© Sérgio Spritzer, 2021 A child swings on a branch high in a tree and calls to his mother: Look mother! See how I know how to swing, how strong I am!
The mother's first reaction is one of fright, getting angry with her son and cursing for being so reckless.
If you do, he would be scared and might even fall out of the tree. She reflected, imagined all this and reworked her answer acting as follows:
Respecting the son's intention and attitude from his point of view: How strong you are my son! Now I want to see your ability to hold tight to the tree and come down here. You can do it? Of course, he boasted. After being on the floor, the mother asks both of them, side by side, to look up.
In this condition, she asks her son: What do you think about being up there? He says: Wow, it's high there, right? And looking at the height, he thinks aloud: It can be dangerous, right mom? He was reflecting. What the mother did was to help her son to enter a reflexive mode by putting himself in her place with her intentions, respecting his place with his intentions.
The reflective process takes place when people can not only put themselves in the position of the other, from the level of wishes and intentions to that of behavior, and can then envision desired results in common.
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