Mindful Communication for Little Boys

Welcome to Intentional Motherhood: Creating Family Culture through Spirituality, Mindfulness, and Adventure. I'm your host, Kelsey Redd, a mental health counselor turned stay at home mom, empowering you with skills and knowledge you need to be the best mom you can be and actually enjoy motherhood and even find humor in the antics we experience every day.

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Today, I'm gonna tell you an interesting lesson I learned about gender differences and how we need to communicate a little differently for boys and girls.

I have had the most enjoyable and hilarious social experiment by having my boy girl twins. I think it's the most fun thing that you could ever possibly experience, and I highly highly recommend if you ever get the chance to have twins and especially boy girl twins, that you take that opportunity because it is so fun.

So let me tell you a little story. The other day, I'm looking around the house and I'm just about to start with cleanup time. The house is a disaster and I decided that I'm gonna do this in the best way possible to get cooperation from my kids so that I'm not just asking them and demanding them to clean up the house, but so that it's actually their idea and they really want to cooperate in this cleanup time with me.

So I'm going to do all the things that all the parenting coaches tell you to do. So I go over to my son who's on the couch building something with some Legos. I get down on his level. I put a hand on his arm to get his attention.

I look into his eyes, and with the most calming, regulated parent voice I can muster, I say, “Honey, what do you think we should do about this living room?”

And he looks around, “What mom? It looks fine.”

So I ask again a new question, “Does it look a little messy to you?”

Let let me put this into context. This is the kind of cleanup situation where there's, like, toys scattered all over, all over the floor. The couches the couch cushions are everywhere. Books, Legos, Magna Tiles, toys just strewn about.

So I'm like, “Does it look a little messy to you?”

And he looks around again and he's like, there's like one thing out, but like, we can still walk, which technically I guess is true if I we can still walk through the living room, he means that we can tiptoe through the mess avoiding Legos like land mines, then yes, that's true. We can still walk through.

And so I'm starting to decide I need to take a different approach. So I say, well, honey, maybe we can clean up a little bit and then it'll be easier to walk through. And he says, I'll clean one thing. As he reaches for a Lego slightly out of reach and adds it to his pile that he's playing with.

So now at this point, I'm starting to go crazy. I'm starting to think that my mind is going to explode and my daughter, his twin sister, walks into the room and I call her over to me. And in the most genuine, curious way with pleading, my eyes just pleading the way a mad woman pleads for sanity, I ask her in the most sincere way I can. I say, “Babe, does this room look messy to you?” Because at this point, I'm wondering, “Am I hallucinating here? Am I just absolutely insane? Am I seeing things? Am I hallucinating of messes, of Lego messes everywhere?”

So I asked my daughter, “Does this room look messy to you?” And she looks around and she says, yeah. I'm like, oh, thank goodness. I'm not crazy. And I ask her, “Okay, what do you see?” And she says, “Well, there's Magnatiles everywhere and there's Legos all over and I see books and I see pillows and I see toys..” and she goes on and starts listing every item she sees in the her in the living room similar to how my brain is working, right? And I'm secretly just thanking my daughter for being a normal woman, a normal young woman, and recognizing what it is that I see and that I deal with every day.

So what does this teach us? How can we take this information and be a better mom from this information?

Well, I learned a valuable lesson. I learned that my son is not going to see things the same way I see things. I learned that I'm going to have to use different communication when I'm talking to my son than when I'm talking to my daughter.

And here's a pro tip, have any of you ever experienced this in your marriage? Has anyone ever wondered why you walk into a room and see 400 things that need to get worked on or taken care of and your husband doesn't seem to notice the same way you do? Well, next time that happens, you can rest assured that your husband is not intentionally trying to drive you crazy. But actually, since the time he was probably a young child, he has not been able to see the mess in the room.

Just like my five year old son taught me, that there are actual genetic differences in the way boys and girls, and later men and women, see the world around them. So let's just give each other a little grace.

And when we talk to the boys in our life, we might have to say, honey, I see 10 Legos that need to be put away. Can you go pick up 10 Legos? Or hey, honey, I want you to go find every green magnet tile and put all the green magnet tiles together and put away in the tub. Or let's count how many couch cushions we can put back up on the couch. Those might be the instructions that we give to the boys.

But what I do like about this lesson is that it reminds us to find a little bit of the humor and to recognize that we might have to tailor our communication, our requests, our instructions, even our discipline to each child based on gender differences, of course based on age differences and based on personality differences. Each child has to be parented so uniquely and this is a perfect reminder of what some of those differences might look like and how we can tailor our communication to get better results from each kid. If you enjoy hearing relatable stories and specific scripts that you can use in your parenting.

Don't forget to follow the show, follow me on Instagram and let's be in touch. Join the conversation by sending me your stories. I'd love to hear from you.