Help your teen develop healthy friendships.
The Connection Between Horses and Parenting
Welcome to this week's You Are Destined for Greatness, coming to you this afternoon talking about horses and humans—specifically parenting and, teens and parenting.
Here's the deal. One of the things we want is for our kids to have a lot of friends. We want them to be happy, to think that everybody likes them, so they’ll feel liked and happy. Which is good because we need connections.
A lot of times with horses, we want to be friends with horses. We want to feel like they like us. We want to feel like we have a connection, a partnership. So, a lot of times, what we do is we do things like we give them treats because we’re trying to control what they, we think that they’re going to think about us. We think that they’ll like us if we give them treats. Or we show them physical affection in ways we understand to show love.
Understanding Horses' Love Language
Here's the deal, though—they don’t speak our love languages. What I just described are two of the five love languages: gifts and physical affection. But they have their own love languages.
So a lot of times, with giving them treats, they get confused with who’s, in short, to them it’s a survival resource—something worth fighting for. So it can be confusing. A lot of times, physical touch, they’re like, “What the heck is going on here? I don’t understand this.” Because it’s not how they communicate with, show affection to each other.
Okay, so what happens is, a lot of confusion and sometimes it can present a dangerous situation.
Should You Be Your Child’s Friend?
With kids a lot of times what we do, and you hear this, we say, “Well, I’m going to be a good friend to my kids. I’m going to be their friend.” You know, we’ve kind of heard that maybe we shouldn’t be a friend. But well, if we’re not a friend, then how are we supposed to be? Number one. And, how are we supposed to help our kids have friends?
Okay, being a friend to our kids can also be confusing to them—just like horses get confused. Because friendships are conditional, right? They can break up. Friendships are based on people trying to meet each other’s needs.
Now, if your kid thinks it’s part of their job to meet your needs, that’s probably not the ideal situation, okay?
Helping Your Kids Build Friendships
So, let’s take a quick look at what we can do to help our kids have friends. First of all, should they? I think so. They need to understand how to operate in society and feel a sense of connection, okay? Feeling important, feeling liked, feeling loved, and having connection is a deep human need.
And as teens, we’re figuring out who we are, and this need for connection is even stronger then.
The Key to Self-Confidence
So what can we do? In this week’s podcast, I share five ideas. This is stuff we deal with all the time in Stable Living, but I’m going to give you one of the five in this video today.
And that is to demonstrate and teach your kids how to generate, to teach them the skill of generating self-confidence. Okay? What confidence is and what it isn’t, and how to develop self-confidence.
Which is, that skill is being willing to feel any emotion so that we are, that our kids are willing to exercise courage to do things that they don’t know if they can do. To risk being vulnerable, to risk being hurt, to show courage in an effort to make those connections. Or to do anything, really, because anything for progress.
Because what we need is to have feeling of self-confidence to be willing to do things we don’t know we can do or haven’t done. For example, start a new friendship.
More about this to come. Thank you for being with me. Remember, You Are Destined for Greatness.
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