Self Awareness
Children lack self-awareness. They are not alone in this. Many adults lack it as well. In fact I think everyone fails to recognize their own motivations at some point or another. It can be very frustrating to me because I can see both the behavior and the needs which drive it. I can see when the behavior actually makes the needs less likely to be met rather than more.
Today Kiki called me from school. She was rambling and tired on the phone. She mentioned that her head hurts and then requested that I bring her bag to school. The contents of this all important bag were pencils and erasers. She was requesting me to take 20 minutes out of my day to deliver pencils to the school. What she really wanted was sympathy, and mom to come to the rescue so she can feel loved, and possibly even that mom would see how poorly she is feeling and just bring her home. Unfortunately she’s been calling me to rescue her a lot lately. After the last time, I warned her that me delivering items to her at school would cost extra chores and would only be done in case of emergency. Pencils do not qualify as an emergency. I told her to borrow a pencil from someone. She said “I’m mad at you!” and hung up. By the time she got home, she wasn’t mad at me anymore and I offered all the sympathy and nurturing that she’d wanted in the first place.
My other daughter Gleek is also frequently lacking in self-awareness. She will end up in fights with other kids and be righteously angry with their actions. But when I start sorting through all the he said / she said and accusations, I invariably discover that Gleek provoked the other child to the point that the child had to defend themselves. Then Gleek is angry and hurt by the defense. But I can’t get Gleek to see it. And spending hours trying to explain how the conflicts are her fault don’t do her any good. They just make her feel bad about herself and that suppressed emotion makes the next conflict much more likely. So much of it is driven by sadness and feeling left out. Gleek feels these things and so she provokes the other kids into paying attention to her. Not all the time. Many times she is loving and thoughtful. Many times she plays with friends peacefully. But some days I just want to put her in a room by herself until the mood to provoke passes.
My girls aren’t alone in not seeing their motivations. When Link is faced with a task he does not want to complete, he gets angry and obstructionist. He lashes out at everyone and claims that they are preventing him from concentrating. He tries to pick fights because the resulting argument delays the task. And he can’t see why he is doing it. On some level he knows he is being unpleasant and he feels badly about it, but he can’t just see the task he doesn’t want and plow through it. I have to corner him and not let him escape.
In my kids’ defense, I think they are far more self-aware than other kids their age. They have a mom who pulls them aside and points out what they are doing and why. I doubt they like when I do that. But I can’t help but try to teach them what I see. I can’t just look at behaviors, I have to ferret out why they exist. I have to understand what is going on. I do it to myself too, except that I’m sure I don’t have a clear view on me. Just as a person has difficulty seeing the back of her own head. I need to remember that when I feel frustrated about what my kids don’t see.