Connection Before Correction
Not just a parenting strategy (but a good one for all relationships).
There is a phrase or mantra that I often suggest to parents — not just parents, but mostly parents. It can be important to remember in adult relationships too, for reasons I’ll explain later.
The phrase is:
I don’t know who to attribute this phrase to; it’s been around in the psychology world for a while. Kim Golding talks about it in 2015 but I can’t be sure that it didn’t originate elsewhere.
Anyway, the important questions are what does it mean and how do we do it?
What does it mean?
“Connection before correction” means that it’s helpful for a child, who is still learning (more than us grown ups are) about feelings, for an adult to connect with their feeling, state, experience, need or desire before providing teaching or correction on their behaviour or expression.
But what does it really mean, in practice? How do we do it?
Ok, let’s say a child becomes frustrated with something they’re trying to do and it’s not working out. They swipe it off the table and stomp off. A parent might say, “Hey, look after your stuff! Pick that up or you won’t have it next time!” (Correction without connection). Connection before correction would be more like, “Hey, seems like you got pretty frustrated with that — is it something I can help with? You’ll need to pick it up for us to try again”.
It’s important to remember that if you can’t quite find the words that would allow you to connect with their experience, you can always just offer them a hug. Hugs are connective experiences, they help children to regulate (if they’ll accept them) and might well have benefits for you, too. Correction that follows a hug is likely to be better received.
OK, so what about adults?
One of the really neat things about this little mantra is that it works in all kinds of relationships. The way that you connect and the way that you correct will vary, of course, depending on the age of the other person and your relationship with them (maybe you won’t offer to hug it out with your boss, who knows) but the basic principle — connect before correct — works in many situations.
For example, in a romantic relationship, someone expresses to the other that they have been hurt by something that person had done, and the other person responds with something a bit defensive, like “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that”, or “Don’t you think that’s a bit of an over-reaction?”. Whereas if they went for connection before correction, they might say, “Oh, I can see why you might have thought that, but I really didn’t mean it to come across like that”, or “I can tell that this really got to you, I’m sorry, I’m finding your reaction a bit difficult though — can we talk it through?”. Or something along those lines.
So hopefully you can get an idea from these examples of the power of this simple (but often not easy) technique. The temptation is to jump straight to the teaching, correcting, or defending bit. But the teaching part is much easier to hear if you connect first. And you want to make it “hearable” — you can read more about that here.
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