Emily Falk

Like, how would you feel about giving the other child's mom a call and we could just talk about it.

And Emmett's initial reaction was that he would really like to do that.

But what he would like to do is tell the mom all of the reasons why

her child was not behaving in a way that worked for Emmett and to get her to, you know, punish that kid in some way.

And what I said to him was, well, we can't really come into the conversation assuming that your friend is at fault here, because if we come in that way, what kind of reaction do you think you're going to get?

And eventually, after he had had a minute to do a different activity, calm down, we called the other family and we had a really great conversation.

And I think the crux of that, the insight that the kids were able to generate with some coaching was that this younger kid really wanted Emmett's attention.

He really wanted to be able to engage and to play.

And when Emmett was doing things like

And so the setup of this phone call, I think, would have gone very differently if Emmett had come in initially saying, here are all the reasons why I think what you're doing is wrong.

And so he was willing to do all kinds of things in order to get Emmett's attention.

Then we get a defensive reaction.

And I think Emmett would say that, you know, then it's his fault for not engaging in the conversation.

Right.

And so I say that to say that I think the way that we set up the context of the conversation matters a lot.

And so having some initial conversation.

relationship where we talk to each other about things that are hard and where we have the assumption that the other person has good intentions is so important.

So if we just start with the moment of the confrontation, we've already sort of lost the battle, right?

We want to have this mental and emotional preparation going in that makes it possible for us to do all these other things that are beneficial.

I think Michael is exactly right here.