Gottman's ratio

Weekend newsletter - also featuring The Fall of the Roman Republic, Fitness lessons from the Amish, mud kitchens, and Where's Wally

Hey friends!

Here’s something I’d like to talk about

Gottman’s ratio.

John Gottman, one of the most renowned relationship researchers in the world, developed the concept for the Gottman ratio after observing thousands of couples and examining the factors that led to relationship success or failure. The ratio is a measure of the balance between positive and negative interactions within a relationship.

According to Gottman’s research, the minimum ratio for happy relationships is 5:1, meaning that for every negative interaction, there should be at least five positive interactions. While Gottman developed this ratio by looking at romantic relationships, the same principles apply to parent-child relationships.

Recently, I have been struggling with some challenging behaviour from Mr 4. He’s always been a whole body kid - when he’s happy, he jumps and bounces around everywhere, he feels happy in his whole body. Well, the same goes when he’s angry - he feels it in his whole body, and it comes out in stomping, kicking, and punching. Normally, this isn’t such a big issue, because I’m pretty good at sensing when tension is building and stepping in to mediate arguments between the kids before things escalate into violence. However, in the last 2 weeks, Mr 4 has been flaring up into violent outbursts daily, and exploding into them so quickly that I’m often unaware of what the tipping point even was for him.

At first, I just tried to power through, hoping that whatever was causing his fuse to be so short would resolve itself, or at least reveal itself so that we could work on it together. On the contrary, the cause remained a mystery, and the frequency and intensity of his angry outbursts grew.

One night, as I was putting him to bed, I looked down at my sweet boy, and realised that I missed him. Yes, he was right there next to me. But I missed the experience of wanting to be around him. I knew then that our ratio was slipping. We were definitely below the 5:1 ratio. Honestly, some days it felt like we were barely hanging on at 1:1.

I determined that the next day I would spend some one-on-one time with my little man. So as soon as the opportunity presented itself, I suggested that we have some special Mummy and son time. He brought over a book. And we snuggled together on the couch, reading together.¹ We didn’t have a single angry outburst that day.

There are many ways to build positive interactions into our relationships. We may show affection, actively listen to our kids, or find ways to engage in playfulness together. We can also be responsive to the ways that our kids are attempting to engage positively with us - such as when they ask us to play with them, or want to show us something they have made.

Now, I am still struggling to understand the underlying cause of Mr 4’s frequent outbursts. I don’t have all the answers. But I do know that increasing the ratio of our positive to negative interactions is helping.

It’s helping him to feel loved, valued, and seen. And it’s helping me to find joy in parenting this little guy again.

---

Now tell me…

Have you heard of Gottman’s ratio? Is this something you could work on in your relationships?

And for my paid subscribers, read on for another 4 things, from me to you.