Today’s reality pushes kids and teens into facing challenges from a very young age and forces them to be adaptive, yet without allowing them adequate time required to simultaneously develop their emotional world. Such a reality leads to a great gap between social demands and the development of their emotional world. Such gap is expressed in a variety of contexts, such as, behavioral issues, obstacles related to their ability to develop social skills, and above all, obstacles in their learning environment, which in many cases go hand in hand with low achievements – which results in stigmatizing and labeling those kids as problematic (with behavioral issues, ADHD, and so on).
Such a reality doesn’t allow kids to practically and proportionately respond to the challenges facing them. Instead, it causes them to react instinctively, which is the direct result of the fact that they haven’t been granted the time required to develop their emotional world, since they have been busy meeting the standards that today’s reality forces on kids. Such preoccupation focuses kids on the need to respond to tasks dictated by the surrounding system or reality, in order to fit societal definitions of being normative and avoid being labeled and stigmatized.
It’s important to realize how critical this stage of developing the ability to handle society emotionally is. In other words, if kids are deprived of such emotional tools, they are liable to form patterns that are unsuitable and even destructive to them, which will accompany them even in their adult life.
So, exactly at this point, we wish to invite anyone who cares about the future of our kids as well as of humankind on this planet – to start instilling in the future generation the tools that will assist them in mediating between external societal demands and their inner emotional world.
NLP as Tools for Life
We have all experienced and are well aware of the benefits of NLP in making a change in our lives. Yet, unlike work with kids, with adults we (mostly) engage in transforming past patterns, limiting beliefs, or value ladders that no longer fit into the present and are actually detrimental to fulfilling one’s potential.
On the other hand, while working with kids one-on-one, we are offering them a gift for life! We are offering them, through NLP tools, the ability to choose! Through tools that will assist them in comprehending, confronting, processing and containing their emotional world, they will be able to choose that exact behavioral pattern that will serve and benefit them. As a result, they will turn into active individuals managing their own emotional world.
Thanks to this practice, kids and teens learn to channel their attention inwardly, to their emotional world. They become mindful of both their emotional world and the demands of their surrounding reality, at the same time, and doing so mitigates the gap between their instinctive behavior and what is going on in their subjective emotional world. With such a state of mind, kids and teens are capable of fulfilling their potential and thus become the architects of their own lives!
