Are You An Expert at Coaching Children?

© Richard Bolstad 2023

Coaching is a skilled method of listening to others to help them discover and use their own strengths, resolve inner conflicts, and achieve more of what they want to achieve. Professor Julia Miller of Sydney Business School (2018) has conducted several research studies which show that while most managers think they know how to coach, actually when asked to do so they simply offer advice: “Why don’t you do this?”. The researchers call this pseudo-coaching approach “micromanaging-as-coaching”. It leads to employees feeling less and less competent.

Similarly, Dr Eva Pomerantz of the University of Illinois (2001) found that parents who think they are good at coaching their children frequently do the same, and with the same results. Pomerantz used the term “intrusive support” to refer to parents monitoring and telling children how to deal with emotional and social challenges when the children have not even asked for such help. This is the kind of support parents use more when they feel responsible for their children’s happiness. The more the parents used intrusive support, the less competent their children came to feel, and the less happy they became. “Intrusive support” was associated with children being more likely to develop psychiatric problems, depression in particular.

However, like managers, parents can learn to be better coaches. Our Coaching with Children model is designed for professionals working with children, but is also useful for parents to understand. The first step involves them getting clear what are their children’s problems, and what are their own problems (the things they worry about as a parent). If you are not happy with your child’s behaviour, this is a parenting problem, and the solutions will involve parenting skills (setting clearer boundaries, explaining what you want without insulting the child, and so on). If your child is not happy, and asks for help, then indeed this may be a time where a parental version of “coaching” is useful.

Successful coaching is based in the ability to listen to and enter into the internal world of the client. You do not have to agree with their beliefs, or understand the world the way they do, but to help them change you need to show them that you can understand their way of experiencing it. Imagine talking to a child who is disappointed in their own artistic creation. Most parents will have discovered that just telling the child “Come on; it’s a perfectly good picture. Stop being so self-critical!” doesn’t actually help, but actually may increase the child’s expressions of despair. Instead, a trained coach would listen to the child and then share their own way of thinking or even invite the child to find their own better way of thinking e.g. “Sounds like you’re kind of disappointed that it doesn’t look the way you wanted it to?” [child nods] “I really like the mix of colours in it. When you think about what you want to change, I wonder what things you might have learned now that could help you make one more like what you want next time? What would you do different?” This process is called “reflective listening” and “reframing” in coaching, and teaching the child how to do it enables them to develop the skill themselves, becoming increasingly resilient in later situations. In a way, a parent who uses these skills is coaching their child in a pattern of thinking that they can use not just in this situation, but in any similar challenge.

Children have a literal “super-power” that helps them to rehearse new skills like this. A research study by Rachel White of Hamilton College and Stephanie Carlson of the University of Michigan, titled “The Batman Effect,” (2016) showed that when children assume the role of a superhero in play, they become more outgoing and more confident in their actions, persisting in the face of challenges. Far from making them “escape reality”, such play helps children experimentally learn new approaches to reality. Children learn new emotional responses and find creative new solutions, not merely by logical discussions or study, but by metaphorical play. They are able to build models for socially successful behaviour in the real world, by what Psychologist Lev Vygotsky called “scaffolding” – the pretend role creates a protective “scaffold” until they have practiced and internalised the confidence they need to act in the new way on their own (Woolfolk, 2004). In this sense, play is a coaching activity uniquely suitable for children.

Metaphorical stories engage the same natural learning processes. In our training “Coaching with Children”, we show coaches how to construct and deliver such metaphorical stories. Psychotherapist Dr Milton Erickson used metaphorical stories repeatedly in his work with children. In one example (Haley, 1986, p.200) Erickson worked with a young boy who was wetting the bed at night. Erickson chatted with him and found out that at school he enjoyed archery, and was pretty good at it. Erickson pointed out that when he drew back the bowstring to aim the arrow, the circular muscles around his eye would automatically contract to allow him to focus. He then mentioned that when he ate a meal, the circular muscles at the bottom of his stomach contracted to hold the meal in his stomach, and then they relaxed only when the food was ready to be moved out again. His bedwetting stopped without them ever discussing it.

Many famous children’s stories are actually therapeutic metaphors of this sort. One example is the Wizard of Oz, where the characters discover that their very awareness of the problems they thought they had … was actually evidence that they can solve those problems: the tin woodsman worried that he didn’t have a heart, and so he was extremely careful not to harm living things; the cowardly lion always went to the front on a fight so he would not run away; the scarecrow always thought very carefully before making a decision, because he knew he had straw instead of brains. In fact, in doing this, the tin woodsman already demonstrated compassion, the cowardly lion already demonstrated courage, and the scarecrow already demonstrated wisdom. The Wizard of Oz, by pointing these things out and giving them each a metaphorical present, acted as a skilled coach. Often, such metaphorical stories provide practical material examples of a person solving an analogous problem. Practical concrete examples are easier for a child’s thinking to process than conceptual recommendations, as Jean Piaget showed in his study of child cognitive development (Woolfolk, 2004).

Processes which are done by guided imagination in Psychotherapy with adults can be adapted for this “concrete operational” cognitive style by having the child create a drawing or a clay sculpture of the material that would usually be visualized. This is another good example of how coaches can utilize the natural skills and preferences of childhood, rather than trying to assess whether a child is “old enough” to manage adult-style coaching. Parenting exposes the parent continuously to this more practical style, and in our course on Coaching with Children I give students practical experiences and many more examples from my own professional work.

Childhood is a time when an immense number of new strategies are learned. As a young child you learned to tie your shoelaces, to brush your teeth, to count to a hundred, to say thank you to people who give you presents, and to read the letters you are reading right now. Of course, children develop a high tolerance of learning such skills, and it can help for them to notice that social skills and the skills of learning and memory themselves, are just strategies that can be “learned” in the same way. An example that has been studied in the coaching field of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is visual memory, which is enhanced by directing the child’s eyes up towards the dominant side of the brain (usually the left) as they recall an image. This movement activates the visual cortex of the brain so effectively that it immediately increases the memory of the spelling of English words by an average of 61%, essentially making the most challenged speller in an American class succeed as well as the best speller (Carlei and Kerzel, 2020; Dilts and Epstein, 1995).

Coaching with children is of course a great way to rediscover the child in yourself. To summarise, it involves

  • Distinguishing parents problems from children’s problems.
  • “Reflective listening” and encouraging “reframing” rather than simple advice giving.
  • Utilizing the child’s preference for roleplay based learning and metaphorical stories rather than theory.
  • Concretising psychological concepts in art and play.
  • Adopting an educational model for learning emotionally and socially, rather than a traditional “intelligence assessment” model.

Bibliography:

  • Bolstad, R., 2012, “The Rapport Based Family” Transformations, Amazon, Auckland [Also available in Japanese, Chinese and Russian language]
  • Carlei, C. & Kerzel, D., 2020, “Looking up improves performance in verbal tasks”, Laterality, 25:2, 198-214, DOI: 10.1080/1357650X.2019.1646755
  • Dilts, R.B. and Epstein, T.A., 1995, Dynamic Learning, Meta Publications, Capitola
  • Hayley, J., 1986, Uncommon Therapy, Norton & Co., New York
  • Milner, J. and Milner, T. 2018, “Most Managers Don’t Know How to Coach People. But They Can Learn.” Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2018/08/most-managers-dont-know-how-to-coach-people-but-they-can-learn
  • Pomerantz, E., 2001, “Parent & Child Socialization: Implications for development of depressive syndromes” p 510-525 in Journal of Family Psychology, Number 15, 2001
  • White, R.E., Prager, E.O., Schaefer, C., Kross, E., Duckworth, A.L. and Carlson, S.M., 2017, “The “Batman Effect”: Improving Perseverance in Young Children”. Child Development, 88: 1563-1571. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12695
  • Woolfolk, A., 2004, Educational Psychology. (9th edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon

Now you may like to read Lynn Timpany’s inspirational article “NLP and Change With Children”

Also, check out these children’s books, available at bookshops like Amazon, and produced by New Zealand NLP Practitioners and Trainers we know!