Special announcement! I’m in Seattle today and super thankful for the opportunity to join the Gottman Training Specialists to lead the next group of future Bringing Baby Home educators. I’m officially in training as an upcoming Bringing Baby Home Training Specialist! Hope to post pictures tomorrow! Woo hoo!
Greetings & Goodbyes: the 6 second kiss
The challenge this month is to share rituals of connection within our families.
We start by sharing greetings and goodbyes that show our family members how important they are to us. So this week, when you say hello or goodbye to your partner, make the kiss a good one! Aim for a 6 second kiss! Check out this video for inspiration. Although I don't know this lady, her video is inspiring!
Open Ended Questions: What if...
Our goal this month is to improve our skills at asking open ended questions, so that we can get to know one another over time. This week we are getting to know the things that our partner hopes and imagines (the "what if's". Here are some questions to get you started:
- If you could live one other person’s life, whose life would you choose and why?
- If you could live during any other time period in history, when would you choose to live and why?
- What do you imagine your life would be like if you lived 100 years from now?
- If you could design the perfect house for us, what would it look like?
- If you could choose any other career or vocation other than what you do now, what would you choose and why?
- If you could wake up tomorrow with three new skills in which you excelled, what would they be and why?
- If you could change into any animal for 24 hours, what would it be and why?
- If you could live in any other country but your home country, which would you pick and why?
- If you could experience being any other person for 24 hours, who would you pick and why?
Check out the Gottman Card Decks app for more.
Or improve your skills at Bringing Baby Home on October 13-14.
Open Ended Questions: The Future
Our goal this month is to improve our skills at asking open ended questions, so that we can get to know one another over time. This week we are getting to know each other's hopes for the future. Here are some questions to get you started:
What do you want your life to be like in, say, three years from now?
How do you see your work changing in the future?
Open Ended Questions: The Present
Our goal this month is to improve our skills at asking open ended questions, so that we can get to know one another over time. This week we are getting to know each other's daily experience in the present. Here are some questions to get you started:
Is our child like anyone in your family? Who?
How do you think we could have more fun in our life?
Open Ended Questions: The past
Our goal this month is to improve our skills at asking open ended questions, so that we can get to know one another over time. This week we are getting to know each other's past. Here are some questions to get you started:
How would you compare yourself as a mother/father to your own mother/father?
How have you changed in the last year?
Are we partners? Or enemies?
When we need something, it is easy to look at our partner as the enemy instead of as a teammate. How can we work together as one team fighting against the issues that come up this week? How can we give our partner the benefit of the doubt? How can we look for ways to find compromise when our needs are in conflict? How can we use conflict as an opportunity to better understand who we are and what we need? Are there ways that we can take responsibility for our part of the problem?
Gentle start-up: a key to expressing needs respectfully
According to the Gottmans' research, the way a conversation starts is likely the way that it will end. So if we start with criticism or contempt, we are likely to end with defensiveness or stonewalling. But if we start gently, we are more likely to have a productive conversation. Some keys to a gentle start-up include: expressing appreciation; making statements that start with "I", such as "I'm upset" or "I'm angry"; describing the facts of the situation; and clearly describing what we need. Check out this video from Julie Gottman to hear more.
Appreciation: a key to being heard
According to Dr. Gottman’s research, the masters of relationship had 20 times more positive interactions than negative interactions during everyday interactions, and five times more positive than negative interactions during times of conflict. Our ratio of positive to negative interactions is strong when our relationships are full of fondness, affection, gratitude and humor. When we create rituals that build gratitude and affection for one another, we are putting our relationship in what Dr. Gottman calls “the positive perspective”.
Expressing needs: calm down first
I wanted to start our expressing needs challenge with a quick reminder that it’s really hard to think clearly or have empathy for our families when we are physically upset (Dr. Gottman calls it “flooded”). If we notice that our heart rates are high and our bodies are tense, we may need to start off by taking a good break. What is the nature of a good break? It is at least 20 minutes long. It is thinking about something else besides the argument. By the time the break is over, our bodies are physically relaxed, and our hearts and minds are calm.
The August Challenge: Expressing Needs Clearly and Respectfully
The August "Expressing Needs Clearly & Respectfully" Challenge: https://mailchi.mp/3768881f81c2/aug-2018-expressing-needs-clearly-and-respectfully-challenge
Obstacles to filling emotional bank accounts: distraction
As adults, many conflicts begin when our needs go unmet. Maybe we express our need when our partner is busy doing something else. Or perhaps we feel scared that our partner won't be willing or able to meet our need, so we don't express it or we use hints to "test the waters." A key strategy of the Gottman Bringing Baby Home program is to express our needs clearly and regularly so that they don't build up or escape our mouths as criticism or contempt. (Dr. Gottman calls this a negative bid - expressing our bid, or request, in a negative way).
Baby Cues
This month we are exploring how to build our family’s emotional bank account by responding to each other’s needs. We are working to become more aware of how we each express our needs (bids). This week we are exploring the ways that infants and toddlers express their needs. We know that in the early stages of language development, parents have to be the detective to figure out what the cries, sounds, and movements mean. Over time, babies figure out that they can use their cries, sounds, and movements to have an impact on the people in their world.
The Empathy Reflex
As we work together to read each other‘s words and body language to figure out each other‘s needs, it can be useful to think about what Dr. John Medina calls the empathy reflex. In his book Brain Rules for Baby, he describes what he calls the empathy reflex. The empathy reflex is a habit that we can build to identify how the other person feels and make a guess about why they might feel that way. This can help us to bridge the gap between the behaviors that we can see in the other person and the intentions that we can’t see.
Step 2: Respond to bids mindfully
The next step in this challenge is to slow down, breathe, recognize bids, and RESPOND MINDFULLY.
In the Bringing Baby Home class, Dr. Gottman talks about the importance of recognizing bids and responding to them intentionally. The motto of the workshop is "small things often."
When we notice that our partner or our child is making a bid for connection, we have several ways that we can respond.
1. We can turn towards. This means that we respond to their request for connection by connecting with them.
Step 1: Recognizing bids
The first step in this challenge is to slow down, breathe, and then RECOGNIZE BIDS.
As I mentioned in this month's newsletter, a bid is defined as the way that a person expresses what they need at the moment.
Some examples of bids that our partner might make include:
- A bid for our attention, such as calling our name or saying "Look at this"
Helping kids to slow down and breathe...
Let's take a look at different ways that we can slow down with our kids to savor the moment together.
I recently discovered a book called "Breathe Like a Bear" by Kira Willey. It is full of ideas for ways to teach little ones to breathe! Kira is also a songwriter. Check out her music on your favorite music player! I've been enjoying "Bunny Breath" and others! A few of her strategies include:
Pretending that we are drinking hot chocolate, taking sips and saying a long "mmmm" or slowly blowing it to cool it down.
The "Slow down and breathe" challenge part 3: The benefits
When we do manage to slow down and have dedicated time to just breathe and observe our children, we may find that we can be intentional to think about what we enjoy, we can savor the moments as children grow so quickly, and we might even learn something new about the way that our children grow.
For example: once upon a time there was a baby who was struggling to sleep. His mama was so tired and frustrated, because no matter what she did, he woke up after just a 30-40 minute nap.
Can we parents really eliminate hurry?
One of my favorite quotes is from John Ortberg and Dallas Willard, "Ruthlessly eliminate hurry." But how realistic is that? Check out this blog post as we join other parents who struggle with this challenge with us.
Slowing down
As I mentioned in my newsletter this week, the challenge this month is to slow down and breathe.
If you watch the Gottman Institute's "What's Baby Saying?" video, Dr. Gottman explains that "it is important to realize that babies operate on a much, much slower time scale than adults. You may remember when you were a child, a summer seemed to last forever. Now as you get older, summers go by very, very quickly. Because the world is so much slower for children, it takes time for a baby to react to things.
