What you say — and how you say it — gives your child messages for life

“If you keep pushing your friends when they touch your toys nobody will like you.”

“If you don’t return their calls soon they’ll stop calling.”

Parents are so wise. Even better they are always willing to share their wisdom to help their kids be successful in life. It’s true that mistreating people can lead to troubled or nonexistent relationships and it’s great that parents would want to teach their kids about this fact of life. If a tip here and there can save the youngsters a little of the pain of learning everything the hard way why not offer it?

More Harm than Good

In fact “helpful tips” can sometimes do more harm than good. It’s not that parents mean to do damage it’s that they often aren’t aware of the pitfalls of parent-child communication. There are two factors that can transform a benign conversation into one that causes harm:

1. the hypnotic power of the parent and the highly suggestible nature of the child — that is the power of the childhood trance state

2. the way grammar works when processed in the trance state

Children under 12 are more suggestible than older kids and adults. This is the result of the fact that their brains are more dominated by the alpha waves (the brain waves used when one is relaxed and/or daydreaming). This begins to change in adolescence as beta brain waves — those used when concentrating or using reasoning — become more dominant increasing the activities of the conscious mind.

The master hypnotists in a person’s life are his or her parents. These people have everything it takes to effectively hypnotize a person: power differential credibility trusting relationship authority and more. The combined effect of the child’s brain waves and the adult’s power to influence creates a situation in which parents can install lifelong patterns of feeling and thinking in their children’s mind. A child believes what his parents say far more than his parents would want him to.

But this isn’t the full picture. The second point above — the way grammar works when processed in the trance state — also has a significant impact. In short descriptive clauses and negative words like “don’t” and “not” tend to get dropped while the main clause is retained as a recorded message in the brain. Therefore as far as the mind is concerned the sentence “If you continue to behave this way you’ll have no friends” gets stored in the brain as “you’ll have no friends.” The descriptive clause “if you continue to behave this way” gets dropped.

So now we have a case of a child being hypnotized into believing that he’ll have no friends. This is not what the parent was trying to accomplish!

Aim for Results

When speaking to a child or spouse aim your words at your target — talk about what you want rather than what you don’t want. As we have seen this is especially important when speaking to young children but the principles of semantics apply to every member of the family. Living together for decades all family members come to have great influence on each other.

Suppose a parent wants her child to improve his social skills. She can say “If you are gentle with your friends they’ll like being with you and want to come over more often.”

“If you return your friends’ calls you’ll be able to enjoy strong friendships.”

In each of these sentences the child is offered hope and instruction. The hypnotic suggestions embedded are positive and promising: “they’ll like being with you” “you’ll enjoy strong friendships” and so on. The idea that the child can be successful is planted deep within his subconscious mind where it will guide him to become successful in his social interactions.

Want your teen to improve in her studies? Replace “If you don’t do your homework you’re not going to get good marks and you’ll never get anywhere” with “If you apply yourself more you’ll get good marks and you’ll get where you want to go!”

Want your spouse to do a better job supporting you in your parenting? Replace “You just stand there when I need your help and you do nothing” with “When you’re right there and things are going poorly you’re the one who can save the day!”

Want your spouse to get organized? Replace “If you leave your papers all over the place of course you won’t be able to find the receipt when you need it!” with “If you put all the receipts in one folder in the drawer you’ll always be able to find a receipt when you need it!”

If you just follow these instructions you’ll be very successful in your communication with family!

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