How I taught my kids to take each others perspective during arguments

From my personal encounters with teaching empathy to my six and eight-year-old to sparking young minds' curiosity for neuroscience, this episode has a lot to offer. I'll share how a Nintendo dispute became a perfect opportunity to teach my kids the power of perspective taking in arguments and the crucial role of empathy in conflict resolution. It's a lesson that goes beyond parenthood – it's fundamentally about understanding and communicating with each other. 

The importance of parental mental health is often underappreciated, and that's what we'll be delving into in the later half of our episode. As a community, we ought to acknowledge the emotional and mental toll parenting can take and work together to provide the support needed. I encourage you to help us understand better what parents need to maintain their mental and emotional wellbeing by providing your input. Let's wrap up the week with a meaningful discussion about empathy, perspective, and mental health. Here's to a positive end to the week and a wonderful week ahead!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Teaching Children Empathy and Perspective
• 6:43 Teaching Kids Perspective Taking in Arguments
• 19:06 Supporting Parental Mental Health

Transcript

Cindy: 0:00

Hello, my dear friend, welcome back to another episode of the Curious Neuron podcast. My name is Cindy Huffington and I am your host. If you have children that often argue and you feel like they're struggling and taking each other's perspectives and considering that in this argument, then you don't want to miss today's episode. I will share how I explain this to my six and my eight year old and, as always in the show notes, I will share an article that you could use to dig deeper into this topic, and I think it's really important for kids to learn this and that it's not too early. Like I said, I did it with my six and my eight year old and it went really well, so I'm excited to share that with you. First, before we begin, I want to take an opportunity to ask you for a little favor. If you've been listening to the Curious Neuron podcast, or even if you just started today and you're enjoying it and you want to make sure that you don't miss next Monday's episode, please take a moment to click out of this episode and to subscribe to the podcast wherever you are listening. When you hit that subscribe button, it tells the algorithm and whichever platform you're using, that you enjoy the podcast enough to subscribe to it and when you do that, then it really helps in terms of visibility for my podcast and, more importantly, when you subscribe and leave a rating and a review, like some of you have done, it allows me to get funding. I have some affiliate codes, like you've seen in the show notes, but not many. I try to do very little of those. I only collaborate with the companies that I think are really meaningful and important for you guys. But I don't have ads, and the reason why I don't have ads is because I have a sponsorship from the Tanenbaum Open Science Institute. They are housed here at McGill, at the Nuro here in Montreal, and they have these sponsorships for Open Science, meaning somebody from science who's taking the science and sharing it with the outside world and explaining this in ways that you can understand. And because we do this so well here at Kyrstynauron, we have a grant from them and it's extremely important for me to keep the ratings going and to keep the subscriptions increasing because it allows me to get the funding. Without the funding, this podcast ends. It's as simple as that. I don't get the money myself. It's to help with the audio and the video editing, with the marketing of the podcast, with the equipment and so on. It's important. The podcast means so much to me and I don't want to stop doing this. I enjoy having conversations with people and I enjoy having a conversation with you every week, so please take a moment to subscribe.

Cindy: 2:40

As always in the show notes, you have links to better help. If you are looking for online therapy, you cannot leave your home. You are very stressed and overwhelmed and need some support. They even have therapists that are specific to parenting. I know this because parents' moms have been reaching out to me saying, hey, I subscribed to better help and I'm seeing a difference in my child's behavior. If you'd like to give that a try, the link is in the show notes and you can also get a link to PocPoc, my kids' favorite app. That is all about open-ended play and really amazing sounds, and there's a new dinosaur activity. You can get the link to that and I believe you get 50% off a one-year subscription. And, as always, you know that I'm the co-founder of the WonderGrade app. If you are looking for support to help your child learn how to cope with their emotions, that is my kids' favorite app when it comes to relaxing and mindfulness and it's what we use when they're going to bed to calm down, to relax the body and to really relax our mind. So you can click on all those links below in the show notes.

Cindy: 3:43

I want to acknowledge a small moment that I had this week. Actually it's not small. Why did I say small? It was an amazing moment. So I went back to the neuro in Montreal, which is a neurological institute and hospital, and I had worked here for a few years during my PhD and I gave a talk about Kirsten Rahn to doctors and researchers and students to explain how I have taken the science and how I translate to you and how big this community has gone. We were at 161,000 on Instagram and this podcast has kept growing and the website has kept growing and the community. So I had the opportunity to talk to them about that and to join a panel on open science in the community. And when I was about to get up on you know, to get up on stage and to give that talk, I realized right before that I had been sitting in the same auditorium 11 years ago and I had been listening to a talk.

Cindy: 4:42

I had joined a volunteering program called Brain Reach and Brain Reach and Miguel was this program where graduate students in neuroscience would go to grade three classes and secondary two, so that's grade eight classes, and we would talk to the students about the brain. But what I loved so much about this program is it wasn't about going once. We would go back eight times throughout their school year, so every single month we would go back into these classrooms and we would build a relationship with the students and they just looked at us in awe saying, wow, you're a neuroscientist and that's so cool. You get to touch real brains and we brought one in at one time. It was just so fun to be part of this program. All this to say the first ever meeting that this brain reach program had to explain what the courses would look like and what they had created.

Cindy: 5:31

I remember feeling so excited and just the idea of taking what I had been learning in the lab and simplifying it enough for a grade three student to understand was just so amazing and just ignited something in me. So when the presentation was done or the meeting was done, I ran up the stairs and the director of the program, josephine she was sitting at the top and I just ran to see her and said I wanted to say hi, it's a pleasure to meet you. I also want to say that this is going to become my job one day. And she laughed in a very nice, kind and loving way Because of how excited I was and I said this has to be my job. This is so cool and I love what this program is doing.

Cindy: 6:13

And only moments before getting up on stage to talk about Kira Snoron that I realized 11 years ago I had said I was going to create something where I shared science with the general public. I didn't know what that was going to be. Was it going to be children? Kira Snoron started off with me, talking with teachers, but it became what it is today and I literally created what I said I wanted to create 11 years ago. That was a really cool moment, I can't lie. It felt really amazing and I just wanted to share that with you guys. All right, that's enough.

Cindy: 6:43

Now let's move on today's topic, because I know that if you are listening and you have kids that are arguing all the time, that you probably are looking forward to having some tips, especially when it comes to perspective taking. So my kids are six, four, six and eight and I've noticed lately that my two older kids, sometimes with my youngest one, but my two older kids are getting in heavier arguments, heavier debates around certain things. And so you know, when it was the little stuff like who's turn is it next for Nintendo, or who's first to play the game, the board game we were, we got that under control and that's usually fine. And if they do argue about that they're able to kind of realize, okay, what's sharing? They get that part now, so we don't have to explain that.

Cindy: 7:32

But in the arguments that I was listening to in the past couple of weeks I hadn't stepped in yet, I was observing, and now that I had observed a couple of weeks I realized that what they struggled with was perspective taking. What led me to kind of see this is that I noticed in their arguments they just kept trying to get their point across. They were yelling at each other sometimes and just saying, but I said this, but I said that, and not just that, and not really taking the time to listen to the other person. So I waited to kind of get a better handle of, okay, what's going on and why, what are they arguing about. And then after one of their arguments, I said come sit with me, let's have a conversation. This is when they were cool, com, collected, not in the middle of the fight. That's the wrong time, not the right time to have a conversation. So once the last argument was over, I asked them to come sit with me and I explained to them that it's really important to take a moment in an argument to pause and to think about the other person and what the point is that they're trying to get across. Right, to give them time to talk and to listen right.

Cindy: 8:39

Having an argument with somebody is not just about talking and yelling over them to be heard. It's really about listening and what are their needs, what are they trying to say? And sometimes I know we're not being heard to, but it's important for us to listen to them because maybe if they're not hearing us but we take the time to listen to them, that they'll start listening to us. I explained to them that there were two kinds of perspective taking and the way that I said perspective taking to them was understanding somebody else's experience. So you could understand somebody else's emotional experience, which is known as effective perspective taking, and research, but I didn't say it that way to my kids so emotional, understanding their emotional experience.

Cindy: 9:24

So you might have an argument with your sibling and say I'm feeling frustrated because you often play past your 20 minute limit, right and? And we stop at our 20 minute limit. So you're always getting extra time because you're complaining until you get your extra time. And it's not fair and that's a totally valid point. That's what I was explaining to my kids. Taking somebody else's perspective doesn't necessarily mean that your point is not valid. You're just taking the time to listen to them. So let's say you know the argument is around somebody always passing their 20 minute limit of Nintendo. That's exactly what happens in our house. So one sibling is going to say you know you always pass this limit and I'm feeling frustrated because you're always passing this limit and it's not fair Versus the other child might say, yeah, but you're always getting mad at me. I feel like I just sit here and all you do is get mad at me. They're not seeing, right, what's going on to them. The emotional experience that the first child's having is that frustration of their sibling always taking extra time versus the other sibling who's feeling sad or feeling attacked because somebody's always mad at them, right? So their experiences, their emotional experiences in the same event will be very different.

Cindy: 10:42

Then there is cognitive perspective taking, and the way that I explain this to my kids is the way that you're thinking or reasoning through something will be different or might be different from the other person, right? So let's take this Nintendo example it was. You can say it was my turn to play Nintendo because you played 20 minutes and we get 20 minutes each, so it's my turn. Get off the couch, give me the remote. It's my turn. Versus the other person who's playing says I have five minutes left to finish the stage that I've been trying to finish for a week. I just need five minutes. Five minutes isn't the end of the world, just give me five minutes, right? So we see that in the same situation, two people can have different cognitive perspectives and two people can have different emotional perspectives or experiences. And that's what happens in budding heads.

Cindy: 11:31

If we keep pushing our perspective on somebody but we're not taking the time to switch it up and to think about what they're saying, it doesn't mean again that you're going to change what you're saying, but just the fact of taking the time to listen to that person might change what you're doing or might help you together, and this is what I was telling my kids to come up with a plan. So what would that look like From the example that I just gave you? For the cognitive perspective, it means that if somebody's playing in their 20 minutes is over and they just want five extra minutes, but they're not, they weren't saying that. Maybe they were just saying I want to continue playing, I'm not done, I'm not done.

Cindy: 12:11

What the conversation I had with my kids allowed them to understand is you need to communicate, you need to speak and let somebody know what's going on inside your mind, because if you don't have this conversation with them, they have no idea that all you need is five minutes to finish the stage that you've been wanting to finish for the past week. So my kids understood a little bit more about the importance of communicating and not just saying get off, no, you get off. No, you get off, no, you get off. We all hear it in our house, but it's. It's exactly what they had this really beautiful, like moment of oh. That makes a lot of sense and you know.

Cindy: 12:47

What it allowed them to also understand is the way you feel in a situation is not necessarily the way somebody else will feel in a situation Number one but number two you might have made somebody else feel a certain way and that wasn't your intention, right? So when you think of the emotional experience or the emotional perspective that I explained before, if that child is sitting on the couch playing and is always being told just get off, stop playing, get off, your turn is over, and they're just feeling attacked and they're feeling sad and they're feeling, you know, more frustrated or whatever it is, because people are often mad at them If we don't take the time to realize. Yeah, you know what? I have been getting really frustrated with you, but I've been getting frustrated with you because you keep using up your time and more, when we don't. We never go over time because we follow the rules and we don't try to get five minutes every time, and that's not fair. It means that you're getting five minutes every single time and we're not right.

Cindy: 13:46

So it allowed my kids to realize that if they can just tell somebody how they feel or take the person's perspective, it might help them get a better understanding of what's going on in this situation and what's going on in this argument. And the more information you can gather from this argument, the more you can come up with a solution together. You're a team and this is what perspective taking allows you to do, and you can only do it in a way that works when you communicate and you tell people what's going on inside your mind. So this is the conversation I had with my kids, and they were really receptive to it. Again, this was a six and eight year old and guess what? I had this discussion at the beginning of the week. I'm not saying they applied it every single time right after that and that there were no problems, but I saw them applied and I saw them speak to each other and say, like you're doing this and I'm feeling this way, and then they came up with a solution. I saw it with my own eyes. It was a beautiful moment, which is why I thought it would be so important to share this with you. I didn't want to wait too long. I really wanted to get this information out there to you so that you can apply this in your home as well.

Cindy: 14:55

Now listen to this. As I was writing my notes for this episode the solo episode last night, I just had my own aha moment where I realized why in the world. Aren't we doing this as adults? Right? If you think about the last argument you had and I'm guilty of this you were you taking your partner? Or if it was a family member or colleague or friend or whomever it was otherwise, were you taking their perspective, both cognitively and emotionally? Were you? Were they taking your perspective? Take a moment to think of that last argument and think of what could you have done differently. And when we take somebody's perspective, the beautiful thing is it diffuses the argument almost instantly. It just diffuses the argument in a way where you feel seen, you feel heard, you might feel validated, and then you start listening and then, perhaps together as a couple or two people and two adults, you're coming up with a solution. Imagine if every argument was like this. It would just be a beautiful world, alright. So I do want to let you go with one little activity for this week. You know what it is. I really want you to try, at your next argument, to take the other person's perspective.

Cindy: 16:20

Both think about cognitively, like what is the point they're trying to get across? Maybe it's not the same point, maybe it's not. You're not rationalizing the same way. Whatever it is, you might have different perspectives Also, what is there, I like to say, emotional experience instead of effective perspective. It just reminds us, even as adults, what is the other person's emotional experience in this argument or during this argument? Is it maybe something I'm not even understanding? Right, like, sometimes we say something, there are people that are more direct or there are people that are less empathetic and in an argument, you might be trying to get a point, a point across and you're not being as empathetic as the other person would like you to be, and then that comes off as cold perhaps, or whatever it is, and that other person might feel not connected or feel sad or whatever it is. You might not see it and you might not realize it, but only by trying to say it out loud. You know, I feel like you're. You might be feeling this. Am I correct? Are you? You know, or what are you feeling right now? Take the time to explore it.

Cindy: 17:30

Having an argument, you know it's it's a lot. Of sure, you need to get some point, a point across, but it's also about trying to understand the other person's point and to try to come up with a solution together, right? So if two people are just trying to yell and it's the same thing that I said before with my kids. If two adults are trying to yell one louder than the other, one meaner than the other, one more disrespectful than the other to get the point across, your brain is just in fight or flight. Your brain does not want to sit down and try to problem solve. Your brain wants to get the hell out of there and run and not come back. So you need to take the time to have conversations and arguments in a way that allows the other person to feel seen and to feel heard, and that doesn't mean that you're wrong. It doesn't mean that they're wrong. It doesn't, you know, because we often want to be right but in the end we want to come up with a solution. So I hope that today's episode is inspiring to you and that you feel that you're ready for the next argument between your children and with you and whomever you might have an argument with. But I do hope that it reminds you about the importance of perspective taking and that we can teach this to our children.

Cindy: 18:42

Don't forget to please take a moment to subscribe to the podcast, leave a rating and review. Come see us on Instagram at curious underscore neuron. You can visit our website at curious neuroncom. By the way little sneak peek we are working on revamping the entire website. I can't wait to share it with you. It should be done in the new year and lots of exciting things coming for curious neuron.

Cindy: 19:06

I wish I could tell you everything that I've been doing in the background, but when it comes to parental mental health, I think that we need a lot more support as parents. If you haven't done so yet, there's a link in the show notes where I'm collecting as much information from parents, because I am pitching for a grant to do some research on curious neuron and I need your help. So, if you haven't done so yet, click the the Google form in the show notes and fill it up. It takes about three, four minutes and just let me know what you need in order to support your mental health and your emotional health. Thank you for being part of this community. I appreciate you so much. I will see you next week. Have a wonderful and beautiful week. Bye.