Intuition is the adult term for what kids know as early warning signs. It is said that females have better intuition than males because girls are more sensitive. Perhaps that’s only because some of us train our sons NOT to rely on their intuition and not to show their feelings about things. We like them to be manly: rational, sensible, scientific, and cut off from their feelings. And when male children are sensitive we put them down by telling them not to be girls/sissies/cry babies!? The other thing we often do when children show emotion is to tell them to grow up and act their age. Enough! Stop NOW!
By training the feelings out of our boy and girl children we are teaching them to not recognise and act on risky situations. Please, make today the day you start teaching your child to recognize and listen to their early warning signs and to act on them as children. Don’t wait until they are young adults and then force them to make uninformed and belated safety decisions about walking alone at night or unsafe partying. Children need to learn the very basic rules about intuition, BODY WARNINGS, while they are still young. If they don’t get it as children they may not trust their intuition as they get older.
Our early warning signs, our body feelings, are nature’s way of giving us a message that something is good or bad. The worst that can happen is that we might be wrong. Better to be wrong than sexually abused! My goodness! No wonder so many children are sexually abused. We are training the feeling out of them without realizing what we are doing.
Perpetrators of child sexual abuse often pick children who are disconnected from knowing what to do with their early warning signs, children who are unlikely to say anything even if they do have a feeling that something is wrong. Predators test these children out through the grooming process (coming up in another blog) and when they’re sure the child won’t act on their intuition they swoop on them.
Protect your child by offering activities and discussions that include listening to their body. Here’s a few for you to try:
Dog’s hair/cat’s tail: Animals are great for showing off their early warning signs. Animals have not had it trained out of them: it is an automatic process just like when we are cold we get goose bumps. When dogs are bothered by the presence of another dog the hairs on their backs are automatically raised and they often bare their teeth. This is the dog’s physical early warning sign telling its opponent to back off! Cats automatically flick their tails and flatten their ears. When we scare, annoy or hurt an animal their body tells us to leave them alone. Because we fear being hurt by them we tend to become sensible and back off. And so it is for child predators. If a child displays their early warning signs the perpetrator may back off. The child is telling them it is not safe, that there will be a consequence to the abusive behaviour. The child becomes the hunter and the perpetrator runs.
Ask your child what their early warning sign is for any different situation: do they feel like they have a tiger in their tummy trying to get out, or can they feel the hairs on the back of their neck standing up? Encourage your child to describe how they are feeling, and don’t laugh at their descriptions. Remember that children don’t have an adult vocabulary.
The classic example of this is a child saying they have a headache in their stomach. They know they have a pain but can’t describe it in detail. It is up to us to help them to find the right words to describe how they are feeling. How are they ever going to do this if we don’t help them pinpoint feelings in a range of different (happy, sad, scary, etc) situations?
Scary stories or movies: Scary stories are a great way to introduce physical early warning signs. When reading a story together you can ask your child how their body is feeling. If they respond that they don’t know, show them what their body is doing: curled up in a ball, fists clenched, sweating, chewing fingernails, etc.
Common physical descriptions from children: In my work with children I have heard many early warning signs. These include:
A pack of wolves in my tummy,
A ball of string with lots of knots in it,
Fire or skull and crossbones in my stomach,
A question sign/bell in my head,
Beautiful smelling flowers in my heart,
Ants biting me all over,
Legs like Mummy’s tummy, all wobbly,
An Ant Eater in my chest.
Use some of these or invent your own when you discuss feelings with your child. By modeling a verbal description of how your body is feeling linked to the emotional word you would use, you are assisting your child to gain a greater feeling vocabulary. Use a variety of physical descriptions to match a whole range of emotions, not just scared or angry feelings. Remember the good feelings too. How would you describe the body feelings for happiness, relief and excitement? Describing feelings is not just about the painful feelings. All feelings are natural and are there to tell us something.
Drawing/writing exercise using prompt pictures: Show your child a picture (magazine, photo, card). Ask them to draw/write the way their body would react to the situation in the picture. When children respond by saying they would punch/kiss the person, or run away, ask them to draw/write what would be happening inside their body where nobody else can see. This process is a bit like peeling an onion. There are layers to get through to help connect with body reactions, emotional layers that are deeper than the behaviours children show us.
Art collage of different faces: Cut faces out of magazines and glue to a sheet of paper. Ask the child to say how they think each person is feeling. Learning emotional language will help your child throughout life. When they can express emotions, children have a better chance of telling you if something happens to them. Because children don’t have an extended emotional vocabulary they act out their emotions as a way of telling us something is wrong. As parents, we often miss these messages, and ask the child to stop being naughty/silly/annoying. If your child cannot find words to express their emotions, they have no other way to draw your attention to how they are feeling.
Mix and match: Cut pictures of people into three pieces: head, body and legs. Use pictures that express different emotions and body stances. Mix the pieces up and have the child match them together. While the child is matching, give hints about what a person’s legs might look like if they’ve got an angry face and have their arms crossed, or what a face might look like when the arms and legs are hanging limp.
Mime: When the opportunity arises and the kids are bored with nothing to do, play a miming game. Silently act out a particular body reaction to any emotion and ask the children to guess what you are feeling. Offer a prize for correct answers. Gingerbread people make great food prizes because you can then naturally mention body ownership. Remember though that food is a child’s right and food rewards must never be used to replace good care and nutrition. A food reward needs to be something special. A treat, not something that the child has a basic right to on a daily basis.
Surprises: We have a rule that the word “secret” is not to be used EVER. Secrets are bad things, things that you can’t tell anyone, whereas a surprise is something that can be kept confidential until a particular time, like the chocolate we bought for Mom’s birthday. Often predators will encourage children to keep secrets. Bad secrets hurt children and they need to know they don’t have to keep them. Remember, nothing is so awful that we can’t talk to someone about it. This rule needs to be reinforced by discouraging the keeping of “secrets”.
Change “secret” to” surprises” by playing the following game and letting children know that it is never okay to keep secrets because when they stay in your head they make you feel all jumbled up. They get more scary and confused and we feel awful. Secrets must be broken. Telling someone out loud is the best way to stop secrets. Play “Surprises”: this is similar to the old Chinese Whispers game (also called “secrets”), a game of messages that become changed, distorted and nothing like the first message. You need a group of children. A positive message (e.g. I love chocolate fairy cakes) is whispered into the first child’s ear. That child then whispers the message into the next child’s ear and this continues, passing to each child until the message is back to the beginning person. The first child then states, out loud, the message they have just received. It is generally quite different to the way it started. Say SURPRISE, SURPRISE! If a child asks to play the secret game again (as they do), correct them by saying, “It’s called surprises because you must never keep secrets.” Playing this game prepares a child’s mind for changing the word “secrets” to “surprises” and assists children to remember to tell about bad secrets.
Imaginif…you shared ideas on how your family teaches emotional intelligence and intuition.