Helping children learn honesty is a huge part of them developing a secure experience with us. But it's less about extinguishing lying and more about creating an environment for them to feel safe being open with us.
Three tips for helping create that environment:
1. Recognize and manage your own anxiety and any impulse to use honesty as a way to control your children. Honesty and pressure to perform don't mix easily.
2. Understand that lying is developmentally normal and has a wide range of variance. Don't treat all lies as psychopathic impulses. Teach and validate their wide ranging nuances.
3. Remember that honesty flourishes where messiness is understood and given empathy.
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In this video, learn about the power of empathy when dealing with anger, but also be warned about the limits of empathy in the context of abusive mentalities, where anger is used to justify harmful behavior.
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Teaching healthy conflict resolution to our children means modeling it for them, which requires communicating and connecting through conflict without fighting dirty or being violent.
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In this video, you'll learn that one of the most important skills we can give our children is the ability to apologize and repair in a relationship, primarily by watching what we model, with the two important elements being the absence of shame and the presence of true understanding of what the other person felt or experienced as a result of our actions or inactions.
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