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Sharing a family meal every day is a powerful antidote to drug and alcohol abuse and addiction.This podcast explores how different families engage around challenging subjects. We host the conversation at a local restaurant partner, led by our Program Director Theresa Bairos, LMFT. Join us!
EPISODE 4
Meta-messages: What’s not seen or heard can still speak volumes
By Stephen Kaplan
The celebrated American essayist Wilferd Arlan Peterson once wrote, “Our children are watching us live and what we ARE shouts louder than anything we can say.” Especially as kids move into pre-adolescence, they become very sensitive to the disconnects which often exist between what the adults in their lives say and how they act. Even if we’re saying the right things, we must be aware of the “meta” messages we’re communicating that impact risk factors for substance misuse.
When we’re talking about “meta” messages, what we really mean are the broad themes that we communicate to the youth in our orbit about goals, behavior, and living life that transcend any one particular topic but impact them all.
An example might be something like, “Failure is not an option.” This is not something that is necessarily directly said by anyone in the family, but it is a “life lesson” that youth discover as they watch the others in their family unit go about daily life.
What might contribute to a youth learning this lesson from the family? It can start as early as elementary school when we reward children for bringing home good grades on a report card. Even what seems innocuous like, “I’m so proud that you got all A’s,” can contribute to a youth thinking that they are not loveable unless they bring home all A’s in the future.
Pair this with maybe a time when a child is having difficulty with a new skill and a parent says, “Keep practicing until you get it right.” You can imagine how a child might start to interpret this unspoken rule that what matters in their house is success.
So it wouldn’t be surprising in this house, if a child developed a substance use problem, they might not seek out help from their parents because they wouldn’t want to put themselves in the position of being seen as a failure by the important adults in their life.
Another example could be the meta-message, “Rules are just annoying.” A little speeding in the car here, parking in a no parking zone there, going through the express line at the grocery store with more than 10 items– you get the idea. You can imagine, then, that a child might question the “rules” around abstaining from alcohol under 21. The child’s thought bubble might be something like, “It’s just a rule and nothing bad happens when I see my parents break other rules.”
As much as families send these meta-messages, all kinds of communities have these types of meta-messages as well, including schools. What hidden messages do you think your school is sending about what is important and how we should or shouldn’t interact with each other (among adults, among students, and between adults and students)? The youth in the building are probably picking up on those same messages.
Most of us who work in schools would say we want the message to be one of trust, mutual respect, and openness. Are there things that are going on at our school in the way we behave with other adults and with students that might be sending a different message than the one we intend?
So, now that you know all about meta-messages, how can you go about discovering them and working on fixing them? As adults, the first thing is to do some reflection on what meta-messages we learned from our families of origin and our schools when we were children. It’ll help us be more aware of those that we might be replicating (or rebelling against) with our own children and students.
Then, the next step is to actually ask the youth in our lives what they think the messages are that they’ve gotten from us (and be prepared to hear the responses). Then we can begin to figure out how to go about harmonizing our meta-messages with our spoken messages.