To Coach or Not to Coach
The Fine Line Between Helping and Hindering

continued

To minimize these backfires, I recommend that parents "take their kid's emotional temperature" before being generous with help. This means asking open-ended questions or making non-threatening observations to find out how receptive the child may be towards help. Comments such as "Maybe we could talk about that since I think we could both learn a thing or two," doesn't present the parent as the one with all the answers. Instead, it places parent and child in the same role of learning from events.

Of course, some kids don't offer a lot about what's happening in their lives, but they may demonstrate how they're feeling about those events. Angry expressions, attempts to discredit parents' help, and/or rampant justifications for why they don't need help, suggest that the coaching bridge between parent and child may be closed for the time being. Parents are wise to back off in the face of these barriers to help, but they should stress that help remains available should the child be ready at some other point.

The importance of how parents present their offers of coaching can not be overestimated. It's much easier to send a child reeling away from our offers than it is to establish a safe dialogue within which to receive it. Comments such as, "I want to give you some help with that," or even "Let's talk about that," can quickly send a child into a defensive mode. Some children are so sensitive to having their autonomy threatened that they experience a parent's coaching as the imposition of control.

When the child sounds off with protests such as "You're pressuring me!" or "Stop pushing so hard!" this signals the need for some preliminary groundwork. The groundwork can be likened to preparing soil for cultivation; don't expect a child's self-management skills to grow and flourish without the proper environment. The proper environment for coaching considers the whole child, not just their areas of need. A forthcoming article addresses the many concerns inherent in the "whole child" concept. For the purposes of this column I will continue to confine my comments to autonomy.

Cultivating acceptance of coaching in a child whose feelings of autonomy are easily threatened is a daunting task. One of the first steps is to establish a dialogue wherein the two of you can safely discuss what coaching is supposed to be and what it isn't supposed to be. It may even be helpful to write down two headings, such as "good coaching" and "bad coaching" and then start placing examples under each heading.

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