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Getting Behind The Eyes of Your Child
By Dr. William Sears
We also used the getting-behind-the-eyes-of-a-child approach when deciding where it was best for our infants to sleep. First, we believe that there is no right or wrong place for an infant to sleep -- it's where all family members get the best night's sleep, and that may be a different arrangement at various stages of a child's development. In deciding whether it was wise for our infant to sleep in our bed or in a crib, we got behind the eyes of our baby. We asked ourselves, "If we were infants, would we rather sleep alone in a dark room -- behind bars -- or nestled securely close to parents?" Once we looked at it this way, the choice for co-sleeping versus solo-sleeping was an obvious one.
Getting behind the eyes of your child helps you act like a mature adult in figuring out the best discipline approach on the spur of the moment. One day our 2-year-old, Lauren, impulsively grabbed a carton of milk out of the refrigerator and spilled it on the floor. We were already late for where we were going and I was about to get angry at Lauren. Yet, we saw Lauren was about to disintegrate, knowing that she had displeased her parents. Martha, the master empathizer, calmly walked over, squatted down to Lauren's level, put her hand on her shoulder and started talking softly to her. Lauren immediately stopped crying, hugged her mommy, and we all cleaned up the mess.
I later asked Martha what she did to calm Lauren so quickly. Martha said that she asked herself, "If I were Lauren, what would I want my mother to say?" Kids do annoying things, not maliciously, but because they don't think like adults. You are likely to have a miserable day if you let every kid-created mess bother you. It would have been easy for us to click into the "Oh, no! Now I have to clean up this mess" mindset. Yet, getting out of yourself and into your child saves mental strain. You don't have to clean up the mess in your mind along with the milk on the floor.