Law of Attribution

The other night in my Parenting Teens workshop that I facilitate, I was sharing what I had learned about the Law of Attraction. I also spoke of yet another law that someone told me about a few days earlier. It is the Law of Attribution.

I don't believe it has much of a following as does the Law of Attraction but in our role as a parent it can help us in certain situations.

Imagine a time when you had know idea where your child or teen was. That void in a time when we simply do not know.

The Law of Attribution deals with that void, that hole, by filling that hole with information, answers or assumptions so we don't sit around "not knowing." It's akin to that noticeable silence in a conversation that we feel compelled to fill.

The need to “fill the hole” is basically the Law of Attribution. Attributing information complete our need to know what's happened even though the assumptions we make, the information we use or the answers we give may be wrong. Often we are even more worried because of the state that we've put ourselves in.

Jumping to conclusions is not always helpful when we find our youth has been delayed at a school practice or stayed longer at a friend's house. The anger rises when they come home cheerily and we've been worried sick. Instead of stating how worried we were , we erupt in anger.

What I was thinking about in this type of situation is that we need to take a deep breath, give our kids a hug and state our need to know where they were.

Sometimes you get what you ask for

In following with the theme of the Law of Attraction, I have been doing much thinking about the ideas surrounding attracting positive or negative things over the past couple of weeks. It started with the Losier seminar (see my last blog) followed by a radio interview I had with two wonderful young men Brad Morris and Matthew Ashdown who can be found at their Junior Attractors website. (Both of these situations the lunch seminar and the radio interview were unconnected to one another but as with the Law of Attraction popped up within days of each other.)

As I was preparing for my course with parents of teens, I came across a sentence that read:

Ask yourself this question: "If I were to get my teen to swear or call me names, how would I do it?" Your answer may describe how you are doing it.

In other words, we sometimes inadvertently get what we ask for. This is not limited to teens but to all of the phases of childhood throught adult hood. Haven't you ever witnessed a time that a parent, in anger or frustration, yells at their child to stop yelling! Here we go again acting out the behaviours that we want to have stopped.

Another statement that I came across says:

Make sure you are not triggering some of these behaviours (i.e. name calling, swearing, yelling) by doing them yourself or doing triggering behaviours—asking questions, giving orders, not listening, lecturing.

In true Law of Attraction format I will change that statement to read: Make sure you are modelling behaviours that you want to see from your child or teen.