A 10-yr old boy lately exhibits a lot of strange behaviors. He becomes easily frightened. He hides herself in the room. If pressured to go to the school, he often quarrels with his classmates.

The mother is deeply concerned and seeks help from the undersigned.

The initial coaching conversation with the mother brings up the following aspects of the parenting method used, which is commonly applied by most. And such approach, among others, contributes to the child’s behavioral problems.

This article discusses more the parenting approach, and not the healing and coaching work, using Number Pscyhology and Energy Psychology, on both the child and the mother.

Similarity is made on developing organizational members, or unleashing their potentialities.

With her best intention for the good development of the child, the mother admits she often loses her temper and punishes the boy severely. She said she does not demand the boy to score top in the academic class, but stresses the importance of character building and instill good value system.

Sound logical. We cannot not agree on the importance of character building and good value system.

At the same time, is logic all there is to develop people. A similar point was raised in my previous article “Safety Disasters and Organizational Learning”, http://www.360q.com/NLP/EnergyPsychology27.htm.

Note: using Number Psychology analysis, certain characteristic and personalities of both the mother and the child are made, which are to be further validated during the coaching conversation. Hence some clues are made on what possible behaviors are adopted by the mother and the child. The mother confirms that her strategy to cope with life is to use strong will power, and she has achievement orientation. She also agrees with my analysis that her child learning strategy is different, he prefers soft approach, sometime taking a while to take action, or in-decisive. Achievement to him is not so important, but he seeks stability and experimentation.

Without realizing differences in personalities and learning strategies, clashes and frustration often occur in interaction: mother and child, organization members, management and staff etc.

Instilling Value-system

Coach : “In what way you are mad with your child about how he spends his pocket money in the school?”

Mother : “He buys all the junk stuff: stickers, paper toys, wasting the money. I need to instill to him good value system. I explained (or is it lecturing him?) that if he keeps spending money on these worthless things, there is no more money left for his higher education. “

With good intention on the part of the parents, the above is a typical parenting approach. It sounds logical, and it seems a good rationale – the teaching on good value-system.

We as adults, we also make decision everyday – what to buy, what to spend money on. Is it not true that a lot of things we buy, on the hindsight is of little value. Ten years from now, looking back at today we may regret on a lot of money spent on things not worthy of its value.

So we are constantly learning.

So is the child.

For the child to spend money on so called junk stuff, a few learning steps are involved.

• His appreciation of certain things
• His decision making to spend money on the things
• His action to acquire the things
• His satisfaction (or not) on the action taken.

Since the child is learning, as parents we should help him in his developmental path. Help him build his self esteem that a) he has appreciation of things (though not worthy in the adults’ opinion). Or do you want your child to have no appreciation of anything, no desire of anything in life? You will be dead worried if he behaves such. b) praise him that he is learning to make decision, c) he has taken action on his decision, d) go alone with him that he seems to be satisfied with what he acquired.

When his self esteem is built and reinforced, parent can then coach him on what other options, besides “those stuff” can be of greater values. Then the child learns fasters, he learns from his action, not lectures from the parents.

Furthermore, what are the effects on such lecture “that if he keeps spending money on these worthless things, there is no more money left for his higher education? No education, you have to be a beggar on the street!”

We instill fear in the child. We put pressure on the child.

What belief system get generated in the child mind, subtly, and un-consciously :

“Money is difficult to get. “ “In order to survive in the future, one should not enjoy life now and buy what you likes” “Future is full of difficulties” “I am guilty as I make serous wrong decision that can affect my future and my family future” “ I must save every penny for my future” …..

We are not helping the child to manage the power of Now, but project him into the future of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear.

How can the child learn under such circumstances? His mind is full of negative images.

Now, we switch back to organizational learning.

In my previous article “Safety Disasters and Organizational Learning” http://www.360q.com/NLP/EnergyPsychology27.htm , management reaction is quite similar to the above mentioned poor parenting. With good intention, they are reactive. They instill high Safety value through training, management speeches, slogans. They highlight the consequences of poor safety. They fill up the mind of the organizations with negative images.

The management reacts harshly to minor incidents, like the above parents. They reward the staff handsomely when million hours achieved without Lost Time Injury. On the other hand they instill fear and discipline to maintain the safety records.

Being reactive, they have no more energies left to examine the underlying behavioral drivers – the bottom of the iceberg : the belief system, emotions and psychology of all parties concerned, including the management themselves, what personalities and what learning strategies.

On Integrity – Character Building

Coach: “You mention about good character building. How is that related to your child?”

Mother : “He tells lies. Instead of using the pocket money to buy food at the canteen during recess time, he uses the money to buy junk stuff. I discover his drawer full of junk stuff, yet he denies it, with stories that those are given by his friends.”

Learning to cope with life is basic human instinct.

When the child hasn’t leaned many other choices in life, he has limited choice. He only knows he likes certain things without realizing or experiencing other wonderful things like appreciating little animals, or music etc., and his limited choice is to use money to acquire the things he likes, so called junk stuff. With such limited choice, he identifies his self worth with the “junk stuff”. If such identity is threatened, he has to defend it, by lying.

This is not a moral issue. This is a psychological issue.
(Nether is corruption a moral issue, but psychological issue, a topic for the next discussion)

Good parenting is to help the child first by assuring his self esteem, not criticizing his integrity, that his limited choice of identification of self with the “junk” stuff, is a beginning step towards more choices and maturity, that his lying is his limited identification of self-worth. Help increase his choices, help expand his identification of self.

Similar psychology is at work in the workplace. When the pressure is high on safety discipline, people would not dare to report safety incidents, due to fear of punishment. They cheat, they lie. They hide the problems. In the end, things just explode.

Good organizational learning is to understand the basic human drivers and help balance the mental, emotional and pyschological blockages– both the management and the staff, so that hidden potentials can be well manifested to the desired visions of the organization.

End.