John Gray - Children Are from Heaven - Positive Parenting Skills for Raising Cooperative, Confident, and Compassionate Children

For example, telling a child, “I am worried that you will get hurt” or “I am sad that you didn’t call” has the gradual effect of making a child feel manipulated and controlled by negative feelings. Instead, an adult should say, “I want you to be more careful” or “I want you to call me next time.”

This is not only more effective, but it also teaches children not to make decisions based on negative emotions. The child cooperates not to protect the parent from the discomfort of feeling afraid, but because the parent has asked him to do something.

Children should never get the message that

they are responsible for how a parent feels.

Parents can best help their children develop an increased awareness of feelings not by sharing their own feelings, but by empathizing, acknowledging, and listening. Using the five skills of positive parenting will automatically draw out your children’s feelings.

Just as a child should not feel responsible for a parent’s feelings, children should not think that their emotions and wants put them in control. It is not wrong to ask a child how she feels or what she wants, but it should be done sparingly. If you are thinking about doing something and you ask your child how she feels about that, she may get the message that her feelings determine what you will decide.

This gives too much attention to her feelings and wants and gives the wrong message that she is in control.

Directly asking children how they feel or what they want gives them too much power. Children need their parents to be in control, but also need to feel that their expressed resistance, feelings, wishes, and wants will be heard and considered.

Better than, “How do you feel about going to visit Uncle Robert?” say, “Let’s get ready to visit Uncle Robert.”

If they would rather go swimming, they will let you know how they feel.

Directly asking your children how they feel can sometimes have the opposite effect of what you want. A direction question puts too much pressure on children to know how they feel when they haven’t yet developed self-awareness.

Too many questions can awaken self-awareness too soon.

It is generally around the age of nine that children begin feeling embarrassed by things and experience greater modesty about their bodies. With this increased self-awareness, they are ready for more direct questions about feelings.

Instead of asking a child how he feels, a parent can simply make an empathetic statement like, “I can see you are frustrated.” At this point, the child’s feelings and willingness to talk about feelings are stimulated.

The best way to teach awareness of feelings is to listen and to help identify feelings through empathy. Another way parents can create an understanding environment for feelings is by telling stories. Parents can successfully communicate that they too have feelings by telling stories of how they felt in reaction to some challenges in life growing up. This way, the child doesn’t feel in any way responsible to help the parent or make things better.

Parents can successfully communicate that

they too have feelings by telling stories from

their past.

After a child talks about how afraid she is of taking a test, the parent might then disclose a sweet story from his childhood when he had to take a test and was afraid as well.

Telling these stories should not only validate the child’s feelings, but also give a reassuring message at the end.

Even when a parent doesn’t share feelings, children may still be affected by them. Some parents realize that it is inappropriate to share their feelings with their children, but they don’t have effective ways of releasing them. As a result, particularly at stressful times, their unresolved emotions build up inside. Although they are holding them back, they can still affect their children.

When parents bottle up their own negative feelings, it will tend to intensify children’s feelings. What parents suppress, their children will tend to express. It is often the most sensitive child in the family who takes on the unresolved emotional issues of the family. Therapists now commonly recognize that when a child has a problem, it is often linked to problems the parents are having.

It is often the most sensitive child in the

family who takes on the unresolved

emotional issues of the family.

If you are feeling anxious about deadlines, you may find that your children are always complaining about too much to do and not enough time. If you are feeling emotionally neglected or unsupported, one of your children is always complaining that he feels neglected. In these examples, what you are suppressing is being felt and taken in by one of your children.

It is as if they are sponges. If you are filled with love and empathy, they soak up your love to heal their own wounds and upsets. If you are filled with anxiety, depression, anger, sadness, fear, turmoil, resentment, or frustration, that is what they absorb. They literally take on your negative feelings and then act them out.

Children take on negative feelings and

then act them out.

This explains why, on those days when you are extremely frustrated or overwhelmed, your children erupt with emotional turmoil or become extremely needy or demanding.

When parents are not taking care of their own needs, the children will absorb that neediness and express it. Children act out at the most inconvenient times, because it is at those times that you are not giving yourself enough time as well.

Certainly, children have their own issues and emotions, but when they have to take on their parents’ emotions as well they become overwhelmed and they explode in tantrums.

Keep in mind that children will throw tantrums even if their parents are successfully dealing with their own emotions.

One way to determine that your child is acting out your feelings or their feelings is the resistance test. If you resist their feelings, then clearly they are expressing some of what you are resisting in yourself. If you are able to listen patiently with empathy, then clearly they are not acting out your unresolved feelings.

If you resist your children’s feelings, then

clearly they are expressing some of what you

are resisting in yourself.

If you do feel resistance to their feelings it doesn’t mean you are a bad parent. It is a clear sign that you need to take some time for yourself to nurture your own needs. It is fortunate that at those times when you can’t be there for your children you can fall back on giving a time out. Regardless of what you are suppressing and the child is expressing, a time out will work to assist your child in dealing with what needs to be expressed.

Quite often, after giving a time out, parents feel better, too, because their child has expressed all their negative emotions. This is often why spanking and whipping children used to work so well to create temporary peace in the family.

Not only did the child feel and express their pain, but the parents’ suppressed feelings and pain was expressed as well.

In this way everyone felt temporary relief.

When parents have not learned to release negative emotions and instead suppress their inner feelings, at least one of their children will tend to take those feelings on, generally the most sensitive of the children. This child is often considered the black sheep of the family. Without an environment that accepts and nurtures negative emotions, these children either act out these feelings and become disruptive, or they turn the feelings inward and suffer low self-esteem. Quite often, both reactions occur.