Lessons For Parents: #1: Acceptance Must Be Demonstrated

Acceptance Must Be Demonstrated by Thomas Gordon, Creator of Parent Effectiveness Training

It is one thing for a parent to feel acceptance toward a child; it is another thing to make that acceptance felt. Unless a parent's acceptance comes through to the child, it can have no influence on him. A parent must learn how to demonstrate his acceptance so that the child feels it.

Specific skills are required to be able to do this. Most parents, however, tend to think of acceptance as a passive thing-a state of mind, an attitude, a feeling. True, acceptance does originate from within, but to be an effective force in influencing another, it must be actively communicated or demonstrated. We can never be certain that we are accepted by another until he demonstrates it in some active way.

As professional psychological counselors or psychotherapists, whose effectiveness as a helping agent is so greatly dependent on his being able to demonstrate his acceptance of the client, we spend years learning ways to implement this attitude through our own habits of communication. Through formal training and long experience, professional counselors acquire specific skills in communicating acceptance. We learn that what we say and how we say it makes the difference between our being helpful or not.

Talk can cure, and talk can foster constructive change. But it must be the right kind of talk.

The same is true for parents. How they talk to their children will determine whether they will be helpful or destructive. The effective parent, like the effective counselor, must learn how to communicate his acceptance and acquire the same communication skills.

Parents often skeptically ask, "Is it possible for a non-professional like myself to learn the skills of a professional counselor?" Thirty years ago we would have said, "No." However, we know that if is possible for most parents to learn how to become effective helping agents for their children. We know now that it is not knowledge of psychology or an intellectual understanding about people that makes a good counselor. It is primarily a matter of learning how to talk to people in a "constructive" way.

Professionals in the mental health field call this "therapeutic communication," meaning that certain kinds of messages have a "therapeutic" or healthy effect on people. They make them feel better, encourage them to talk, help them express their feelings, foster a feeling of worth or self-esteem, reduce threat or fear, and facilitate growth and constructive change.

Other kinds of talk are "non therapeutic" or destructive. These messages tend to make people feel judged or guilty; they restrict expression of honest feelings, threaten the person, foster feelings of unworthiness or low self-esteem, block growth and constructive change by making the person defend more strongly the way he is.

While a very small number of parents possess this therapeutic skill intuitively and hence are "naturals", most parents have to go through a process of first unlearning their destructive ways of communicating and then learning more constructive ways. This means that parents first have to expose their typical habits of communication to see for themselves how their talk is destructive or non-therapeutic. Then they can be taught some new ways of responding to children.



"DR. CREW"
Dr.W. Crew Lauterbach, Ph.D., LCSW-R, M-C.Ht., CMFT, CWP, SPN

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