Children Fighting and Why Parents Must Treat Victims First

18-Jul-2024

Basic Triage ~ treat the victims first

Often parents will confront the perpetrator (the child who kicked or bit or threw something or whatever caused the injury) as soon as 'something happens,' and this doesn't work very well... let's use the parallel of a hit and run accident involving a pedestrian...

The car is speeding away with blood and whatnot on the bumper, and the pedestrian is lying in the road.

Do you chase the car? If there was an emergency responder at the scene should they chase the car first?

Leave the victim lying in the road, and go stop the driver, arrest them, charge them, see them in court and await the sentence to be carried out, then return to the victim?

Obviously no.

So, when parents take after the biter (or whatever) first, they're making sure the wrongdoer gets the sentence before dealing with the victim.

This is backwards for so many reasons, but the reason it backfires so badly is threefold:

1. The biter (or hitter, or kicker, or whatever) is now faced with an angry parent. When kids feel overpowered or scared by their parents' anger they go one of two ways: inside, or outside.

When kids go inside, they hide or dissociate or distract themselves or otherwise become unavailable to whatever the adult's trying to get through to them.

When kids go outside, they explain or justify their behaviour, fight The Man, argue for the defense, or otherwise become unavailable to whatever the adult's trying to get through to them.

So, that doesn't work. Pointless to try.

2. The injured party feels abandoned or secondary to the issue of Justice, and has to deal with their injuries on their own. That they will also turn inside... or outside.

When an injured child goes inside, they hide, explain why they deserved to be treated this way or that the other people hate them, feel ignored or passed over, and have a pity party about how unfair the world is to them.

When an injured child goes outside, they wait and plot revenge, feel rage at their boundaries being over-run, and build up a lot of stress and anger that gets acted out.

So, that doesn't work, either. Not good.

3. When the injury is handled first, none of #2 happens at all. The victim is soothed, treated, feels cared for, and gets what they need to heal and re-regulate after a shock, scare, or hurt. Empathy*, such as 'you felt so shocked when your arm started hurting so suddenly when you were having fun playing...'

While that is happening, the perpetrator (biter, hitter... yeah) has an unobstructed view of their impact on the other person, without anything pushing them inward or outward so they can't see or hear 'what the problem with your action' is: they can see it. It's right there.

They remain defenseless, because they do not feel 'under attack' ~ because your focus is where it belongs: on the injury.

They have no need to explain or justify what they did ~ because what they did is no part of the conversation led by the adult.

They feel no panic in the face of an angry adult. No angry adult.

Spontaneous Apologies

It will come as somewhat a surprise to many adults that, when kids can clearly see what their impact has been, they will frantically try to apologize, help, give gifts, or otherwise attempt to make amends, often long before the adult has finished dealing with the first aid.

This is just a happy side effect of handling an injury in the most appropriate way.

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*Empathy that doesn't carry any hint of blame for who did what, just pure 'you felt this emotion when this happened to you when you needed that other thing...' When you're new to this, it's HARD to keep the blame out of it, as we're so socially conditioned to always seek the Who's At Fault piece. Since that can't help anyone feel soothed, heal any kind of injury, nor restore anyone to a sense of safety or inner calm, it's best to skip it entirely.

Linda Clement is a parenting coach who works with highly successful parents who are seeking to break the cycle of transgenerational trauma. If you're ready to leave a legacy your great-grandchildren will thrive with, you're invited to start here with half an hour on Linda's calendar...

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