EveryDay Strong Advice: Dealing with an unmotivated child
If children aren’t thriving, it’s not because they don’t want to be successful, it’s because there are barriers keeping them from being successful.
Dear EveryDay Strong, what can I do to help my unmotivated, defiant child?
I recently had a mom bring in her 13-year-old boy from a rural Utah community to come see me. I asked what brought them in, and the mom brought out a list of problems she had with her son, saying that he was defiant, oppositional, addicted to this and that, manipulative, frequently lied, etc. They were acting like his behavior was a result of him choosing to act a certain way, because he was unmotivated.
I knew that this boy did not feel emotionally safe to be himself, express himself and did not feel understood. Whenever I bring safety into a situation with a child, it feels like magic to the parents and the child, but it’s not. After the boy’s mother finished with the list of her son’s problems, I turned to him and said, “I bet that you wish people knew how hard you were trying. I bet you wish you could tell people how deeply you felt about things not going as well as you’d like. I bet that you feel unappreciated and unseen as you’re trying to go through this. It’s probably a little bit hard to listen to your mom talk like this.”
All I did was validate back to him some of the things he was likely feeling. This teenager started crying, and it became a turning point for his mother. She started to want to listen and talk about how he’s been feeling.
This is not the first time that I’ve had a situation like this. It can seem like I’m a mind reader, but I’m just responding to human needs. There’s something so universal about what every human needs. Every person wants to be able to feel safe and open up, and wants others to know that they are trying in life.
Every person wants to be successful. People just need their needs met for emotional safety, connection and confidence in order be successful. When you really believe this, your perspective on life changes. You’ll stop saying that people are lazy, don’t have a vision and don’t know where they’re going in life. You’ll stop saying that they’re manipulative and oppositional and anything else, that’s a label or insult. You’ll start trying to put yourself into the shoes of other people, which is one of the best ways to help them feel safe. You’ll say, “I bet, despite all that’s going on, what we need to work on is for you to feel more safe and comfortable in who you are. Maybe there’s more we could do to meet your needs.”
Believing in meeting people’s emotional needs for safety, connection and confidence takes some faith. It can be a big change to start thinking about creating emotional safety for your child to feel like it’s OK to be them, to fail, to try new things, to feel big feelings and to make mistakes. But if you can create safety for your child, and then you connect with them, it communicates to your child that you are thrilled to watch them grow, you love being a part of their life and that you’re going to be a part of their life no matter what. You’re telling them that you’ll ride this roller coaster of life with them, no matter where it goes.
When kids look unmotivated, there’s a number of reasons for that. It’s complicated, but it typically doesn’t have to do with rewards and consequences. Often, it has a lot to do with control. If someone controls my life and tells me exactly how I have to do my job, what my schedule’s going to look like and I don’t have any control at all, my motivation will be quite low. If we trust kids, express confidence in them and give them some control back into their lives, they’ll be more likely to grow and flourish.
Often, parents are out of touch with their own anxiety. Parents think they know what life is like and want to prepare kids for it, but that’s often their own anxieties coming out rather than the child’s. When parents come to me and say that their child is not going anywhere, it makes me wonder where the parents planned on their child going. Sometimes where you want your child to go is not the same as where they want to go, and your standards are not the same. If you believe that kids want to be successful, then you need to step back a little and remember that a parent’s main job is to create an environment that includes safety, connection and confidence.
