Terry—
For what it’s worth, this is an example of how I would handle a scenario regarding leaving the playground after a 5 minute notice with my youngest (mostly, it doesn’t get past stage 3):
“Alright, the phone timer is going off—it’s time to roll.”
If she gets upset:
“I think you’re probably frustrated ‘cuz you’re having a good time and you want to keep playing, right? But we need to transition now, ok?”
If she starts screaming:
“Honey, I know you’re frustrated about leaving. I get it. Im not trying to be mean, we just need to be at the bus stop when your sister’s school bus gets there. Can you please cooperate?
Continued ristance:
“Sweetie, I’ve asked you 3 times. I want to give you xyz later like we talked about, but I really need you to cooperate or your consequence is that you won’t get xyz. Please let me help you find a calm voice and a calm body. Can we do some bubble breathing together?”
Screaming persists:
“Ok, I’m gonna count to 3 now. (She knows this means she has 3 seconds to cooperate or she will get some kind of consequence.)
“One…two…thr—“
Cooperates 90% if the time.
———
While it’s true that, in general, I try to approach things with the objective/holistic category you designated, there are specific scenarios where I literally don’t feel the need to because the natural consequence of not doing what’s requested tends to do the work—it’s therefore also not worth having things escalate for me, either. Refusing to wear a coat on a cold day is such a situation where I will take a subjective/holistic approach and just let them see for themselves the reasonableness of a request. They hate being cold.
Of course we are talking about dilemas and complexity dynamics related to small children, and since that’s all that I have (small children), that’s all I will speak to.
A couple additional thoughts:
In actual practice the whole idea of whether or not a feeling is valid or not, doesn’t really come into play, overtly. I personally think the spectrum of emotions that could be experienced by a kid based on their perception of a situation is valid in the sense that it makes sense to them and is coherent. In practice, this could largely be considered a semantical discrepancy concerning how folks define “valid”. Personally, I can see it making a difference at some point though, especially when they are older.
I’ve heard it proposed that there are three parenting styles: permissive, authoritative, and authoritarian. Personally, I try to parent authoritatively. I think that’s the sweet spot between the other two. I think that what category style that a parent might tend towards could also play into where the end up falling on the objective to subjective validation spectrum we’ve been talking about.
My wife and I share a general commonality on our philosophy, but she tends towards being more permissive than I do. This does create added complexity in our family. Luckily the divergence isn’t too huge.
Cheers.
