Talk to the Unconscious
Note to readers: As always, key takeaways and action items are provided at the end of the post for those pressed for time.
There’s a mistake that nearly all parents make at one time or another, one that I myself have been guilty of on multiple occasions. As understandable as it is, this post will hopefully help millions of parents avoid falling into the trap in the future.
The issue arises when we are engaged in the act of parenting, and we are communicating some valuable information, possibly some excellent life lesson, and then our child begins to respond, to speak—and here it comes, the parental gaffe…
We listen to them. The child is speaking, not infrequently providing some form of resistance to our parenting, and we actually let their words infiltrate our minds and—in some unfortunate instances—we even let their words influence our behavior.
This is not to say that we parents should never listen to our kids. Obviously, anytime they express their love for us—that we should not only listen to, but ideally make a recording of it. And then anything to do with gymnastics team doctors.
Dark humor aside, the issue of resistance is real, as I hear from readers and friends who talk about the pushback they get from their kids related to learning—especially in response to efforts to supplement their educations.
Here is the issue—and we are about to get sciencey—the kid brain that is speaking, possibly protesting, that conscious kid mind is a disproportionately small part of the whole, just as is the case of your mind—the part that is aware you are reading this.
Our conscious minds account for a mere 5 or so percent of our mental activity, but that is not the message they are sending to us as we go through our days. Conscious minds are happy to let us all think that, aside from sleeping, they are our minds.
Meanwhile, the other 95 percent, the unconscious, does the heavy lifting, unacknowledged, unappreciated, never resting (apologies if this is triggering for any readers who are thinking that I am describing their role in a marriage).
And this is where the connection to parenting comes in. As parents, we are responsible for facilitating the development of the whole mind, not just the 5 percent kid mind that may have the cheek to question your wisdom.
Gaining a deeper understanding of the unconscious mind has been a boon to my parenting, and I think it is critical to all of our efforts to enhance and supplement our children’s mental development, as I detail below.
My own mind was introduced to this line of thinking by listening to the book Incognito, by David Eagleman. Eagleman is a neuroscientist and skilled popularizer of brain research (his PBS series The Brain, is a great option for learning screen time).
Incognito is all about the awesome power of our unconscious minds, as well as the paradox that we—by which I mean our conscious minds—have a hard time fully appreciating all that these other minds are responsible for and capable of.
A simple example of the magic of the unconscious mind is my choice to listen to Incognito. In the moment that I picked it from a list of possible books, it seemed random, just a whim, especially given how little I knew about the book. But was it?
The book ended up being revelatory for me, solving a riddle about my own mind that has haunted me for decades (a topic for a future post). And this eureka experience may well have been orchestrated by my unconscious, which grasps the big picture of my life and may have sensed that Incognito had a higher probability of providing that missing puzzle piece.
Think about the path of your own life. Think about all of the odd twists and turns, but also the degree to which what seemed random now makes sense and has a logical cohesiveness that you could have never planned. Your unconscious at work.
Throughout our lives our unconscious minds are there, taking in extraordinary masses of information, millions of bits, disregarding much of it, while forming new connections and new neural pathways with what it considers most relevant.
Now, consider this in the context of parenting. Our kids are in possession of what may be the most epically powerful learning machine on the planet, but it also happens to be largely invisible; it is the mass of the iceberg below the surface.
While young children are mis-informing parents that we are not the boss of them, or our older kids are suggesting that the excellent documentary on fungi that we picked for them looks dumb(!), that other 95 percent is there, lurking, taking everything in, regardless of what those conscious minds are saying.
From this perspective, our responsibility as parents really is to that unconscious, that hidden brain, that massive submerged iceberg. That is the part that is setting the course for their lives, that in some miraculous way is constructing their selves, and is doing so with the potential to deliver them to their best destiny, a destiny only it seems privy to.
Given all that, we parents should double down on helping them encounter the most relevant, enriching mental building blocks we can find, rather than backing down. Which is yet another reason to be thankful that we live in this historic moment, when most of the world’s knowledge is readily accessible and content has become ever more engaging (think One Strange Rock).
Plus, part of the mystery of the unconscious and how we all develop is that there is no telling what is going to be most relevant to our futures. Those unconscious minds will do their work wiring all the input together in a way that is unique to each child and use it over the course of each child’s life in a way we can’t begin to fully appreciate now, but will someday make sense.
Imagine a moment decades from now. Your grown adult kid is having some epiphany, an insight about the direction to take their life; and in the wake of it, they realize that credit for it goes back to something you introduced them to—way back in 2022! (Back before Elon Musk was president and the great relocation of all humans to Mars!)
What they likely won’t remember in that distant future moment of parental appreciation is that your efforts may have been over their own objections. That resistance to your efforts—that detail will be left out by their conscious minds. Bad conscious mind!
But we’ve always known as parents that part of the job involves the thankless act of ignoring resistance, going all the way back to monotonous discussions about whether or not it was important to brush teeth before bed, no matter how tired we are.
Hopefully, recalling the scale of the unconscious mind and the paradox of our attention-grabbing consciousness can help us parents stay on task in our role as a sort of physical world sherpa for our children’s unconscious minds—serving up what the other 95 percent needs to do the critical, magical, mysterious, possibly divinely-inspired work of transforming our kids into their most fully realized selves.
Take-aways, caveats, details, fine print
Understanding the massive role the unconscious mind humans is a powerful tool for parents.
David Eagleman’s book, Incognito, is a great primer on the topic (you can buy it via this link to help sustain this website)
Given the power of the unconscious mind, and the uncertainty around what will be most relevant to our kids in the future, we want to foster lots of learning and exposure to quality information.
These insights are also helpful at shoring up parental resolve in the face of resistance from the conscious mind, which is disproportionately vocal.
What happens after all of this information enters their minds is out of our hands, part of the amazing mystery of it all.
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