Brain Rules for Baby (28 page)

Some families deal with hot emotions by actively ignoring them, hoping their kids will “snap out of it” as they do. But denying the existence of emotions can make them worse. (People who deny their feelings often make bad choices, which is what usually gets them into trouble.) Parents in the studies who raised the happiest children understood that no technique known to humankind can make a feeling go away, even if nobody wants the feeling around. Initial emotional reactions are as automatic as blinking. They don’t disappear simply because someone thinks they should.

How might the attitudes of discouraging or ignoring emotions play out in real life? Imagine that the family goldfish, the only pet your 3-year-old son Kyle has ever known, suddenly dies. Visibly upset, Kyle mopes around the house all day, saying things like “I want fishy back! and “Bring him back!” You’ve tried to ignore him, but his moodiness eventually grates on you. What do you do?

One response might be: “Kyle, I’m sorry your fish is dead, but it’s really no big deal. He’s just a fish. Death is part of life, and you need to learn that. You wipe those tears away, son, and go outside and play.” Another might be: “That’s OK, honey. You know, the fish was already old when you were born. We’ll go to the store tomorrow and get you another one. Now put on that happy face, and go outside and play.”

Both responses completely ignore how Kyle is feeling at the moment. One seems to actively disapprove of Kyle’s grief; the other is trying to anesthetize it. Neither
deals
with his intense emotions. They give him no tools that might help him navigate through his grief. Know what Kyle might be thinking? “If this is not supposed to matter, why do I still have this big feeling? What I am supposed to do with it? There must be something really wrong with me.”

 

Day-to-day, parents of happy kids do not allow bad behavior simply because they understand where it came from. A little girl might slap her baby brother because she feels threatened. That does not make slapping OK. These parents understand that kids have a choice in how they express emotions, reflexive though emotions can be. They have a list filled not with
emotions
that are approved and disapproved but
actions
that are. And the parents put teeth into it, consistently teaching their kids which choices are appropriate and which are not. Parents of kids like Doug speak softly but carry an obvious rule book.

Some families don’t make a rule book. Some parents let their kids freely express whatever emotions they have, then allow whatever
behavior the kid engages in to spew forth all over the world. They believe there is little you can do about the stream of negative emotions, except perhaps to scramble up the bank and let the flood pass by. Parents with these attitudes are descending into an abdication of their parenting responsibilities. Statistically, they will raise the most troubled children of any parenting style ever tested.

It’s a myth that releasing emotions makes everything better (that blowing your top will defuse your anger, for example). “Better out than in, the saying goes. Almost half a century’s worth of research shows that “blowing off steam” usually
increases
aggression. The only time expressing anger in that style helps is when it is accompanied immediately by constructive problem-solving. As C.S. Lewis observed in
The Silver Chair
, one book in the
Chronicles of Narnia
series: “Crying is all right in its own way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.”

 

Parents who raise the happiest kids constantly rummage through their offspring’s intense feelings looking for stray teachable moments. They seem to have an intuitive sense that people produce lasting change only in response to a crisis. And they often welcome these intense moments of possibility.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste is an attitude as common in these households as it is in certain political circles. The problem the child is having may seem ridiculously small to the parents, not something that should take up precious time. But these parents realize they don’t need to like the problem to solve it. They regularly replace the words “potential catastrophe” with “potential lesson”, which puts a very different spin on what a catastrophe is.

This has two long-term consequences. First, it makes parents remarkably relaxed in the face of the emotional meltdowns. That pays dividends, for it gives children a powerful example to emulate when their own crises come into their adult lives. Second, there are fewer
emotional disasters. That’s because timing is important: The best way to limit the damage of a house fire is to put it out quickly. If you run toward the fire rather than ignore it, your repair bills are likely to be smaller. How do you put out the fire? That’s our sixth spice.

Let’s say you are waiting in a long line at the post office with your restless 2-year-old, Emily. She announces, “I want a glass of water. You calmly respond, “Honey, I can’t get you water right now. The drinking fountain is broken. Emily starts to whine. “I want some water!” Her voice cracks. You anticipate what’s coming, and your blood pressure begins to rise. “We’ll have to wait until we get home. There’s no water here”, you say. She retorts, “I want water NOW!” The exchange escalates in intensity, in danger of erupting into a very public fight. What now? Here are three tactics you might take:

Haim Ginott, one of the most influential child psychologists of his generation, would say none of those are good choices. He proposed a series of parental “to-dos in the late 1960s that have since proved, after years of testing in John Gottman’s labs and others , to be quite prescient. Here’s what you are supposed to do instead:
You acknowledge the child’s feelings and empathize. “You’re thirsty, aren’t you? Getting a big gulp of cold water would feel so good. I wish that drinking fountain was working so I could lift you up and let you drink as much as you wanted.”

Sound odd? Many parents would expect this response to make things worse, like trying to extinguish a flame by dousing it with lighter fluid. But the data are remarkably clear. Empathy reflexes and the coaching strategies that surround them are the only behaviors known consistently to defuse intense emotional situations over the short term—and reduce their frequency over the long term. Note how you’re running toward your child’s reactions in that fourth response rather than away from them. Note how you verbalize her feelings, validating them, signaling understanding. This is empathy. Lynn Katz at the University of Washington calls it the “coaching of emotions. So does Gottman. The idea springs directly from Ginott’s insights about how to raise happy children. So, what should Rachel have said to Tyler, the kid who wanted cookies instead of carrots at the beginning of this chapter? She should have started with stating the obvious: “You want a cookie, don’t you, dear?”

We think there are several physiological reasons empathy works, thanks to seemingly unrelated research efforts: an attempt to understand crowd behavior and an attempt to characterize the optimal doctor-patient relationship.

A person tends to experience feelings generated by the emotions of surrounding crowds. If people around you are fearful, angry, or violent, you often “catch the same feelings, as if it were a virus. Investigators interested in how mobs influence individual behavior discovered this emotional contagion. It applies to a broad swath of
emotional experiences, including humor. You have been exposed to this for years. In an attempt to get you to “catch” feelings of humor, TV-based sitcoms often include laugh tracks.

The second set of studies looked at how to optimize doctor-patient relationships. It was puzzling: Therapists whose heart rates and skin temperatures were synchronized to their patients during clinical interviews found their patients got better faster, and more completely, than therapists whose physiologies didn’t synchronize. The term is called, appropriately enough, physiological synchrony. The patients of these “empathetic” doctors routinely recovered from colds faster, bounced back from surgery more quickly (with fewer complications), and were less likely to sue for malpractice. The presence of empathy is actually a health-cost issue.

This biological finding led directly to the discovery that empathy calms people down. When the brain perceives empathy, the vagus nerve relaxes the body. This nerve connects the brainstem to other areas of the body, including the abdomen, chest, and neck. When it is overstimulated, it causes pain and nausea.

It’s understandable if you find it hard to project empathy on a sustained basis. You may discover when you first have children how profoundly your former world was about you, you, you. Now it is all about them, them, them. This is one of the hardest parts of that social contract. But your ability to move from
you
to
them
, which is what empathy forces anyone to do, makes all the difference to your child’s brain.

Even though empathy seems to spring from innate sources, children must experience it on a regular basis to become good at expressing it. “Empathy comes from being empathized with”, says Stanley Greenspan, clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine, in his book
Great Kids.
In order for you to grow empathetic kids, practice empathy on a regular basis, with your friends, with your spouse, with your co-workers. As in tennis, novices learn to play the game best when they can practice regularly with pros. The more empathy your child sees, the more socially competent he’ll become, and the happier he’ll be. He in turn will produce more empathetic grandkids—nice to have in old age, especially in a rickety economy!

Fortunately, to give your child the gift of emotional regulation, you don’t have to juggle all six spices 24 hours a day. If 30 percent of your interactions with your child are empathetic, Gottman contends, you’ll raise a happy kid. Does this mean 70 percent of the time you can cut yourself some slack? Perhaps. Really, the statistic points to the great power of paying attention to feelings. A lot of parents don’t raise kids like my friend Doug. But there is no reason why
you
can’t.

Daniel has wealthy parents, but they are nearly bankrupt when it comes to controlling their children. Daniel, the eldest, is Exhibit A. Daniel’s mother took him and his sister on a weekend trip to the family’s opulent vacation home. As they hurtled down the freeway, 5-year-old Daniel suddenly unbuckled his seat belt. He grabbed his mom’s cell phone and started playing with it. “Please put that down, his mom said. Daniel completely ignored the request. “Please put that
down
”, his mom repeated, to which Daniel replied, “No.” Mom paused. “OK, you can use it to call your dad. Now please buckle your seat belt.” Daniel ignored both directives and proceeded to play video games on the phone.