I was attempting to play the role of the normative (TV-defined) father to my 17 month old boy, placing him securely in my lap with the book "Little Bear won't sleep" (a 9-month-birthday gift from his mother). I was happily reflecting on the aptness of the title, especially since this little bear of mine fights and struggles to stay awake each night. This culminates in a process where he has to be led bawling by me into a darkened room, and treated to a 30 minute to one hour exercise of carrying and lullabye-singing to put him to sleep (another story for another time).
As I had a specific agenda to tell the story of the sleepy little bear, one might say I was pretty fixated on ensuring that he sat through the entire activity of me reading each and every line in the page before turning to the next one. Fikri, however, had his own plan.
He was adamant on turning the book to a specific page where Little Bear was conversing with an owl, and content on staying on that page whilst pointing and saying our "Owwwwer" 30-40 times (I lost count). He proceeded to point to Little Bear whilst saying "Dog!"
Looking at my exasperated attempts to turn the page back to where I had last finished reading (and my correction of "Dog" into "Bear"), I realised:
"Why don't you just let him do what he wants to do?"
The realisation that I was trying to teach and read words to a baby struck me. These were words crafted by letters still too boring for a child to be bothered with. Even as an adult, I still hoped for more pictures in my books. As I looked at him, he was pretty content just sitting there and saying "Owweerrr!" and maybe I should just pace with him.
It was also a useful lesson in how I might approach the persons I work with. Too often, we move fast into setting the agenda of the meetings we conduct (sometimes we get confused with ideas of social justice, that we ironically push these ideas in a disrespectful manner). Morgan (2006) talks about the "Decentered and Influential" position where the helper sees the person or the family as the expert in their own lives, placing the family's skills, knowledge, and preferences in the centre of practice.
We attempt to be influential not through setting the agenda for discussions, but through the use of questions to enable the skills of the person to become more obvious and known. In this position we talk about how we could be useful for our clients, and process their expectations of help. We do not rush into giving advice, but ask questions about the processes and steps of how they came into certain decisions. We make known their strengths, values, and preferred futures so that we are aware of where they hope to go.
So it was that I spent a good half an hour that morning facilitating the name-saying of the "Owwweerrr", whilst eventually letting him see the other animals in the book (Squirrel is hard to pronounce).
And the Bear does look like a Dog anyway...
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