In the trainings we offer, we are very interested in helping adults have success at influencing young people and to do so in fun, easy ways.  One of the most challenging aspects of parenting, or even coaching young people is their changing reactions to questions as they move towards and into their teens.  The simple "How was your day?" question which once started sharing about all the things that happened, and usually more than we want to know, is reduced to "fine", or "okay".  As young people move towards their own private identity, the goal of these responses is to shut us down and keep us out of their business, and it works.  If we press, we begin to feel rude, as they have answered our question, and they certainly think we are being rude.

While it really won't work very often for the "how was your day?" question I find we can get much more information by using "implied" questions.  Implied questions are statements about your own inner state of curiousity which invites someone to help you fulfill your need for information.  For example: "I wonder what you would think about ............" If this is delivered with a tone of voice that communicates pondering, then it will often get a response.  Another form is "I am curious about........."  You notice that both of these sentence forms are statements, and it is important to end the statement with a question tonality at the end.  It works best to just lay it out there as a statement to the universe about your state of mind.

Some others I have used are:

• I am really curious about what you will do for a living when you are older.
• I have been thinking a lot about whether or not you will want to go to college.
• Sometimes I just think about the type of person you will fall for.
• I think it will be interesting to see how you decorate your own home.
• I would like to know what you think about your teachers.
• I wonder which of your subjects is easiest, and which ones challenge you.

The form of the implied statement is an "I statement" about what is in your mind, which invites a comment from others.  One of the most powerful aspects of this approach is that it leads the listener to think about what you have shared, even if they don't respond.  The earlier statements lead the listener to think about his or her future, and the teachers and subjects.

The implied question can also be very influential when paired with references to the bond you have with someone else, or to a strength of the person.  For example:

• I wonder sometimes if you have any idea how great you are.
• I wonder when you will realize that you are liked by a lot of people.
• I don't think you know how much you are loved.  
• I don't think you get how good you are at .............

Now that I have shared this, I wonder how often you will think about how to use implied questions to open up dialogue with others.

There is a common statement in youth development work "If you expect young people to do great things, they will do great things."  Young people around the nation have proven this time and time again, and it has helped reduce the stigma that young people aren't contributors.

I was very blessed early in my career to work with H. Stephen Glenn, and one of the most important things he taught me was the "EIAG Process".  He pointed out that an individual's perception is the key to their attitudes, motivation, and behavior.  Therefore, in order to deal with any behavior, it was important to understand the belief behind any behavior.  Also, if you wanted people to learn and apply, the teaching and learning process needed to tie content to someone's existing perceptions.  To do that, he taught the EIAG Process.

The process works fairly simply.  The first thing that occurs is any experience that has potential for learning.  It can be a lesson in a classroom, or it can be any situation that occurs and is followed by a conversation.  So the E in the EIAG process is Experience.

Once the experience is occurring and/or has occurred, you tie the experience to perception by first asking questions that challenge a listener to "Identify" those aspects of the experience which are important to him or her.  These are "What questions" like:

• What happened?
• What are you feeling?
• What did you see?
• What was important?

These questions help connect with the experience and identify the impact.

After this, the next goal is to help the person "Analyze" the significance of the experiences he or she has just identified.   To to this, you would ask "What" and "Why" questions like:

• Why was that significant?
• What caused that to happen?
• What is meaningful about it?
• What made that important?

These questions further build a perception of meaning in the moment about the experience.  However, people, especially young people often have trouble generalizing and applying learning across contexts.  In order to help with that, we ask "Generalizing questions" like:

• How can you use this?
• How is this valuable to you?
• In what way will this affect what you do in the future?
• What wisdom did you gain from this?
• What did you learn from this whole thing?

So, at the end of the process, we have helped someone identify what happened that might be useful or significant for them, helped them analyze the specific usefulness or significance, and invited them to think about how this learning would be usefule on a more global scale.  I invite you to try this with any of your students, children, or anyone else in your environment.  It does work. 

A few days ago I was fortunate to present at a conference in New Mexico for community corrections workers in juvenile justice transition programs.  They were a fun group, and the State is moving the programs in really good directions.  The major paradigm shift is from a "do as you are told" philosophy to a "setting goals and doing with, or coaching" philosophy.  If they are able to succeed in this change, then their young people create more successful lives.

The prescribing, or do as you are told approach only produces between 30 and 35 percent commitment and adherence to the goals in almost any human interaction.  When people work together to establish goals and strategies that number doubles to around 70 percent.  This holds true any time we are working with someone over the age of puberty.  The failure to recognize this contributes greatly to much of our failure in our parenting, human services programs, businesses and any other relationship-based process.  This can be an especially painful and costly failure both in corrections and in Child Welfare.

The greatest human need is a sense of personal significance, and doing what others want at the cost of our own will violates that need.  We only do what someone wants us to do if we perceive there is something in it for us.  Furthermore, we always balance the benefit of complying against the price of the loss of personal freedom involved.  So even if we start out being motivated, if we have no input we lose that motivation over time. 

One of the major side effects of the ignorance of this principle in Child Welfare is the high rates of children being inappropriately removed from families in some states.  Child Welfare agencies which set up services which don't address the needs of birth parents, then make the birth parents jump through hoops which produce even more chaos in the lives of families.  This sets families up to lose their children.  These approaches damage everyone, and are expensive in both human and monetary terms.

Agencies which partner with parents and develop unique solutions tailored to each family preserve families and actually contribute to the welfare of the families, children and the community as a whole. Unfortunately as agencies become busier, there is a tendency to ignore or rush through the collaborative processes and go back to simply telling families what to do.  When this is combined with reduced funding for supportive services, children are removed from families at higher rates.  This isn't due to the families lack of love for their children.  That doesn't change.  What changes is the type of service approach offered to families and the inability of families to comply with insane service requirements.  In short, the preservation goals are sabotaged by the strategies of the Child Welfare agency, and everyone suffers, especially the children and families.

Where collaborative teaming approaches are consistently implemented in Child Welfare practice, and that teaming is extended to individualized family service strategies, most children can stay in their families and a genuine service to the community exists.  When these approaches break down, the same agencies can and do actually cause harm.

Yesterday, we asked about the kind of friend a young person wants to be.  Today, we want to help them focus on the other half of the equation.  Learning to develop strong friendships, based on healthy commonalities is  critical skill.  So today's questions for discussion: