Understanding Children and Teens: A Practical Guide for Parents, Teachers and Coaches

By Judy Bartkowiak

The recent pandemic has turned family life upside down. Now, more than ever before, children and teens are experiencing anxiety, low self-esteem, fear, and a host of other, unfamiliar feelings. This book aims to give parents and those who work with children the tools to help them overcome these difficulties and to enable them to express themselves, and to build emotional intelligence and resilience.

Children and teens are given the means to believe in themselves with unconditional love and acceptance, empowering them to achieve all they wish for in life.

Understanding Children and Teens shows the reader how to use Neuro Linguistic Programming, and Emotional Freedom Technique as well as mindfulness and Art Therapy in order to connect with children and teens to help them overcome their problems. With clear explanations, examples, and easy-to-follow exercises, this book will enable those who care for children to gain valuable insight into their world, and to understand what they are thinking and feeling.

This practical guide is aimed at parents, teachers, coaches, and everyone who works with children and teens and is informed by the author’s experiences of working with this group over the last 30 years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Free Association Books
• Release date: Nov 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781911383512

Judy Bartkowiak

Judy Bartkowiak is an NLP trainer and coach as well as an EFT trainer and coach who specialises in working with children and teens. Before becoming a therapist, she worked in market research, and then ran a Montessori nursery alongside her therapeutic work. She has written extensively on NLP.

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First published by Free Association Books.

Copyright ©

2020

Judy Bartkowiak

The author’s rights are fully asserted. The rights of

Judy Bartkowiak to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

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1988

A CIP Catalogue of this book is available from

the British Library

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978-1-911-38350-5

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For parents, teachers and coaches, all over the world.

– Believe in yourself and trust your intuition.

This is a really important time in history when you have the opportunity to make a huge difference in children’s lives. Do it!

Foreword

Judy Bartkowiak is an international NLP and EFT Trainer, Therapist and Author specialising in working with children, teens, parents and families. Her passion is to show her clients how to move from a stuck state of low self-esteem, depression, fear and anxiety, anger or grief into a state of flow where what they want and need is possible.

She is trained and experienced in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), Picture Tapping Technique (PTT), Matrix Reimprinting and Mindfulness. Before becoming a therapist, she worked in children’s market research for companies such as LEGO, Mattel, Aardman, Hasbro and the BBC.

In writing this book, Judy wants to share her expertise and to empower those who love children by giving them a cornucopia of techniques that will enable them to express themselves and to build emotional intelligence and resilience. It is her belief that when they believe in themselves with unconditional love and acceptance, they will achieve all they wish for in life.

Judy is the author of a number of NLP books which may be helpful should you wish to delve further into NLP or apply NLP to yourself.

NLP Workbook – comprehensive introduction to NLP concepts, theory, and techniques with questions to get you implementing the learning for yourself.

Self-Esteem Workbook – applies NLP principles to all aspects of self-esteem guiding you through the exercises to increase your self-esteem.

Secrets of the NLP Masters – 50 chapters covering applied NLP techniques and principles to all areas of your life; sport, family, health, friendships, work and relationships.

Be a happier parent with NLP – definitive parenting guide taking you through every NLP principle and technique so you can apply it as a parent then the second part covers specific situations such as moving house, moving school, new baby, etc.

Engaging NLP series of workbooks for children, tweens, teens, parents, teachers, work, back to work, pregnancy & childbirth, weight loss.

You can get in touch with her via her website www.nlpfamily.com

Introduction

When I started to write this book, pre Covid-19 in January 2020, it was my intention to share with you all my experience and learnings so that you would have a wide range of tools and modalities at your fingertips as professionals working with children, teens, parents and families. It had not been my intention to write for parents as I had done with Be a happier parent with NLP.

Then Covid-19 turned our lives upside down. We all had to face almost wartime restrictions on our liberty, our finances and our ability to work. Schools closed and children were home-schooled while parents tried to continue working with nobody able to draw on extended families and friends for support. Many of us lost our jobs, homes and livelihood. Thousands lost loved ones. It would be fair to say that we all struggled, along with other families, all over the world.

As I was writing the book, parents were telling me how they and their families were suffering, how they were experiencing mental and emotional problems they hadn’t had before and they didn’t know what to do. I realised that what I was writing for professionals was also relevant for parents, many of whom would, in any case, be working in a professional capacity with children. I also recognised that teachers were also facing extreme challenges and would continue to do so for many months or even years. So, parents and teachers, this book is very much written with you in mind.

Whether you use these exercises for your own children or for those you work with, they are all fun to do and yield great insight. They enable healing through showing children and teens that they have other possibilities. They are no longer stuck and can change their patterns.

My guiding principles when working with children are:

Observe the body language

Listen and notice the language patterns

Listen specifically for the limiting beliefs

Be curious about where they might have the skills to overcome them

Find their models of excellence

Help them ‘join up the dots’

Make the learning and skills ‘portable’ so they don’t need me

Joining up the dots may be through:

Reflecting back using ‘clean language’

Feedback of a pattern you’ve noticed

Guiding them in an exercise which enables them to disassociate and see the pattern for themselves

Addressing a limiting belief through a technique from NLP or EFT

The analogy I use is this:

Imagine your client is stuck in the mud. They can’t get out on their own, and by holding out your hand to them, they can make their first few steps until they are back on the dry ground where they can run and play again.

You will have your own metaphor or analogy of how you work with your child clients or with your own child, and I think it’s helpful to have one, because there can be a tendency when you love children to ‘rescue’ them rather than coach them. As parents, we do still need to have access to that inner coach as children move towards independence. This is a time when you can’t be ‘fixing’ or ‘rescuing them’ and they need to be forming their own coping strategies.

Finally, it is my intention that this book contains all the skills and expertise I have acquired over the last 20 years or so while working with children. We continue to learn all the time, and I share what I know with my students. You can book training courses with me via my website www.nlpfamily.com and I have listed resources at the back for modalities that I mention but in which I am not an expert.

Demystifying the Acronyms

NLP, EFT, PTT, Clean Language and Matrix Reimprinting

Let’s get the theory out of the way quickly! Whilst I am enormously grateful to Richard Bandler and John Grinder for developing a life philosophy that is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s when they came up with the name ‘Neuro Linguistic Programming’, I wish to goodness they had named it something more accessible to parents and those who work with children!

1. NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming.

‘Neuro’ is all our thoughts, experiences, beliefs, expectations, inner chatter that we use to filter what we experience through our senses. So, just as we have all had different parents and experienced different early years, everyone’s filters will be different. This means that each of us can experience the same event but make it mean something different.

‘Linguistic’ is how we respond verbally and non-verbally. Our facial expressions, body language and of course the words we use, are based on what we have made the event mean to us: our internal representation of it. The linguistic part is how we then present this version of it to the outside world.

‘Programming’ is what happens next. We tend to repeat patterns because they are based on our map of the world. So, even when we don’t get the result we want, we still keep repeating the patterns because our neural pathways have learnt this and it’s familiar.

When we understand the structure of this programme – the beliefs and thoughts behind it and the language pattern – we are then able to change it. The focus of NLP is to know what we want and to understand how we can achieve it.

Bandler and Grinder consulted with many others to create their principles: Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson, Fritz Perls, Gregory Bateson, Alfred Korzybski and Noam Chomsky.

I’d like to share with you some of Virginia Satir’s work as a Family Therapist, specifically her Therapeutic Beliefs taken from ‘The Satir Model’. You may recognise these later in the NLP Presuppositions.

1. Change is possible. Even if external change is limited, internal change is possible.

2. Parents do the best they can at any given time.

3. We all have the internal resources we need to cope successfully and to grow.

4. We have choices, especially in terms of responding to stress instead of reacting to situations.

5. Therapy needs to focus on health and possibilities instead of pathology.

6. Hope is a significant component or ingredient for change.

7. People connect on the basis of being similar and grow on the basis of being different.

8. A major goal of therapy is to become our own choice makers.

9. We are all manifestations of the same life force.

10. Most people choose familiarity over comfort, especially during times of stress.

11. The problem is not the problem; coping is the problem.

12. Feelings belong to us. We all have them.

13. People are basically good. To connect with and validate their own self-worth, they need to find their own inner treasure.

14. Parents often repeat the familiar patterns from their growing up times, even if the patterns are dysfunctional.

15. We cannot change past events, only the effects they have on us.

16. Appreciating and accepting the past increases our ability to manage our present.

17. One goal in moving toward wholeness is to accept our parental figures as people and meet them at their level of personhood rather than only in their roles.

18. Coping is the manifestation of our level of self-worth. The higher our self-worth, the more wholesome our coping.

19. Congruence and high self-esteem are major goals in the Satir model.

20. Healthy human relationships are built on equality of value.

I think you’ll agree with me, whether as a parent, or a practitioner, teacher, or other professional working with children, that these beliefs from Satir are still very much relevant to us today, even in a world that is so very different from the world she knew when she wrote them.

2. EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Technique or ‘Tapping’ as it is more widely known

EFT is an Energy Healing Modality. It is based on ancient Eastern Medicine and focuses on our awareness of the emotions as we experience them inside our body. We first feel emotions in our body – butterflies in our tummy, a sick feeling, tightness in the chest, sweaty palms and so on. Our brain tries to make sense of them and, as parents or teachers, we might ask, ‘Why do you feel like that?’ Children have already asked themselves this question and have no idea.

What has happened is that something has triggered their ‘fight/flight/freeze’ response. The amygdala basically acts like a smoke alarm when all that has happened is that, metaphorically, we have simply ‘burnt the toast’. This is a reaction to something much deeper in the subconscious, and could well be the manifestation of a core limiting belief they have formed about themselves, such as ‘I’m stupid’ or ‘No-one cares what I think’ or ‘Mummy doesn’t love me’. These beliefs are formed in utero and in early childhood when we don’t even have that reasoning ability. This is why we don’t know why we feel it, because it doesn’t make any sense logically. It was a perception we picked up from our environment at a time when we couldn’t understand anything other than our own need for survival.

Let me share with you a very simple exercise that you can do for yourself right now and use for your children and clients. I find it a great way to introduce ourselves, and those we love, to the idea that our emotions live in our body and have colour.

Tapping uses the acupressure or tapping points along meridian lines in the body which connect the organs. We combine tapping on the points with saying the negative feeling we want to get rid of i.e. sad, cross, fed up, tired, lonely. EFT practitioners feel we are connecting with what’s blocking us and allowing it to go. We are clearing the blockage.

The process is quite simple which is why children love it so much – they can easily do it themselves.

Even very young children can do simple tapping on themselves or on their teddy bear. As they tap on their bear, for whatever they are feeling they are getting the benefit. They might say my bear is afraid of the dark or he feels all alone as they tap him on his face and hands. This is called ‘surrogate tapping’. When you, the parent or practitioner, tap along as well they are getting additional ‘borrowed benefits’ – as are we, of course. In fact, tapping as a group, tapping as a class in school, as a family, can be very powerful.

Once children know how to tap, they can use it whenever they need to feel relaxed.

3. PTT – stands for Picture Tapping Technique

This technique combines EFT Tapping with Clean Language and Art Therapy. The child connects to their negative feeling and then draws their feelings on the paper, giving each drawing a title. We focus on the title then on the individual elements drawn on the paper e.g. ‘red circle’, black wiggly line’, and so on. Typically, it will take about 5 -7 drawings to clear an issue.

It is a great technique when you want to work ‘content-free’ which might be helpful with teenagers in particular, or if your child prefers not to tell you what they are worried about. This way you can help them without them having to reveal the details.

I find that sometimes once the issue has cleared, the clients then feel quite relaxed about telling you what