Picture this: You’re excited about your teenager’s first day at their new job. You know how important this is for them and want it to go really well. You start imagining… and soon you’re thinking of all the things they might not have thought about, like their bus pass, filling out the hiring forms and taking comfortable shoes.
Your inner dialogue: “I want it to go really well for them.”
So, you ask if they’re completely ready and mention their blue running shoes.
Your kid’s inner dialogue: “Why is she babying me? Does she really think I don’t know how to get ready? I was feeling confident but now I’m nervous. She doesn’t believe in me.”
It’s as if you’d put a blue box in the mail to your child but they received a green one!
The more we understand how and why this happens, the better equipped we are to navigate misunderstandings, resolve conflicts, repair, reconnect and build more empathetic and honest communication with our kids.
Intention vs. Impact: What’s the Difference?
The difference lies in perspective:
Intent is what you mean to convey or hope to achieve with an action.
Impact is how they receive your actions or words, the actual outcome for them.
Consider these examples of where intent and impact diverge:
You plan a surprise dinner to celebrate your teen’s recent success. Your intention is purely positive but, when you spring the surprise, they feel stunned and awkward. You didn’t know they were feeling low today. They huff through dinner and go to their room thinking you tried to manipulate them into being happy instead of letting them feel their feelings. Blue box — green box.
You decide to work extra hours to pay for basketball camp. Your intention is to support your child’s interests and give them a fun time with their friends. The impact is that you have less time to help them with their chemistry homework.
To lighten the mood at a family gathering, you repeat a joke you heard at work, but your cousin finds it insensitive and, although she doesn’t say anything, she feels uncomfortable with you for the coming weeks.
Your friend says, “Don’t worry, everything will be fine,” intending to reassure you. But you feel like they’re dismissing your fears, and you emotionally retreat from them.
How to Repair the Gap
1 Start the reconnection by inviting their feedback.
If you want the impact of your words and actions to better match the intention in your heart, you first need to understand how they impact others. So, you have to bear the discomfort and ask.
“I got the impression you were upset after I asked you if you were ready for your first day at work. Are you willing to tell me how that affected you?” Straighten your spine and lift your chest to open your heart space. Use attachment language: “Our relationship is so important to me that I am willing to talk about this, even though it might be difficult. I want to understand what happened for you.”
2 Ensure that you’re both grounded enough to have this conversation.
Take a moment before diving in to notice how calm or triggered you feel and ask your young adult to do the same. “Do you think this is a good time for us to talk about it?” If there’s any doubt for either of you, leave it be for now and wait, half an hour or half a week, until you can both come to the conversation feeling centered.
3 Listen, just listen.
Give them space to share, uninterrupted, how they experienced the moment. “Please tell me how you experienced that.”
And while they’re speaking,
Remember that their experience was different from yours. That doesn’t mean that your experience was less valid. But this time is for them, so resist the temptation to ‘correct’ their version.
Watch for judgements sneaking in. “What a silly way to interpret that… They should have known I sent a blue box.” If your head is categorizing and adjudicating, your heart isn’t fully connected so take a deep breath and re-open your heart space.
If your mind starts jumping ahead and seeking solutions, come back to what’s being said in the moment. Can you hear their words? Can you see their facial expression?
Focus on holding a space where forgiveness and reconciliation can begin. Can you feel their energy?
4 Confirm your understanding
After they finish sharing, ensure that you’ve taken in your child’s experience accurately (without translating it into something else or making meaning that isn’t there). “Do you mind if I reflect on what I heard so far to make sure I’ve got it right?
Then describe the green box they received. “It sounds like when I asked if you were ready, you felt like I didn’t think you could figure it out for yourself. But it all happened so fast that you didn’t get to say anything, and you felt even more annoyed. Is that right?”
Never underestimate how being accurately witnessed brings hearts closer together.
5 Affirm their feelings.
“Yes, I see, you felt doubted. I understand why you felt knocked off balance.” When you acknowledge your child’s emotions, you show that, even when there’s disagreement or discomfort, you are still able to feel them.
Resist any temptation to diminish or challenge their feelings, by saying things like,
You’re being oversensitive.
How could you doubt that I believe in you?
You should have known I was just trying to help.
Trust them to tell you what they felt and accept that this was their experience. And trust that their heart will experience your empathy.
6 Do not become defensive.
None of us like to be misunderstood and, at some point in this conversation, you might feel the urge to exclaim, “But that’s not what I meant.”
Being defensive will move the spotlight away from what was hurtful and who was hurt by it, and possibly hurt them all even more. Such words suggest, “I need to change the way you’re seeing this,” and create opposition instead of connection.
Here’s the thing: impact deserves to be addressed on its own, without revisiting the original purpose. So, let that purpose — your love — glow in your heart, accept that it didn’t come through in the way you meant, and take the blue box off the table. Then you can open yourself to seeing the whole situation in a new light. That’s where connection happens.
7 Take responsibility for the impact.
Here’s the place for humility and integrity. “I see how suggesting which shoes you should take to work came across as patronizing. I take responsibility for stepping into your preparations without checking first if you wanted me to. I’m sorry that my words left you feeling unsupported.”
How healing a simple, sincere apology can be, for your heart and theirs.
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Dear mama, we’re all just figuring it out. We’re all doing things that accidentally hurt our kids so please give yourself grace.
There’s always potential for a mismatch between your intention and what your kid concludes from your behavior. Blue boxes might not arrive in the state you imagined. Your words might change connotation as they travel the distance between your heart and theirs.
So, in that moment before you speak or act, ask yourself:
Is this what I really mean?
How might this land for my kid?
Will this transmit my love?
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Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash