Toward a Eupsychian Parenting
A new study contends that verbal abuse of children “can be as damaging as physical or sexual abuse”, as much as doubling their likelihood for negative outcomes as adults. Surely, no parent truly intends to cause lifelong damage to their child. To help us reduce our children’s chances of negative outcomes we can apply the same techniques that are used in the business world to reduce negative outcomes. This involves helping individuals shift to team-based mindsets and also to a team-based way of communication.
We should first realize that both adults and children are naturally motivated toward doing what is beneficial for themselves and the group/s that they are members of when they are in healthy(eupsychian) environments, but unhealthy environments negatively impact this natural motivation. The realities of the past and present may not fit the term “healthy”, but everything we do from this day on has the potential to improve outcomes.
For parents our shift to a team mindset will require us to start seeing ourselves as leaders. Ideal leaders will function as servants to their team members. This creates enthusiasm to follow the leader’s direction because team members feel respected and develop a need to return that respect. Unhealthy mindsets and communication are learned over decades, or even generations. Improvements will take effort and may not happen overnight.
Psychological health refers to a person’s overall mental and emotional well-being. The healthy, psychologically safe environment that a leader creates tends to lead to big increases in the psychological health of team members and likewise to their need for autonomy(to make one’s own decisions according to what they deem valuable). This requires that leaders help develop team members into valuing things that are important to the team. This includes things like productivity, betterment, altruism, or even survival.
Once mindset transforming has begun we can work on communication. The authors of Raising Good Humans and How to Talk So Little kids Will Listen list numerous things that are barriers to communication including: ordering, threatening, blaming and accusing, name calling, lecturing, and dismissing. Most of these things are pretty straightforward, but there is one that is not always straightforward and that is also very destructive to autonomy: ordering. What we find is that orders tend to start with action verbs.
The opposite of ordering is asking, or specifically: asking if a person can do something. Although combining action verbs with an asking voice has become commonplace, it is far better to use both asking words and voice. Instead of saying: “Take the trash out”, we can ask: “Could/Can you take the trash out?” If we are unsure if a person is able to do something and/or to increase our chance of getting a reply, we could ask: “Are you able to take the trash out?” Surely, some readers are now thinking that this would never work. We just need to trust that once a team environment is created, team members are always looking to do things for the good of the team.
Using “we” is another way of getting individuals to do something while also reinforcing a team mindset: “We need to take the trash out.” Motivated individuals who have the resources(in this case: time) are motivated to complete the task. It is often beneficial/important that individuals know what, why, and/or when something needs to be done so that they can eventually take care of the task independently: “… because the trash truck comes on Fridays.” Asking for a volunteer often works even better: “Is there anyone who can take the trash out?” This motivates the individual with the most resources to volunteer to complete the task. This is real efficiency.
At the end of the day we still live in a world where success is often hard to achieve. By producing a team environment we can reduce negative outcomes and increase individual and group success. To conclude, we can look to the words of Sir Michael Marmot: “What we are trying to create is a better society that promotes human flourishing.” For those interested in how eupsychian principles can benefit the world of work, Toward a Eupsychian Management was written for just such purpose.
