Very often I get asked, by people who have seen this circle of security graphic, that they\u2019re a bit confused about this thing down here at the bottom that says, \u201cAlways be bigger, stronger, or wiser and kinder\u201d. It\u2019s easy to think about, it\u2019s easy to understand that a parent\u2019s job is to be wiser and kind. Sometimes it\u2019s a little more confusing to think about the parent\u2019s job also as being bigger and stronger. And it\u2019s just because the child is, is still vulnerable, is still developing, could get in trouble, doesn\u2019t yet have the kind of wisdom that he\u2019s going to have when he\u2019s an adult, and so, in order to stay protected, in order to survive, children are actually wired to want a parent who is bigger and stronger. And they look for that in a parent. But bigger and stronger doesn\u2019t necessarily mean \u201cmean\u201d. It doesn\u2019t mean nasty. It doesn\u2019t mean angry. Bigger and stronger means that the child gets this message, \u201cIf something goes wrong, I\u2019m big enough and I\u2019m strong enough to take care of you, and take care of it\u201d. And that\u2019s what children really want. But most important here is that, there are those four things: bigger, stronger, wiser, and kind. And the really important thing is to have all four. And to have some balance in all four. Because if you are bigger and stronger, but you\u2019re not kind, then you\u2019re going to come across as intimidating, scary, and angry. If you are wiser and kind, but you\u2019re not bigger and stronger, your child\u2019s not going to feel safe because if something happens, \u201cThere\u2019s nobody there for me who\u2019s big enough and strong enough to take care of it. So you do need all four, but you need to keep them in balance with one another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the thing is, it\u2019s all these little moments, sometimes we think, sometimes we think that it\u2019s the big things. Does the child, is the child in a good preschool? Is the child in a good school? Period. Does the child have lots of friends? That those big ticket items, so to speak, are the really important ones. And it turns out, that what this research is showing is that, that\u2019s not so true. It\u2019s all those little moments, on a minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day basis that really are the things that put a child on a good developmental pathway, and keep him on that good developmental pathway. So these little moments are really, really important for parents to pay attention to. And these little moments are actually more important than the really big things. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it doesn\u2019t mean we have to be perfect. It doesn\u2019t mean that at all. You don\u2019t have to be successful at this 100% of the time. So as parents, we can relax a little bit. No one knows the exact percentage but just to give you an idea, maybe 75% of the time. Just really so long as it\u2019s predictable to the child that this is the way it\u2019s going to work, but it doesn\u2019t have to be 100% of the time <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Very often I get asked, by people who have seen this circle of security graphic, that they\u2019re a bit confused about this thing down here at the bottom that says, \u201cAlways be bigger, stronger, or wiser and kinder\u201d. It\u2019s easy to think about, it\u2019s easy to understand that a parent\u2019s job is to be wiser […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1790","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1790"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1791,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1790\/revisions\/1791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}