Practices

If you take a break from a fight, name when you will come back, and come back.

Give me twenty minutes, I am not leaving this. Then return, calmer, as promised.

For a compromise, name your one true core need, then be genuinely flexible on everything around it.

Separate the small inflexible core from the wide flexible area. Guard the core, give on the rest.

On a stuck, recurring fight, stop trying to persuade. First explore the dream or value behind each position.

Gridlock rarely yields to argument. Set persuasion aside and get curious about what the issue means to each of you.

Before you try to persuade, summarize your partner's position back until they say yes, that is it.

No persuasion lands until your partner feels understood. Interview them, then reflect their view to their satisfaction.

After a fight has cooled, revisit it once without blame, each saying how it felt.

Not who was right. How it felt for me, how it felt for you, and what we each needed.

On the fight you keep having, stop trying to win it and ask what it means to them underneath.

What are you hoping for, or afraid of, in this. Then only listen for the dream beneath.

Before you argue your side, say their side back so well that they feel understood.

Summarize what they mean until they say yes, that is it. Then, and only then, your turn.

If you go silent and shut down, do not just stonewall. Say you need a break, and come back when calm.

Silent withdrawal makes it worse. Name that you are overwhelmed, take twenty minutes, then re-engage.

When either of you floods, take a real break of at least twenty minutes before continuing, and agree when to return.

Past a certain heat the body cannot hear reason. Stop, settle, and come back at the time you set.

Anger pulls your attention towards whatever provoked it, the way a vacuum cleaner pulls at a curtain. Naming it that way makes it something happening to you rather than something wrong with you.

Rumination is an accurate word and a heavy one, and people who already feel judged tend to close up when it appears. A picture does the same job…

Distant health warnings move almost nobody. The cost that lands is the one showing up this month: your memory, your marks, the work you know you could be doing.

So keep it specific and keep it near. Heavy drinking in the teens and early twenties shows up in memory and in school work, which is the exact ground…

What you tried at that age is a poor guide to what is in front of your child now. Cannabis today is far stronger than the same word used to mean.

The sentence that closes most of these conversations is I turned out fine. Try a different one: ask what it does for them, when they reach for it,…

Nicotine looks like the small problem next to everything else going on, and it is the one most likely to still be here in thirty years.

Most adults who smoke started as teenagers, and the earlier the start the harder the eventual stopping tends to be. So it earns a place on the list…

If a young person is using regularly, waiting to see whether they grow out of it is a gamble. Help early is nearly always cheaper than help later.

Families often hold off because raising it feels like an accusation. You can raise it without one: say what you have noticed, say you are not going…

Praise the sitting down at the desk, not only the finished piece. If recognition only shows up when something is completed, most weeks it never shows up at all.

Say what you actually saw, and say it close to the moment: you sat down twice today when you clearly did not want to. Small rewards work too, as long…

When a young person tells you something in their own blunt words, meet them there. Laughing together buys more trust than a well judged correction ever will.

Correct the language and you sort yourself into the same bin as every other disappointed adult, and after that the useful information stops arriving.…

Put the uncertainty at the front. Not Thursday, possibly Friday, most likely Monday is worth far more to the other person than a confident yes you cannot keep.

It feels worse to say, which is why people avoid it. But a hedge given early costs you nothing, while a promise broken later costs twice: the thing…

Score each target from one to five rather than done or not done, and have the teacher say a word about it and initial the sheet before the child leaves the room.

Half the work finished earns a three. That matters enormously for a child whose usual score would be nothing at all, because a pass or fail sheet…

Before anything else, check the child actually knows what the homework is. Most homework goes missing at that first step, not at the effort step.

It might be on the board, on the school portal or in the planner with the teacher having glanced at it, and any of those is fine as long as it can be…

Print the agreement out and stick it up where the child will see it. In a drawer it may as well not exist.

The moment that matters is the one where the console is right there and the maths is not started, and nothing you agreed a fortnight ago is in the…