It is so important in Aware Parenting to be meeting needs because we understand that meeting needs means children and parents feel more relaxed in their bodies and have fewer accumulated feelings. It is so central for everyone's wellbeing. Unmet needs are often the cause of unenjoyable or challenging behaviour but our culture does not understand or value needs - in fact it actively disconnects us from our needs in so many ways and shames and judges needs. The word "needy" for example is so loaded with harsh criticism and judgement and so often we apologise for having needs, seeing it as a flaw, a sign there is something wrong with us, a sign of weakness. Yet having needs is what makes us all human and our needs reflect our deepest desires. When we can value both our needs AND our children's needs, when we can offer compassion and acknowledgement of how painful it is to have unmet needs, we can increasingly find ways to meet needs and then life feels so much better for us all.
Our perspective and the language we use are both so important. For example, if our children are behaving in ways that are challenging and we say they are just attention seeking, we disconnect from them. Whereas when they are behaving in challenging ways and we say they are trying to meet their legitimate needs for connection, we feel so much more lovingly connected to them and they feel it too. When mainstream culture sees behaviour as naughtiness, it misses all the ways that the child has unmet needs and the opportunity for deeper connection, understanding, support and trust that comes from trying to meet them.
I understood all this in theory long before i was able to put it into practice, especially in relation to myself. There is the Oxygen mask on the plane analogy that illlustrates how we need to take care of ourselves and our own needs if we are going to be able to meet our children's. And it shows us that, although we might often have learnt to minimise, neglect, or be unaware of our needs,we all have very legitimate needs that matter.
A core part of Aware Parenting is the understanding that everyone's needs in the family matter and how important it is to be finding ways for everyone to get their needs met. In Aware Parenting we are often looking underneath behaviour to try to identify the underlying needs and feelings that our children are trying to communicate to us through their behaviour. Principle 9 states that Aware parents take care of themselves and are honest about their own needs and feelings. They do not sacrifice themselves to the point of becoming resentful. The core assumptions of Aware Parenting state that:
Children know what they need for optimal physical, emotional, and intellectual development.
If children's needs are met, and if they are not hurt or stressed, they will be cooperative, compassionate, and nonviolent.
Children are extremely vulnerable. Stress, trauma, or unmet needs can have long-lasting, negative effects on their behaviour
Dr Aletha Solter (the founder of Aware Parenting) shows us how important needs are for us all and talks about it taking many adults per child to be meeting needs and yet in our culture we are trying to meet needs on our own that it really takes a whole healthy culture to meet. So it is so natural that it's hard to be meeting needs in our culture where so many of the needs that would be met if we were living in a more healthy culture, aren't being met when we live in nuclear families without support, community, connection, belonging, purpose. We are often alone at home with children trying to meet everyone's needs which is really hard and really painful. So it makes sense that parenting feels really hard often and you are not alone if you are finding challenging.
In her book, I'm here and I'm listening, Marion Rose says "if they have unmet needs, that creates painful feelings for them. The sensations and feelings in their bodies are literally communicating important information to them – that they have immediate needs. When they're feeling those painful feelings, it's really hard for them to be able to hear what we are saying, or cooperate, or be calm. This isn't because they don't understand what we want and don't want. It's because their needs are calling more strongly in the moment to be heard." So we can see that often it is unmet needs and the painful feelings that result, that are causing difficult behaviour in children.
There are so many core needs for children. The most common are connection, autonomy and choice. And so often in the way we now live, these needs are not met - children are separated from their parents at a young age and grow up in families where parents feel stressed and unsupported. They are often told what to do and given no choice or respect from adults around them. They have many experiences of feeling powerless and unable to make decisions for themselves, instead being told what to do. If these are not met, our children often feel unsafe and powerless.
So it is really helpful to tune in to identify the core needs of each individual in the family, which will be different for each unique child. When we can see what is really important for each child, we can acknowledge them in that, helping them to feel understood. We can find ways to meet that need, helping them to feel love and to feel more relaxed and cooperative. We can connect with them in play to meet many of their needs playfully too. But it's not always easy to do and there will inevitably be many times when we can't meet everyone's needs. The powerful thing about Aware Parenting though, is that we can lovingly listen to their feelings about it, and offer acknowledgement and compassionate understanding about how painful it is for us and for them to have unmet needs.
I am so grateful to Marshall Rosenberg and Marion Rose for everything I have learnt about needs from them. It is so helpful to support us to get really clear about what our children and ourselves truly need rather than what we think we need or what our culture might be telling us that we need. This might be through learning more about the core needs and values we have - asking ourselves what do we truly value most for us and what do our children truly value most? A really helpful resource is the Needs Inventory on the CNVC website which outlines the main categories of human needs and the subtle nuances within that category of specific needs. We can use this resource to keep exploring what our main unmet needs are currently and what our children's main unmet needs are. We are then able to find ways to meet them. It is helpful to learn to understand and value needs, to recognise unmet needs, to identify ways to meet needs, to listen to our children's needs and to respond to them at times of unmet needs with compassion.
Once you are more familiar with needs it can be very helpful to reflect with some curiosity about what your relationship with needs has been during your life:
What was modelled to you about needs in your family?
What happened to you if you expressed needs?
Do you remember painful experiences about needs? Perhaps you were shamed punished, ridiculed, criticised, or unheard when you expressed needs.
What are your current unmet needs? How do you feel about that?
What would support you to value your needs more?
What is something you can do for yourself in the coming week?
What would self-care ideally look like right now?
What do you need to feel safe to you ask for what you need so that increasingly your needs can be met - often we expect our partner to know what we need and feel resentful about umnet needs.
Can we meet this need internally ourselves or do we need external support to have it met from the outside?
Can you validate and recognise your own needs as legitimate?
Are you willing to get your needs met and if not, what is in the way?
Are you willing to experiment with asking for your needs to be met and then getting evidence that it is possible?
If it is hard to identify your needs, can you ask yourself what would you imagine your child needing if they were in that situation?
What is the most beautifully nourishing experience you could give yourself soon? What kind of nourishment speaks loudest to your heart?
Here are some suggestions for possible unmet needs for parents and how you might find small was to support yourself:
Physical needs: Getting more sleep, exercise, prioritsing your own needs for nutrition, rest and movement, tuning in to yourself when you need to drink or use the toilet, or spending time in nature.
Emotional needs: Can you allow yourself to ask for help, set up an Listening Partnership or join a circle to have spaces to express and share how you are feelings, journalling, have sessions with someone who resonates, learning to offer yourself compassion, learning to turn down the volume on the voice of criticism and judgement.
Practical support: Can you find ways to take time to yourself before you feel burnt out or sick, do things that bring joy and fun, do one special thing each day for yourself, swap child care with other parents or find a baby sitter, to learn to ask for help and know that you can't do it all alone.
With your children: Can you involve your children in the jobs of life with choice and fun, nurture yourselves together e.g. massages, bringing in rituals for connection in your family, spending time in nature together, meditation and mindfulness with your children. There is a myth that we need time away from our children in order to be meeting our needs but it is also true that togetherness with our children, can meet lots of our needs too.
Our chronically unmet needs: Many of us who weren't raised with Aware Parenting have had a lifetime of unmet needs and part of the healing journey is reparenting ourselves, where we are giving ourselves the things we needed but didn't receive in childhood. As Robin Grille says in his book Inner Child Journey's, "The biggest shifts happen when we give ourselves the developmental nutrients that meet our unsatisfied developmental needs.". So we can imagine ourselves, often with external support, receiving what we needed as children and find ways to fulfil those needs now in our adult life.
It can be hard to identify our needs. Often as children we struggled to be able to voice our needs or perhaps we voiced our needs but didn't get the response we wanted - maybe we were punished, ignored, shamed, so we were left with a vague and nagging sense that something wasn't right and we relied on our carers to understand and work out our needs. So it makes sense that, if we have always minimise our needs, it is not easy to suddenly start validating them.
Learning to trust our bodies, to trust what we feel and to tune in to our innate knowing. Maps of needs are so helpful to support us to learn to reconnect with our bodies signals and to identify our fundamental needs.
Starting the process of recognising what we need, valuing what we need, knowing we are safe to ask for what we need, being willing to have those needs met, celebrating and acknowledging ourselves for meeting the needs.
Doing this is so important for us and our children. By valuing everyone's needs in the family, it supports deeper connection, increased cooperation and a deeper relationship with needs. We gain more capacity to support our children and we model to them how to be an adult that takes care of their needs, values their needs and supports themselves, who knows how to ask for their needs to be met and prioritises the importance of that. Isn't that what you want for your child in 10 years time?
