I am stiff, sore and sunburned today after a long, physically exhausting day yesterday. Beth and I headed out early in the morning with the horse trailer in tow and managed to find a place to park it at a local hospital while I had my last physical therapy appointment for my out-of-alignment bones. Then we headed once again to the middle of nowhere Missouri to pick up our new horse. We made good time getting there, BUT … we spent OVER FOUR HOURS getting that horse into my trailer. It was much smaller than he was used to, and he just stalled … as if to say, “Don’t you idiots understand that my body won’t fit in that space?”


Upon the advice of a friend, I lunged him in a circle around me … basically I made him work. The theory was … make the trailer look better than the alternative. As he was going around and around and around me, and I was getting dizzy, I was thinking about how many times I had applied that thinking to the kids in my household. And how often it was not successful. My friend said her horse leapt into the trailer after he got tired of cantering forever. My new horse was one tired dude, but he still refused. He wasn’t stupid about it … he just wasn’t going to go in.


So we really got creative, and the idea came from the least “horsey” guy there … the father of the kid who showed this horse. He suggested we load the horse into their stock trailer (which the horse willingly entered) and then back their trailer up to mine. We did that, turned the horse around, covered his eyes, and walked him into my trailer. It wasn’t quite that easy, but it eventually worked. Over four hours later, we headed home, exhausted and filthy. The horse traveled fine, came out of the trailer fine, and is settling in nicely.


How many times have similar scenarios unfolded in our homes? Our kids are scared, they believe what we are asking them to do is foolhardy or unsafe, and they refuse. We can’t push them into doing what we want any more than we could physically push this horse into going where we wanted him to go. Either he cooperated or he didn’t, and if he chose not to cooperate, we sure couldn't force him. We tried creative ways to convince him our way was better. Sometimes that works with our kids, sometimes it doesn’t. Amy had such low standards for how she lived, there was nothing we could do, offer, refuse or tantalize her with that made any difference to her. In Beth’s case, she fairly quickly learned that sometimes taking the path of least resistance was a good idea.


It is a well-known fact that some animals have an "opposition reflex". If you want to teach a puppy to sit, hold a piece of food in front of their face, bring up your hand and thus raise their head, and watch their bottom go down. Pushing down on their bottom elicits opposition. It is a reflex.


This is why paradoxical techniques work so well with our kids.


In the case of my horse, he just had to know he could safely fit in my trailer. Because he trusted his previous owner, he finally acquiesced.

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