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“I know!”

If you are a parent, then you will be well familiar with this phrase. You are trying to warn your child about something and they come back with “I know…” This potent phrase wards them from listening to a single thing you say. Truth be told, they do know: know in the sense that they have the information in their brains. This is like owning a book on car maintenance which has been thumbed through but never used in anger. Knowing something at this level of having packets-of-information is very different from Life Knowledge that comes from real experience.

I suspect the parents amongst my readership are now nodding and thinking something like “The folly of youth..” Me too, but before we start enjoying these grey hairs too much perhaps we need to reflect that this behaviour doesn’t time expire and that we all still do it. As we age we just do it better! This is just a tactic to prevent us engaging with challenging thoughts and ideas, and in fact is yet another face of the fight or flight response. The information that our loved one is trying to share is simply too dangerous to engage with and as our manners prevent us leaving the building, we pull this mental ‘vanishing trick’ by using the magic words “I know” PUFF! We are gone! Walls of invisibility surround us and protect us from these challenging thoughts. Behind our safety walls no one can help us; we are ‘safe’ to march straight back into the same old stupid stunt we always pull in these circumstances…

It is tough being a parent and facing this; in all honesty, it is harder to look into the mirror our loved ones are offering us and learn to see what they see. Next time you are tempted to say (or even think) “I know!” Are you brave enough to take and deep breath, sit down and try to listen? I’ll give it a go, will you?

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 09:05 and is filed under Flight / Fight, Hints, Tips & Techniques, Personal Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to ““I know!””

  1. fay_o says:
    28 February , 2008 at 11:44

    It’s when the phrase turns into ‘What do you know’ that we need to worry.

    There is nothing wrong in allowing a child to take over when a task is difficult…you would be amazed how resourceful they can be!

    For some parents it is very hard to delegate, especially to a bright eight year old. If you can do that and allow a youngster to find out for themselves how resourceful they are, allow them the satisfaction of being right by guiding from a distance without them realising. Allowing a little self satisfaction and giving praise. The ‘I know’ situation will then be few and far between.

    A child with confidence in itself is far more likely to ask an elder for advice.

    A parent with confidence in a teenager knows only to give advice when asked.

    The secret is to make the asking easy and regular throughout the child’s life.

    f

  2. richardderwentcooke says:
    28 February , 2008 at 11:45

    Of course you are right to point this out too. Letting go is tough, but definitely the right thing to do.

    In this instance, I wasn’t really referring to that kind of thing. I wanted to highlight the difference between having information, and actually having the wisdom to act on it! Now I know that you can argue that the only way to wisdom is experience, and that includes mistakes. Of course that is true. However, there are times when you can validly seek to protect your loved ones from enrolling in the School of Hard Knocks too.

    Thank you for adding this valuable extra dimension to this post

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