Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child (8 page)

Because Dismissing parents often value smiles and humor over darker moods, many become masters at “making light” of their children’s negative emotions. They may attempt to tickle a sad child, for example, or poke fun at an angry child’s bad feelings. Whether their words are offered in a good-natured way (“Where’s that precious smile?”) or in a humiliating way (“Oh, Willie, don’t be such a baby!”) the child hears the same message: “Your assessment of this situation is all wrong. Your judgment is off-base. You can’t trust your own heart.”

Many parents who trivialize or discount their kids’ emotions feel justified in doing so, because their offspring are, after all, “just children.” Dismissing parents rationalize such indifference with the belief that kids’ concerns over broken toys or playground politics are “petty,” especially when compared to adult-size worries about things like job loss, the solvency of one’s marriage, or what to do about the national debt. Furthermore, they reason, children can be irrational. Asked how he responds to his daughter’s sadness, one perplexed father answers that he doesn’t respond at all. “You’re talking about a four-year-old,” he says. Her feelings of sadness are often “based on lack of understanding of how the world works,” and therefore not worth much in his estimation. “Her reactions are not
adult
reactions,” he explains.

This is not to suggest that all Dismissing parents lack sensitivity. In fact, many feel quite deeply for their children, and are simply reacting out of parents’ natural urges to protect their offspring. They may believe that negative emotions are somehow “toxic” and they don’t want to “expose” their children to harm. They believe it’s unhealthy to “dwell on” emotions for very long. If they engage in problem solving with their children at all, they focus on what it will take to “get over” the emotion rather than focusing on the emotion
itself. Sarah, for example, was worried about her four-year-old daughter’s reaction to the death of a pet guinea pig. “I was afraid that if I sat down and got all emotional with Becky, that was just going to upset her even more,” she explains. So instead, Sarah played it low-key. “I told her, ‘That’s okay. Things like this happen, you know? Your guinea pig was getting old. We’ll get a new one.’” While Sarah’s nonchalant response may have spared her the anxiety of dealing with Becky’s grief, it probably didn’t help Becky feel understood or comforted. Indeed, Becky may have wondered, “If this is no big deal, why am I feeling so lousy? I guess I’m nothing but a big baby.”

And finally, some Dismissing parents seem to deny or ignore their kids’ emotions out of a fear that getting emotional inevitably leads to “losing control.” You’re likely to hear such parents using metaphors that equate negative emotions with elements like fire, explosives, or storms. “He’s got a short fuse.” “She blew up at me.” “He stormed out of here.”

These are parents who may have had little help as children learning to regulate their own emotions. Consequently, as adults, when they feel sadness, they fear they’ll slide into unending depression. Or, when they feel anger, they’re afraid they’ll fly off the handle and hurt someone. Barbara, for instance, feels guilty about letting her own temper flair in front of her husband and children. She believes that expressing anger is “being selfish” or dangerous, “like those killer bees.” Besides, she says, her anger “doesn’t accomplish anything … I raise my voice to a loud extreme and … make them disgusted with me.”

With this unflattering picture of her own anger as a backdrop, Barbara uses humor to deflect her daughter’s temper. “When Nicole gets angry I just kind of smile,” she says. “There are times when Nicole is being completely ridiculous and I point that out to her. I just say, ‘Can it,’ or ‘Lighten up.’” Whether Nicole thinks the situation is comical doesn’t seem to matter to Barbara; an angry Nicole just makes her laugh. “She’s so little and her face gets all red,” says Barbara. “I tend to see her as this little doll and think, ‘Isn’t that funny?’”

Barbara also does whatever she can to deflect Nicole’s attention away from negative feelings. She recalls an incident where Nicole
was mad at her brother and his friends for excluding her from their play. “So I sat her on my lap and played this little game,” Barbara explains proudly. She pointed to Nicole’s crimson winter tights and asked, “What happened to your legs? You’ve turned all red and fuzzy!” This time, the teasing made Nicole giggle. Nicole could probably feel her mother’s warmth and attention, which made her forget about her anger and move on to other pursuits. Barbara feels she handled the incident successfully: “I deliberately do things like that because I’ve learned … that’s a really good way of handling her,” she says. What Barbara missed however, was an opportunity to talk to Nicole about feelings like jealousy and exclusion. This incident could have been a chance for Barbara to empathize with Nicole, help her to identify her emotions. She could have even given Nicole pointers for resolving the conflict with her brother. Instead, Nicole got the message that her anger isn’t very important; best just to swallow it and look the other way.

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ISAPPROVING PARENTS HAVE
much in common with parents who dismiss their kids’ emotions, with a few distinctions: They are noticeably critical and lacking in empathy when they describe their children’s emotional experiences. They don’t just ignore, deny, or trivialize their kids’ negative emotions; they disapprove of them. Consequently, their children are often reprimanded, disciplined, or punished for expressing sadness, anger, and fear.

Rather than trying to understand a child’s emotions, Disapproving parents tend to focus on the behavior surrounding the emotions. If a child stamps her feet in anger, for example, her mother might spank her for her unpleasant, defiant display without ever acknowledging what made the girl so angry in the first place. A father might scold his son for his annoying habit of crying at bedtime without ever addressing the connection between his son’s tears and his fear of the dark.

Disapproving parents can be quite judgmental of their children’s emotional experiences, sizing up extenuating circumstances before deciding whether a situation warrants comfort, criticism—or in
some cases—punishment. Joe explains it this way: “If Timmy is
genuinely
in a bad mood for a good reason—like he misses his mom because she went off for the night—I can understand that, have empathy for him, and try to cheer him up. I give him a hug or whatever; toss him around, try to get him out of that mood.” But if Timmy is upset for a reason Joe doesn’t like—“Say I told him to go take a nap or something”—Joe responds harshly. “He’s being sad just because he wants to be a little brat, so I ignore him or tell him to shape up.” Joe justifies this distinction as a form of discipline. “Timmy’s got to learn not to do that [get sad for the wrong reason], so I tell him, ‘Hey, moping is not going to get you anywhere.’”

Many Disapproving parents see their children’s tears as a form of manipulation and this disturbs them. As one mother put it: “Whenever my daughter cries and pouts, she’s doing it for attention.” Framing children’s tears or tantrums this way turns emotional situations into power struggles. Parents may think, “My child is crying because he wants something from me and I must give it to him or I have to put up with more crying, more tantrums, more sulking.” Feeling thus cornered or blackmailed, the parent responds with anger and punishment.

Like many Dismissing parents, some Disapproving parents fear emotional situations because they are afraid of losing their grip on emotions. “I don’t like to be angry because I feel like it takes away my self-control,” says Jean, mother to five-year-old Cameron. Facing off against a rebellious child, these parents feel themselves careening toward emotions and behavior they distrust in themselves. Under these circumstances, they may feel justified in punishing their children for “making me angry.” Explains Jean: “If Cameron starts yelling, I just say, ‘I won’t put up with that!’ Then if he continues to act that way, he gets a spanking.”

Linda, who is married to a man with a violent temper, fears that her four-year-old son, Ross, will grow up “just like his dad.” Desperate to save him from that fate, she reacts violently herself. When Ross gets upset, “he kicks and hollers, so I spank him to calm him down,” she explains. “Maybe that’s the wrong thing to do, but I really don’t want him to have a bad temper.”

Similarly, some parents reprimand or punish their children for emotional displays in order to “toughen them up.” Boys who show
fear or sadness are particularly vulnerable to this kind of treatment from Disapproving fathers who believe it’s a hard world and their sons had better learn not to be “wimps” or “cry-babies.”

In the most extreme cases, some parents seem determined to teach their children to express no negative feelings at all. “So Katy’s sad,” says one dad sarcastically of his daughter. “What am I going to do? Tickle her chin? I don’t think that’s what you need to do. I think people need to work out their own problems.” This father takes an eye-for-an-eye approach to his daughter’s anger—when she gets mad, he gets mad. If Katy “flies off the handle,” Richard reacts by “slapping her bottom” or “smacking her on top of the head.”

Of course, we found such blanket disapproval and harsh responses to be rare, even among the Disapproving parents. It was more common for parents to be Disapproving only under certain circumstances. For example, some parents appear tolerant of negative emotions—as long as the episode is limited to an amount of time the parent can accept. One dad in our studies actually pictures an alarm clock in his head. He says he’ll put up with his son’s bad moods “until that alarm goes off.” Then “it’s time to bring Jason out of it” by meting out his punishment, which is isolation from the rest of the family.

Some parents disapprove of their children’s experience with negative emotions—especially sadness—because they see it as a “waste” of energy. One father, who described himself as a “cold-hearted realist,” says he objects to his child’s sadness as “useless time” and “doing nothing constructive whatsoever.”

Some view sadness as a precious and finite commodity; use up your allotment of tears on trivial matters and you won’t have any left to spend on life’s major sorrows. But whether Disapproving parents measure sadness in tears shed or minutes spent, the problem is still the same—children who waste it. “I tell Charley to save his sadness for major things like dead dogs,” says Greg. “Losing a toy or tearing a page in a book is not something you should waste your time being sad on. But the death of a pet—now that’s something that’s worth getting sad over.”

With this metaphor operating in a family’s life, it’s easy to see how a child might be punished for squandering sadness on “frivolous matters.” And if his parents were emotionally neglected as
children themselves, they may be even more likely to see the child’s sadness as a “luxury” only the emotionally “privileged” can afford. Karen, a mother in our studies who was abandoned by her parents and raised by a string of relatives, comes to mind. Deprived of emotional comfort as a child, Karen now has low tolerance for her daughter’s “dark moods.”

There is a considerable amount of overlap between the behavior of Dismissing and Disapproving parents. Indeed, the same parents who identify themselves as Dismissing one day may find they act more like Disapproving parents the next.

The children of Dismissing parents and Disapproving parents also have much in common. Our research tells us that children from both groups have a hard time trusting their own judgment. Told time and time again that their feelings are inappropriate or not valid, they grow up believing there is something inherently wrong inside themselves because of the way they feel. Their self-esteem suffers. They have more difficulty learning to regulate their own emotions and to solve their own problems. They have more trouble than other children concentrating, learning, and getting along with peers. In addition, we can assume that children who are reprimanded, isolated, spanked, or otherwise punished for expressing their feelings get a strong message that emotional intimacy is a high-risk proposition; it can lead to humiliation, abandonment, pain, and abuse. If we had a scale with which to measure emotional intelligence, these children, unfortunately, would probably score quite low.

The tragic irony of these results is that parents who dismiss or disapprove of their children’s emotions usually do so out of the deepest concerns for their children. In attempts to protect their kids from emotional pain, they avoid or terminate situations that might bring about tears or tantrums. In the name of building tough men, they punish their sons for expressing their fears or sorrows. In the name of raising kindhearted women, they encourage their girls to swallow their anger and turn the other cheek. But in the end, all of these strategies backfire, because children who aren’t given the chance to experience their emotions and deal with them effectively grow up unprepared to face life’s challenges.

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ISAPPROVING AND
Dismissing parents, some of our study subjects proved to be accepting of their children’s emotions, eager to embrace unconditionally whatever feelings their children expressed. I refer to this style of parenting as “Laissez-Faire.” Such parents are filled with empathy for their kids and they let them know that whatever they’re going through, it’s okay by mom and dad.

The problem is, Laissez-Faire parents often seem ill-equipped or unwilling to offer their children guidance on how to handle negative emotions. These parents have a hands-off philosophy about their kids’ feelings. They tend to see anger and sadness as a matter of letting off steam: Let your child express emotions and your work as a parent is done.