Try Something: Parenting the Messy Way with the 4S's

As I drag my hungry, tired self into the house, carrying grocery bags, mail and my work bag, the nerf bullets fly past my face. I start to say, “Aim low! Not at faces” for the 700th time when I my feet start to tangle in the winter coat thrown on the floor. “Mom, can I have my iPad?!” whines a child as I bang my shoulder into the wall. Have you been there?

An uncomfortable truth I have found about being a parent is that when I am overwhelmed and overstimulated I can behave as impulsively as my children. If you have been following this series, you know that we’ve arrived at the action step. This is the part where we do SOMETHING as a parent. The 4S method is designed not only as a learning system for us to grow as leaders of our kids, but also for these pressured moments when we might just want to shout something unfortunate.

In our busy, hurried lives remember:

THE 4S’s: When you feel a SHOULD, STOP, SIGH and SEE. Then do SOMETHING.

When you feel a SHOULD coming on, STOP. Just pause. Don’t act instantly.

SIGH. Take a deep breath. A long slow one. Imagine it’s a sigh of relief, as if everything is OK. And if you can, remember that you are enough. You are what your child needs.

SEE. Look at your child. Ask yourself what your child needs right now. Do they need you to do something, or do they need to figure it out for themselves?

Then (and only then) do SOMETHING. Even if that something is nothing.

I don’t care what you do next. It really doesn’t matter. It does not matter if you get it wrong. Because if you STOP, SIGH & SEE before you do SOMETHING, you will build skills quickly. You will get to know your child.

©Alison Escalante MD/The Primary Carer

So now we’ve gotten to step 4. In the first steps we started to activate ourself as a leader. Now, it’s time to decide what to do. Most of the time what our kids need is one of three things: for us to set a limit, for us to help them with their big feelings, or for them to deal with it themselves

When it's time to do something we can draw on what we observed in the previous steps, and what we may have learned about parenting from reading. This method works with any parenting system. Do you love that discipline book you read? Great! Do it better using the 4S’s.

This is about bringing our creativity into our parenting leadership, so we can stop reacting to all the anxiety producing shoulds we’ve been told. Have you ever been led by a shoulding leader? It’s not fun. It feels like someone wagging their finger at you and loading on the impossible. Have you ever had a leader that believed in you and solved problems by listening to you and working with you? Do you remember how wonderful that was? Let’s use this method to lead our kids like that.

So try something. Just don’t forget, creativity is messy. It ends in great results, but it’s called the creative process for a reason.

What if what we try doesn’t work? That is totally fine! We learn new information either way.

The 4S method takes a lot of the stress about getting it right out of parenting. It gets more fun as we give ourselves permission to use our creativity and make mistakes. Who cares if it doesn’t work this time; we’ll figure it out if we keep practicing. If we score a win, we’ve learned something that works with our child. If we have a fail, we just learned something that does not work with our child.

Some of us will find a terrible should gets triggered if we try something that does not work: “I should have done better.” Don’t let that should hijack you! Immediately initiate Stop, Sigh and See. Then try Something again.

Here is a story to illustrate how it works:

When my son was a toddler he was an extremely picky eater. We pediatricians usually tell people not to worry about the picky eating, because 99.5% of kids will eat when they are hungry. For most kids picky eating is not a medical issue. We encourage parents to maintain healthy eating habits for them and let them skip meals if they insist on it.

However, my underweight son was that 1 in 200 who would actually go hungry and lose more weight. This was not a surprise: he had had a rare type of food allergy as a young infant that caused him a lot of pain and put him on a ridiculously limited diet. The medical literature reported that kids with his kind of food allergy often had problems with eating later.

So, I read the book on picky eaters. I did my best to think broadly about his food and avoid turning it into a power struggle. But like every other parent I know, I got worried about his eating and couldn’t resist the urge to encourage him to eat. In response, he stopped eating entirely. (The cute little stinker still ate at daycare, of course.)

Next, I tried what the book said. I started hiding that I cared. He was still young enough to need an adult present to prevent choking. So I would put his food in front of him on his high chair tray and turn my back to him while I read a book. During one meal I snuck a peek over my shoulder. My son froze, food in hand on the way to his mouth. He looked me right in the eye and put the food back on the tray.

Another night, after yet another dinner when my son had barely eaten and had thrown his food all over the floor, we gave up. My husband and I let him down out of his highchair in despair and started cleaning up. “Don’t look now,” my husband said. I looked. There was our little one crouched under the table and energetically eating the food right off the floor. The same food he had rejected for the last 30 minutes.

I started to move toward him to do what I knew I should do. I should stop him from eating food off the floor. Gross. We had pets. But something made me STOP. I found myself SIGHing as I could SEE him actually eating something.

After that we started intentionally throwing his food on the floor so he could crawl around and eat it. Directly off the floor! I did try putting it on a plate on the floor, but he would not eat it that way. He would only eat it strewn all over the place. My husband and I alternated between finding it hilarious and intensely frustrating, but we agreed with each other about feeding him.

So what do you think? Was it terrible parenting? Was it great parenting? I would argue in this case the best word would be effective parenting. I think it was the best choice for our child at that time. It would not be the best choice for him now, and it would not be the best choice for most kids. We were in a situation where we had to do something, and we had to think outside the box.

This messy moment in our parenting became shared history for us, that brought my husband and I together. It was a time we solved a problem together in a way no-one else would. As ridiculous as our solution was, it made us feel stronger about ourselves as parents and as a team.

But what if it had not worked? Or what if I’d come across research that it was actually really bad to have a child eat off the floor (this research does not exist)? It would not have mattered! We would have tried something else. And if we had had the 4S’s then, we would have done it with more clarity and confidence.

My next post will be on failing as a parent, and how it useful it can be. Don’t want to miss it? Subscribe here. Would you like to learn more about the 4S parenting method? Read about the first three steps here: STOP, SIGH and SEE.

Disclaimer: This article represents general education and does not constitute medical advice. My ideas are mine alone.