Wait 17 Seconds Before Interfering With Your Child’s Struggles
All day, every day, your children face real challenges. And you can bet that they will inform you of this struggle. Maybe they can’t solve the homework problem. Or how to insert the right hand into the right armhole of a jacket. Or maybe the moat of their Lego palace doesn’t look like a picture, which means it’s not like that .
In defeat, they will declare:
I can’t let this happen!
This does not work!
I need help!
Your parental instinct is likely to fix the problem. This is your job, right?
Wait instead. Seventeen seconds. This is the specific amount of time that Alyssa Marquis recommends in her new book, Bouncing Back to Normal: A Practical Guide for Connecting, Not Perfection, which comes out this month. Why 17 seconds? Marquis, a mom of three, learned that the average person doesn’t stop for more than 17 seconds before interrupting a conversation, so as an experiment, she tried to count to 17 in her head before speaking to her family. She found herself interrupting her frequently – her husband and children had much more to say and contribute when they weren’t interrupted all the time. So she decided to also try using 17 seconds as the waiting time when she saw one of her kids struggling.
Why wait? Providing this buffer provides children with a critical opportunity to move beyond this frustration. As the marquis explains, you must “allow them the possibility of their own victory.”
During those 17 seconds, your child may be thinking, “I need help! I SAID HEEEELP! Anyone? Okay, why isn’t anyone saving me? What else can I do? What can I change? How about trying this solution? Oops, it works! I did it myself. ” It may not be this way every time, but the situations where it does happen will be powerful.
Try. If your toddler becomes more and more frustrated trying to insert the cylinder block into the star-shaped hole, wait 17 seconds. If your preschooler can’t get off the top of the climbing structure (and doesn’t look like they are in immediate danger), count to 17. If your younger student can’t solve the water lily problem and wants to give up, remember: “1 … 2 …. 3 … “
It’s hard to wait. It’s easy to save. But for your kids to see how capable they are, they need a chance to become their own heroes, not a mom or dad who constantly rescues them.