl, and the majority of girls in her class are Anglo-Saxon descents).”  This wasn’t the first time she made similar remarks.  Having read the book, “How to listen so your child will talk and how to talk so your child will listen (by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish)”, I was finally ready to address this problem.  I sat her down at the couch and got a pencil and paper.  I said, “Imagine that we have magic to change your look, what would you want to change?”  We went from hair color, eyes, nose, all the way down to skin color.  It turned out that she was okay with her eyes, nose and mouth (Whew!).  The only features that she wanted to change were hair color and skin color.  That made her a little bit happier.  Then I said, “I wish that I had the magic to give you what you want, but if you want, you could dye your hair when you grow up.”  She smiled and that was the end of her wanting to be like a white girl.  Well, nowadays, her wishes and wants focus more on body type and sizes of thigh, legs and waist, but that’s another story.

What really worked here are two things, one is that I acknowledged her needs and she felt being understood.  Without being heard and understood, a child couldn’t get over her emotion to look at the problem more objectively.  The other is that we found the supporting evidence mentioned in the “thought lie detector” from the book of “More than saying I love you” by Andrea Goodman Weiner (which I mentioned in blog 2).  Through analyzing and actually going through all the parts that she might want to change, we got the supporting evidence that things were not “that” bad as she had imagined.  We are often too busy to listen to what our child is trying to tell us and too eager to solve the problem for him/her.  In my very short time of studying to be a counselor and my personal experiences with my family, I learned that you couldn’t just hand a solution to someone.  It would almost always be rejected if that person is still dealing with his/her emotions.  Then frustration comes in on both sides.  When we face another adult’s worries and complaints, we are more able to use empathic listening and support her to come to a solution on her own.  Shouldn’t we try to do it with our children, too?