Posted: Mar 27, 2020 5:42 am
And hysteria will probably cost ten times more lives.
The thing is when one wants to communicate effectively one has to know what the desired outcome of a conversation is. Clearly it wasn't to get her not to go to McDonald's again since it was closing anyway. If the objective was to get her to be considerate of others' feelings and learn to compromise with the people she's living with (controlling her would be a non-starter as she's a legal adult and it's a grade A toxic asshole behaviour anyway) then I sincerely doubt a slanging match accomplished that.
The way to make someone think about your feelings is to be considerate of theirs. The way to make someone think about other points of view is to engage them in conversation, listen and be listened to, rather than force a confrontation in which everyone just digs in and becomes increasingly entrenched. And that's just from a purely goal-oriented approach. Never mind what happens with young people and children who learn their conflict resolution by imitating their parents. Children who are shown calmness, reasonableness and compassion by their parents grow up to be calm reasonable and compassionate much, much more often. Children who learn that parents get their way by bullying, cajoling and shouting tend to learn to do the same.
The thing is when one wants to communicate effectively one has to know what the desired outcome of a conversation is. Clearly it wasn't to get her not to go to McDonald's again since it was closing anyway. If the objective was to get her to be considerate of others' feelings and learn to compromise with the people she's living with (controlling her would be a non-starter as she's a legal adult and it's a grade A toxic asshole behaviour anyway) then I sincerely doubt a slanging match accomplished that.
The way to make someone think about your feelings is to be considerate of theirs. The way to make someone think about other points of view is to engage them in conversation, listen and be listened to, rather than force a confrontation in which everyone just digs in and becomes increasingly entrenched. And that's just from a purely goal-oriented approach. Never mind what happens with young people and children who learn their conflict resolution by imitating their parents. Children who are shown calmness, reasonableness and compassion by their parents grow up to be calm reasonable and compassionate much, much more often. Children who learn that parents get their way by bullying, cajoling and shouting tend to learn to do the same.