Finding Connection in Flow: Helping Kids Overcome
“It’s only me.”
Feeling alone when dealing with emotional or physical pain can exacerbate an already difficult situation. At the same time, reaching out can be challenging for people who feel isolated. How do their loved ones find the right balance between helping to pull them out of this state and motivating them to do it for themselves? I recently heard Esther Perel, the renowned therapist, say it’s like putting a car in neutral and pushing it slightly downhill. They have to make the effort to get going, but we can be there to give that start.
One of the best ways to connect our kids is by building a community around a shared interest. When does your child seem most engaged? Is there something that they will do without needing external rewards?
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls this the “flow state.” It’s as if we don’t notice time passing when we are in a flow state. Instead of working so hard to make things better—to push our kids uphill—we look for what comes easily and give them that little push downhill, using their own momentum. And when we find that thing, however small it is, can we find a way to connect them to others who share this interest?
As a musician and music therapist, I think of group singing. I love to be surrounded by a sea of sounds with other voices. Performing in a choir is a wonderful way to achieve this, but we don’t need to try that hard. The other morning, I sat at the piano working on a composition as my 7-year-old son played nearby. He came and sat with me to tinker around on the piano. It sounded a bit messy, but the whole thing had a new feeling. Instead of singing and writing alone, I was co-creating. We were in a bit of flow together, jamming.
Where can you “jam” with your child, creating something together for fun? Where can they do this with other people? In finding those things that make the time fly by, we may paradoxically help it slow down just a little, appreciating the precious time we have to be together without needing to fix anything.
