Noticing the tries

Every so often I come across something in my reading that states something I intuitively understood but had never put into words. Once again, in my reading about horses, I found something extremely pertinent to parenting children, especially those that are struggling for whatever reason. I'm going to share a fairly long quote with you and then discuss it a bit, but first my usual disclaimer. No, I'm not comparing children to animals. You all know that right? But very often we can learn from listening to animals something about communicating with our children who are too scared to so anything but react, often in fairly unpleasant ways, to their circumstances. While the author talks about training horses, he is really doing more listening to horses. To avoid comments I'd rather not have to deal with, I am in no way suggesting we train behavior into children. Actually, I'm suggesting the exact opposite. And if you are not a horse person, just go ahead and slog through any horse terms you are not familiar with, they are not vital to the story.

"After working that gelding, I made a much bigger effort to look for and find the tries that my horses offered during training or any other time, for that matter. In doing so, I quickly found just how much I had been missing in the simple communication between my horses and myself.

For instance, I noticed that my horses often tried to respond to my cues much sooner than I'd ever imagined. Often time they would respond even before I had actually applied the cue, a pretty scary thought in and of itself.

The other thing I noticed was that very often the try was so subtle that, had I not been paying attention, I would have missed it altogether. As a result, I was forced to become much more aware of what my horses were doing at all times, not just when I was asking something from them.

People often ask me what, in my opinion, constitutes a try from the horse when a cue is given. Well, that's a tough one. It's been my experience that a try can be anything from a flying lead change to the flick of an ear, depending on the circumstance and the horse.   ...

One of the biggest problems I see when working with folks and their horses is that the vast majority of people have been trained to always look for the bad things their horses do. Because they're always looking for the bad, they easily overlook the little tries and sometimes have trouble seeing the good in their horse, even when the good jumps up and bites them in the butt.  ...

Throughout my career working with horses, one thing the old man taught me remained a constant -- if I was willing to fight with a horse, the horse was almost always willing to fight back. The thing was, there were always a couple of problems in fighting with horses. The first was that any time I fought with a horse, it usually ended up being meaningless to the horse in the end. The second was that anytime I argued with a horse, I always seemed to breach whatever trust that horse had in me. It usually took quite a while for me to prove myself trustworthy to the horse afterwards."  - from Horses Never Lie by Mark Rashid (pp. 126;128;140)

When the author talks about 'the tries', he is referring to those instances where he asked the horse to do something and the horse might not have responded as he wished, but the horse tried to do something. It was the effort that horse was making at understanding what was asked. It is this concept that I had never put into words in regards to parenting. I have said for a very long time that children do the best with what they have, but something what they have is not very much. This is the corollary that I was missing. Very often there is some small (sometimes minuscule) effort that a child is making, but that effort is all they have to offer. The problem is, we, as parents, are looking for something bigger and we miss the little try that is about all our child is capable of doing. Instead we focus on all the ways they haven't done what we asked. If we can catch the little tries, we miss being on our child's team; we miss a tiny little success that can give us a toe hold into encouraging them.

Looking for the tries encourages us to look for what the child is positively doing. It is so easy to fall into the habit of only noticing the bad... and I know that when dealing with challenging behavior, the "bad" can feel pretty overwhelming. In that case, it is even more important to be vigilant to look for the tries because the tries of a child who is that disregulated is only going to be able to manage very little ones. During out last EFL training session last weekend, I was speaking with a learner who ran a school for children who struggled in traditional schools. She mentioned that for some students, it was the very little things you needed to notice, even such little things as picking up a pencil when asked. Becoming vigilant for the tries does mean that we are shifting our focus and not dwelling quite so much on the challenges. 

Finally, by looking for the tries, we avoid the battles because we have seen and acknowledged the efforts, small as they may be. Anyone who has entered into a power struggle with a child ultimately realizes that it is a lose-lose situation even if the child has at some point given way. It is a Pyrrhic victory. In winning that battle, so much else has been lost, most importantly that you are someone who can be trusted; that you are a safe person. Without that trust, the tries will get smaller and smaller as fear crowds out more and more any capability for doing so. Trust and felt-safety must come before anything else, and what better way to build trust than to notice the tries?