Go read the Disclaimer again. I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Seriously.
Julie Shields describes an idea you might recognize from the workplace: the BATNA, or Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. A good BATNA can be extraordinarily helpful in encouraging other people to listen to you when you tell them what you want and need and why. One of the best reasons women have for negotiating with their partner before pregnancy and childbirth regarding what their life with the baby will be like is that their BATNA takes a dive once they get pregnant: if you are about to have a baby (or you already have one), you are unlikely to exercise your BATNA (walk out of the relationship). This simple observation underlies the drop in divorce rates for couples who just had a baby, that occurs simultaneously with a drop in relationship satisfaction for most women and many men.
Demands are specific things that someone asks for in a negotiation. Needs are what a person in a negotiation is attempting to satisfy through negotiation, possibly by making demands. Hopes are thoughts about a future that might be better than the present, or the present extended into the future without changes. Dreams are thoughts about a future that would so thoroughly satisfy all one's needs that one could devote one's time and energy to the truly important things. Love is what keeps us in there slugging when we have no particular reason to believe the negotiation is going to work; it is the result of a firm belief in the good will of one's partner and that grace will enable us to work things out.
With those definitions in mind, I'd like to make a few observations. It is not possible to know someone else's needs and whether they have been satisfied as well as that person can. That said, you can improve your understanding of their needs, hopes and dreams by listening to them and attending to their actions, including non-verbal communications. If you are really skillful, you might be able to come up with solutions that meet everyone's needs so that they have hope their dreams might one day be fulfilled. This is unlikely and, more important, it is a whole lot of work and the process itself can cause problems.
People are fully capable of imagining and, in a supportive environment, communicating (maybe not in speech) what it is they want and need, or, at least, what enables them to consider the future without despair. It is far better, more effective, more satisfying and less work all around to include everyone in the family in generating solutions, rather than having everyone submit their needs to one person who then comes up with ideas and has them dismissed until one is grudgingly accepted out of exhaustion as barely acceptable. Take it from me. I have learned this the hard way. Over and over and over again.
When negotiation produces an agreement that one can tolerate, but is not better than alternatives one can readily imagine (particularly alternatives that one could pursue easily on one's own) there will be, at minimum, problems in enforcing the terms of the agreement. Negotiations will probably reopen. It is often better to delay making a decision, if at all possible. A decision made just to get it over with is a decision that will be undone until it is made properly.
A lot of parents have realized that tyranny does not work in a family, in part because women now have enough power to speak up for themselves effectively. Nor does democracy work in a family. The minority which did not concur in the decision will sabotage it, intentionally or otherwise, or they will exit the family, creating what you could have started with: consensus decision making.
Consensus is easy to get when what is under consideration is better than any alternative anyone involved can imagine. While this might seem impossible, in a family where love is still intact, no one is likely to want to get their way at the expense of another, but rather will continue to search for solutions that help everyone maintain hope, and helps them towards their dreams.
This sounds completely insane. Rather than offer up examples from my own life, or those of my friends, I invite you instead to convince yourself that this cannot ever work, that some alternative is superior to it. Use as examples difficult decisions you have made -- or failed to make, or failed to implement, or which resulted in a breakup or divorce, or caused the end of a friendship, or forced someone to find a new job, etc. I am not suggesting that everyone will be ecstatic about every decision every time. I am suggesting that consensus between people with love for each other will be superior to any alternative and if consensus is impossible, then alternative strategies will also fail.
Every time I think I've found a situation where consensus does not work, I find I actually have a situation where negotiations will break down, or enforcement will fail, or enforcement will be so costly as to be pointless.
Feel free to send me suggestions. My current strategy with my baby is to pay attention to feedback and to try a lot of things in succession until finding one he likes, and trying to discern cues and signals that can help me get to the right choice earlier than just running the checklist. As my baby becomes more able to move around, I do what I can to assist his explorations, without letting him get into danger that he cannot yet understand and mitigate on his own. My new strategy with my husband is to discuss situations that I expect will not go well for me, but will be hard to do anything about while in the middle of them, well in advance of the situation. This removes time pressure and allows for a lot more creative thinking.
Specific tips and techniques can be found at Taking Children Seriously and in Thomas Gordon's book, P.E.T.: Parent Effectiveness Training. Ideas for maintaining goodwill in the adult relationship can be found in John Gottman's Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work. Insight into how past history might be setting obstacles in the path of the adult relationship and the parents ability to care for children can be found in Harville Hendrix's books.
If you do not listen, you cannot learn about another's experience, needs, hopes and dreams. If they do not feel listened to, they will either repeat until they feel heard, or they will exit the negotiation, physically or emotionally. Faber and Mazlish have some ideas about how to listen to children and ensure they feel they have been heard. These ideas also apply in adult relationships. Cohen has ideas that work even when words fail, especially with small children.
Perspective taking is thinking about what the other person is experiencing and then saying something that they can hear that will let them know that you understand them. It can be as simple as saying, "It sure is cold, isn't it?" when someone is shivering. The more upset another person is, the more important it is, to sustain love and enable further communication, that their perspective be recognized and acknowledged by another. That will not address underlying problems (it will still be cold), but it will help move everyone to a state where productive communication can happen.
If you do not let anyone learn what you need, hope and dream, they can provide no assistance in attaining those needs, or helping you hope, or reaching your dreams. You are not part of a family if you are not letting your fammily learn what you need, hope and dream. You are leading a parallel life. It might be very pleasant. You might share living space, groceries and sex. It might last for decades and be very polite, even friendly. But odds are good that a small child lobbed into this relationship will change it entirely: it will end, or become something very different from what it was. Hanauer collected some very interesting stories of exactly that happening, along with other tales of men and women, often involving children.
Communicating needs, hopes and dreams is simple, but can be extremely difficult. Past experiences that make us reluctant to say, "When you read over my shoulder I feel very nervous" can make it virtually impossible to say, "When your mother visits I feel anxious and unloved.". It does not help that a lot of people in our culture believe we are responsible for our feelings, and that no one can "make" us feel a particular way; it is our responsibility to change our feelings in response to someone else's actions if we do not like those feelings. As my husband aptly notes, this is completely incompatible with intimacy. It isn't particularly healthy to suppress one's emotions in that way, either.
There are ways to communicate emotions -- even negative emotions felt in response to the undesirable actions of another -- that are not violent, critical or blaming. It is generally less toxic to communicate negative emotions early, before anger reinforces them and confuses us. It is helpful to use I-messages, but I think more important to maintain a connection strong enough to weather unpleasant emotions and take positive steps to correct the situations that lead to them. If I know that reading over your shoulder makes you nervous, I'm less likely to do it. If I am tempted, and you remind me, I'll probably stop immediately, and you won't feel so nervous and we'll both recover quickly. If it works well enough, we might even feel so good about that successful exchange that our overall sense of connection and affection is improved.
When you are raising a child, your time and resources are no longer yours alone. The courts, in the limiting case of custody disputes, will order that your assets be seized and your wages garnished if you attempt to act as if your time and resources are yours alone. You can make the transition to parenthood a little smoother by making a child sized hole in your life before your child is born. And you can make the process of raising that child together a lot more pleasant by learning how to do other things truly together before your child is born.
But if you did neither in advance, it is not too late to recognize the need to make space and time in your life for your family, and to include them in your life and yourself in theirs.
Allocating Money, Time and Other Family Resources
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen.
Created February 5, 2006 Updated June 28, 2006