In hundreds of thousands of homes in our country, parents are reinventing the wheel … of parenthood.
Upon having a baby, many parents realize that they do not have the slightest idea what to do. They do not feel prepared to care for that baby. Often, after years of feeling competent at work, they suddenly feel incompetent – – – and anxious.
Donald Winnicott, the famous and beloved British pediatrician and child psychoanalyst wrote, “The most important element at any one moment is the ordinary home in which ordinary parents are doing an ordinary good job, starting off with infants and children with that basis for mental health which enables them to eventually become part of the community” (The Spontaneous Gesture,1950, p. 21).
However, in our country, and I suspect in other places as well, there is no “ordinary” way to raise a child. This sort of communal knowledge or this set of common values has been lost.
And the mental health of both infants and parents is affected by this.
Many new parents have focused on their own lives and education and have just not had prior experience with babies or young children. They really don’t know what to expect from a one-year-old or a five-year-old and, as they become parents, they are at a loss when called upon to meet the ordinary situations of child rearing.
Henri Parens, another child psychoanalyst, advocated for parenting curriculum to be instituted in every school. As one of my psychoanalytic mentors, I often heard him talk about this, and quite honestly, at the time, I didn’t see the point. But now that I am working daily with first-time parents, professional parents, and harried parents, I do.
I see that the parents I come in contact with are desperate to know what is developmentally “normal” at each age as well as to know how to handle the inevitable challenges of raising children at all of the various stages of development.
Given the much heralded death of the extended family and the loss of true community for most young families, questions arise: where are people in the early years of parenthood supposed to learn how to parent? Where are they supposed to learn about child development? And where are they supposed to learn how to manage their own internal reactions to the extraordinary stressors of normal parenthood?
Somehow, we have come to a place in history where many kids grow up never once having to take responsibility for a younger sibling or cousin and never having worked as a babysitter. We have put the emphasis on children doing well in school and going to college, and in some cases, even graduate school. In this march toward “success” many young people never learn about babies and children.
I do not know if Henri Parens had the right solution – teaching about parenting in the schools – or if there are other solutions to this problem. But what I do know is that right now, right here in our country, hundreds of thousands of parents are struggling – more than in other generations, I think – to figure out how to do even “ordinary” parenting.
We all have expectations of our children. We are conscious of some of these – and less conscious of others.
I want to talk about several issues regarding these expectations:
First of all, expectations are not necessarily good or bad. They just ARE. And they start even before conception. As soon as we think about having a baby, we imagine what that baby will be like, what they might look like, what their personality might be like, what talents and abilities they might have.
This is universal – – and it is normal. It is part of the process of becoming a parent.
Often we hope for a child who will be a particular way, and have particular skills and abilities. Whether school was important for us, or whether we missed out on going to college or graduate school, we might hope for a child who is “smart” and does well in school. Or, if we were shy as a child, we might hope for a child who is gregarious or assertive. If we love sports, we might hope they will be talented athletically.
In one way or another, our expectations will be formed by our own histories, values and wishes. And to the extent that they are unconscious, it is a good idea to try to make them more conscious. This allows us to decide whether they want to act on these expectations – or to rework them.
Because our expectations WILL affect our children.
Children naturally want to please their parents – and this is good motivation for them. But when we expect things of our children, we also want to make sure that our expectations are realistic, and that we leave room for our children to be who they are, and to establish their own goals in life.
So, small expectations – like helping around the house, being kind or doing homework? That’s a definite YES.
But regarding our deeper fantasies of what we want our children to be as people? We need to ask ourselves if these are reasonable. For example, if we expect our children to get all A’s, what happens if our child turns out to have a learning disability? What happens if reading or math just doesn’t come easily for them? How will they feel about themselves when they come home with B’s or C’s…or worse?
And how will WE feel?
Will we be disappointed? And will our child pick up on that disappointment? What will this do to their motivation? Will they try harder? Or give up? Will they feel badly about themselves? Less confident?
For a while, everyone was talking about Oscar winning actress, Bri Larson’s YouTube content. She said, famously, “my job is 98% failure”. She talked about how many times she was turned down for parts in TV and movies before she got anything significant at all.
Perhaps we need to spend less time expecting our children to be a certain way and more time helping them to learn how to handle the times when they don’t meet our expectations – or their own. Perhaps we need to help them to be more like Bri Larson. And maybe we need to think less about our own wishes for our children’s success, and instead, help them to learn how to fail – and to survive through failure. Because, after all, Bri Larson is right. Life is full of failures, both little and big. And, if our children are to be successful, we have help them to learn to keep trying, and not let individual failures define who they are.
Perhaps it is more helpful as a parent to think about how we are going to talk to our children when they don’t get an A or when they don’t make the team or get the part in the school play. All children experience these disappointments and all children feel badly about them.
Here are some things you can do as a parent:
1. Make goals small. Starting in infancy, when your baby is trying to learn something new, encourage them. But also, watch out if you notice yourself comparing what your baby is doing to what other babies are doing.
2. Concentrate on your own child. Stay in the moment with your own baby or child. Stay with them where they are.
3. Make your goals small for your child. Help them to accomplish tiny milestones; for example, an extra minute of tummy time, one new word, one spoonful of a new food, or for an older child, getting a B when their last grade in that subject was a C.
4. Help build frustration tolerance. The famous psychoanalyst, Heinz Kohut, coined the term “optimal frustration”. He talked about how important it is for people to learn to tolerate some frustration – not so much that they feel like giving up – but enough that they feel challenged. When your baby or your child gets frustrated, whether it’s building a tower that won’t stay up, or learning the letter R, just tell them, “It’s hard. But it’s OK. We’ll try again later.” Build in the idea that some things are difficult but you can take a break…and then keep trying later….after you’re done being frustrated.
5. Check your own expectations. As children get older, keep checking your expectations, keep setting your goals small and keep helping your child to keep their goals small. For some kids, a more appropriate expectation than getting all A’s is establishing longer and longer periods of doing homework. For a child who can’t sit still for an hour, success might mean doing 20 minutes of homework when they only used to be able to do five.
6. Normalize failure. Tell your child your own stories of failure. Tell them how you reacted. Tell them about Larson and what she said and how she persevered through lots and lots of failure.
7. Talk to your children when they are not in the middle of feeling frustrated. Talk about how hard it is to not get what you want or to succeed in the way they want. Talk to them about frustrated feelings and how hard they are. Encourage them to take breaks when they are frustrated with a math problem or with their average when shooting baskets. Encourage them to come back to the activity later when they feel less tired and frustrated.
We want our children to learn how to live in the real world and to endure both the downs and the ups of life. It is important that we think about how to best do this — and how our own expectations may play a part in how our children do or do not “succeed” and ultimately feel about themselves as people.
This is the second in a series on Gentle Parenting
The term, Gentle Parenting was coined by Sarah Ockwell-Smith, a British writer who has authored a variety of books on the subject. She emphasizes the importance of empathy, respect, understanding and boundaries in parenting. And in doing so, she shares some of the best practices of good parenting.
But you may be surprised to know that Ockwell-Smith actually has no qualifications for calling herself a parenting expert. She has an undergraduate degree in psychology, she is a mother, but otherwise, nada.
Her ideas are her own. Like other parenting experts before her such as William Sears (attachment parenting), she speaks based on her own opinions and observations rather than from scientific research findings.
In other words, Gentle Parenting has no data behind it.
And it is just beginning to be studied.
So how can parents know if it is an effective technique for raising happier children?
Well, they can’t.
But this has not stopped many parents from adopting Gentle Parenting wholeheartedly and feeling deeply that this is the “right” way to parent.
It is important for such parents to keep in mind that since parents started to parent, there have been styles of parenting that have been popular and then gone by the wayside, ways of parenting that have been considered “right” at the time and then, just as quickly, have gone out of fashion.
And in the last 75 years there has been a particular trajectory to parenting styles: Since Dr. Benjamin Spock wrote his first parenting book in 1946, parenting has become progressively more “child-centered” with Gentle Parenting being the most child-centered of them all.
But is this actually good for children?
Let’s look at what little data there is.
In one of the first studies of Gentle Parenting, professors Annie Pezalla and Alice Davidson gathered data from 100 self-identified “Gentle Parents”. And what they found may not surprise you. They said that these parents are “at risk of burnout”.
It turns out that this parenting style is extremely hard for parents to implement. For example, the expectation that a parent can remain calm at all times regardless of children’s behavior is extremely emotionally taxing for parents.
This is what they said, “Parenting young children has always been hard, but evidence suggests that it might be getting harder. The pressures to fulfill exacting parenting standards, coupled with the information overload on social media about the right or wrong ways to care for children, has left many parents questioning their moment-to-moment interactions with their family and leaving them with feelings of burnout. 1
And they found that gentle parents were not always so gentle on themselves: “the emergent theme of self-critique, expressed by over one-third of gentle parents, and the findings that, among those self-critical gentle parents, the levels of self-efficacy were significantly lower, illuminates the need for more explorations and more support of these parents. One of the gentle parents in our sample, a 40-year-old mother of two children, wrote that her approach to parenting is about “Trying to remain calm…but I do reach my limit sometimes.” Gentle parenting seems to represent an approach that is extraordinarily gentle for the children, but perhaps not-so-gentle for the parents themselves. “1
Moreover, it is also not clear that remaining calm at all moments is actually helpful for children.
While extreme emotional outbursts from parents in reaction to children’s misbehaviors are obviously not advantageous, I would suggest that there is a natural feedback system that is in place in parent-infant/child interactions both in humans and in most other mammals: when a child or young animal misbehaves by doing something dangerous or annoying, the parent naturally reacts accordingly – with an angry word or growl and sometimes a correction. From this, the child understands that she has done something she should not have. The parent’s negative reaction is the logical and normal consequence for a child’s misbehavior and the child learns what the parent will and will not tolerate.
And the effectiveness of providing a consequence for misbehavior has been widely researched. As I discussed in my last post, in the parenting style known as Authoritative Parenting, parents make their expectations clear, they support children’s feelings and needs and they provide gentle punishments or consequences when children misbehave. And this parenting style has been shown, in many studies, to be the most effective parenting method (amongst the three types of parenting styles: Authoritative, Authoritarian and Permissive) and the one that yields the happiest children.
Gentle Parenting does share some characteristics of Authoritative Parenting – it advocates clear boundaries and provides support for children’s feelings and needs.
And where Gentle Parenting also gets it right is in the area of advising parents to stay calm in the face of children’s extreme feelings. A parent’s ability to remain calm in the face of an infant or young child’s distress – sadness, pain, frustration, IS helpful – and we have known this for a long time. Theorist Wilfred Bion wrote about the mother’s ability to contain her infant’s highly charged affects by reacting with soothing as being one of her most important functions and the one that helps infants learn to tolerate their own distress. He explained that the mother who can grasp the importance of, and take into herself, some of the baby’s earliest and most primitive anxieties helps her baby to internalize the mother’s capacity to tolerate and manage anxiety.
So this is a well known function of the mother, one that was recognized before Gentle Parenting and which Gentle Parenting wisely incorporates – just as it includes a variety of other important parental functions including empathy, endeavoring to see matters from the child’s point of view, verbalization of the child’s feelings and motivations and support for these.
Where Gentle Parenting goes wrong is that it asks WAY too much of parents and it asks WAY too little of children.
At this point in history, most parents work to earn a living and face a host of demands just to survive. Adding to this the expectation to stay calm in the face of every sort of child emotion and behavior, being endlessly empathic, and having no consequences for misbehavior may just be asking too much of parents.
Parents need a sense of having SOME control at home. Sometimes they need a child just to do what they have told them to do. And parents need some way to express themselves to their children. When a child does not comply with what a parent has expected of them, it is natural for the parent to be annoyed and to say so. This is life. Children need to know that not everything they do is acceptable and that some things they do come with unpleasant consequences. They really need to learn what not to do and what to do – because once they go to school and eventually to internships and to jobs, once they have friends, and eventually romantic relationships, this will be the reality of their lives. Not every person in life will be understanding and empathic. Not every motivation for every kind of behavior is equally acceptable in life.
Moreover, research has shown that children feel safer when they know what is expected of them AND they feel less guilty when they have a consequence when they do not comply.
In the end, this is what the researchers who did one of the first studies on Gentle Parenting had to say: What seems to be unique about the gentle parenting movement is that it has not been presented or advocated by scholars of human development; rather, it has largely been the product of social media. Considering that parents are increasingly stressed or burned out by their caregiving responsibilities, it is imperative that evidence-based guidance is made available to those who are interested in gentle parenting. What does this approach entail? How is it related to other parenting approaches? Is it a sustainable approach for caregivers? These are empirical questions, and they deserve empirical answers.
Should children suffer consequences when they don’t do what we tell them to do?
This question has come up a great deal recently in light of the advent of “Gentle Parenting“.
Most of you have probably heard of Gentle Parenting and some of you may even be using the Gentle Parenting philosophy to raise your kids. But for those who are not up to speed, the Gentle Parenting movement was started by Sarah Ockwell-Smith, a British author and mother of four. She has written a variety of books about gentle parenting, including The Gentle Parenting Book. She emphasizes understanding children’s feelings and acknowledging the motivations behind challenging behaviors as opposed to correcting the behavior itself. She advocates setting firm boundaries, giving choices, and avoiding punishments.
According to a New Yorker article on the subject, “Instead of issuing commands (“Put on your shoes!”), the parent strives to understand why a child is acting out in the first place (“What’s up, honey? You don’t want to put your shoes on?”) or, perhaps, narrates the problem (“You’re playing with your trains because putting on shoes doesn’t feel good”)4
This sounds great – and it IS great: trying to understand why your child feels the way she does, and putting this is into words for her is part of good parenting. And yet, this may not be enough. It may not result in the desired outcome…and parents are getting tired of exerting all the energy this style of parenting requires.
We want our children to do the things we want them to do—like getting dressed, coming to meals promptly, sitting at the table, doing their homework, not fighting with their siblings, etc.—and we struggle with how to accomplish this without violating current parenting norms.
And we don’t just want our children to do these things when we tell them; we also want them to learn to do these things without having to be told.
But there’s more. We want our children to internalize good values. We want them to develop their own moral compass. By the time they are 9 or 10, we want them to understand the importance of listening to others, following rules, treating others with consideration, and being honest, among other things.
And often we don’t know how to reach this goal.
So what do we do? Talk to our children each time they do something we don’t like or when they fail to do something we want them to do in the style of Gentle Parenting? Provide consequences when they don’t do what we tell them to do? Or do we go back to old fashined punishments – and actually punish them—whether by a spanking, the removal of a privilege, or by taking away a promised treat?
Physical Punishment
Well, let’s start with physical punishment. That is an immediate no – because we have long known that physical punishment is not beneficial for children. In a review article on the subject, Anne B. Smith states that while physical punishment has often been considered an effective, and even necessary means of socializing children, research has revealed it to be a predictor of a wide range of negative developmental outcomes for children. There is widespread agreement on this throughout all the recent research done in the area. Physical punishment is associated with increased child aggression, antisocial behavior, lower intellectual achievement, poorer quality of parent–child relationships, mental health problems (such as depression), and diminished moral internalization.2
In a review of the literature on this subject, one researcher found that there was also widespread agreement among studies that physical punishment tends to lessen the chances that children will internalize parental rules and values.2
Talking to Our Children
Now let’s move on to another alternative: talking to our children. This has been found over and over to enhance children’s understanding of parental expectations as well as maintaining the affectional bond between parent and child.
But, as I mentioned, talking is often not enough. While some advocates of Gentle Parenting may differ, it has been found that what is more effective than talking alone is setting clear expectations, instituting gentle punishments, such as consequences for misbehavior, and being consistent.
This is called authoritative parenting.
Authoritative Parenting
And the research on parenting is clear on this. In many studies of three types of parenting: authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive, authoritative parenting has been found to be the most effective as well as the style that yields the happiest children.
Authoritative parents are responsive to their children’s feelings and needs, and they are more often supportive than harsh with their children. This style of parenting is associated with talking together with children about their behavior as well as setting up mild punishments or consequences for misbehavior. Studies have shown that this type of parenting results in lower levels of depression and higher levels of school commitment among adolescents.3
Authoritarian Parenting
Meanwhile, authoritarian parents are those who are low in responsiveness to their children yet highly demanding of them. The authoritarian parenting style is associated with emphasizing obedience and conformity and expectations that rules be obeyed without explanation. Authoritarian parents exhibit low levels of trust and engagement toward their children, discourage open communication, and engage in strict control. And it has been found that verbal hostility and psychological control are the most detrimental of the authoritarian parenting behaviors. Adolescents from authoritarian families have been found to exhibit poor social skills, low levels of self-esteem, and high levels of depression.3
Permissive Parenting
Permissive parenting is characterized by high levels of responsiveness to children coupled with low levels of demandingness. Permissive parents affirm their children’s impulses, desires, and actions and consult with their children about decisions. In results that may surprise you, adolescents from permissive families report a higher frequency of substance use and school misconduct and are less engaged and less positively oriented to school compared to individuals from authoritative or authoritarian families. And permissive parenting is also associated with low self-esteem in children.
So back to the question: What is the best thing for parents to do?
Well, it seems to me that what some people call “gentle parenting” can end up being a lot like the “permissive parenting” I described above.
And, according to the research, authoritative parenting seems to yield happier children and children who eventually internalize the rules.
So this means setting clear rules and limits for your children starting early, talking to them about these, and instituting clear, mild punishments, or what I call consequences, for when children do not do what you have told them to do.
And notice, I use the words, “what you have told them to” instead of what you have “asked.”
It is time to stop saying, “OK?” after each thing we tell our child to do. As the parent, it is time we stop asking our children to do things we actually want them to do. It may be hard to act like an authority with our children, but generational boundaries are important. Our children need to know that, in the end, we, as the parents, are the boss.
As parents, we are often afraid to set limits or to give consequences. We are afraid of making our children unhappy or angry. We are afraid of meltdowns—whether in public (embarrassing) or at home (frustrating).
But we have to understand that we need to be able to tolerate our children being upset, disappointed, sad, or even angry with us if we want them to learn how to do what we want them to do and if we want them, eventually, to internalize the values we hold dear.
So, let’s start to institute consequences, be consistent, and let the consequences fit the misbehaviors. Often called logical consequences, these will make sense to you and your child. For example, if your child does not put on her pajamas in time for her to have books read to her on a certain night, then story time will have to wait until tomorrow.
References
1. A. Mageau, Joannie Lessard, Joëlle Carpentier, JeanMichel Robichaud, Mireille Joussemet, Richard Koestner (2018). Effectiveness and acceptability beliefs regarding logical consequences and mild punishments. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Vol 54, Jan-Feb, 2018.
2. Smith, Anne B. (2006) The state of research on the effects of physical punishment, Ministry of Social Development, New Zealand.
3. Hoskins, Donna. (2014). Consequences of Parenting on Adolescent Outcomes.Societies, 4(3), 506–531; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc4030506
4. Winter, Jessica. 2022. The harsh realm of gentle parenting. March 23, 2022, The New Yorker.
There seems to be a problem going on amongst middle and upper-middle-class parents which involves not just hovering and helicoptering but also downright coddling and intruding.
Children from 2 to 32 are being treated as incompetent people who can never do the simplest things — tasks their own parents — and certainly their grandparents did starting very early in life.
The thing is — children are more competent than we give them credit for — and they always have been.
By hovering and helicoptering we get in the way of their developing their own skills, and worse, we interfere with their ability to have experiences that teach them how to do what they need to do in life. As a result, we limit the development of their feelings of competence, confidence, and mastery.
In our parenting groups, I have observed that parents are feeling exhausted. And part of this is because they feel they have to help with everything. If a child doesn’t like what is for dinner, the parent feels like they have to provide something else. If a child wants the parent to help them with their homework each day, the parent feels they have to do this. If the child wants to look at a device during dinner, the parent feels they have to say yes to avoid a meltdown. And in the bathroom? Don’t get me started…
When a five or six or seven year old asks for help with wiping, the parent feels they have to go right in.
But the question parents must ask themselves from the time their children are two years old through adulthood is this: Am I actually helping my child become more competent and confident? Or am I expecting too little from them? Am I stepping in and doing too much for them? And if I am stepping in too often, why am I doing this?
Is it just easier to do things for our children rather than insisting they do them for themselves? Or is it too painful to watch children struggle — to watch children make mistakes and suffer the consequences — to watch children feel frustrated? Bored? Angry?
Or do we have expectations of ourselves as parents that are too high? If so, why? When did we cease to believe that experience was the best teacher? And when did we decide that we, as parents, are really the best teachers and that it is our job to help our children avoid difficult feelings such as frustration, failure, boredom, and anger?
Let’s look to the scientific literature for help.
In studies of what promotes feelings of competence amongst students, structure and support for their autonomy have been shown to be important. Students feel more competent when their teachers give them the opportunity to do work on their own, and when there are clear instructions as to what they should be doing.1
Students also feel more competent when they have the opportunity to help others, and to get support for themselves from peers.1
The attitude of the adults who are around kids is also pertinent as to what makes them feel competent. In a survey, students described teacher kindness, support for autonomy, relatedness, and non-controlling orientation as factors that contributed to their competence satisfaction. For instance, the students felt competent because their teachers had an approachable, helpful, and interactive teaching style and provided them with opportunities to interact with each other.1
Additionally, students mentioned that participation opportunities, respectful teacher-student interactions, and teachers who were responsive to their views, needs, and interests facilitated their competence satisfaction in class. This means that opportunities to give their opinions, to do hands-on work and to be met with a respectful attitude was helpful.
What’s more, students indicated that they feel more competent when teachers make expectations clear, and provide appropriate help when necessary.
Other research has looked at social and emotional competence and has found over and over again that children with better social skills and those who are able to manage their own feelings feel more competent — in addition to being more trusting, empathic and intellectually inquisitive.
So there is quite a bit of research, but often these studies are not translated into actual methods by which parents can learn how to promote competence in their children.3
So, how can parents apply the research findings to their own approach to parenting?
Well, first, we know that being attuned to our babies and children’s feelings and needs is crucial. From birth, we need to observe how they are feeling, and when they are upset, we need to be able to tell the difference between times when they need help calming down and when they are able to soothe themselves.
We must try to stay attuned to their feelings as they engage in difficult tasks (starting with tummy time and going all the way through writing high school papers) and only intervene when it is clear that they have become so frustrated that they cannot continue. We can be there and be available in case help is needed – but we should not jump in at the first sign of frustration.
Second, we must make our expectations of our children clear, but not try to control what and how they do things.
Third, being kind and respectful toward our children and their efforts to accomplish things helps them to internalize a kind and respectful attitude toward themselves.
Fourth, helping children to manage, recognize and understand their own feelings and talking with them about the feelings of others supports social and emotional competence.
Fifth, it is important to encourage independence and autonomy in our children while providing as much structure and support as we think they need.
So, for example, we can help a toddler learn how to pour her own orange juice — but we can suggest starting out doing this activity while standing on a stool and doing it in the sink. As she becomes more capable of pouring without spilling we can ask her if she has noticed how much better she’s gotten and invite her to pour her juice at the table.
Or, when a high schooler is having difficulty with writing a paper, rather than jumping in to read it over or to aid with the writing, we can start by helping them calm down and talk about what is making it so hard for them – before we take ANY action whatsoever.
In summary, helping a child or teen with a task by telling them how to do it or doing it for them is not actually the most effective way to help a child feel competent.
These days, we often feel we have to help our children before they may actually need it. And we may praise our children rather than pointing out the improvement the child has made and asking the child if they notice their improvement or whether they feel proud — of themselves.
In the end, we all want our children to feel competent and good about themselves. And we want them to feel this from the inside rather than waiting for praise from the adults around them or for A’s from their teachers. We want them not only to be competent, but we want them to feel competent.
References
1 Reymond, N. C., et al. (2022) Why students feel competent in the classroom: a qualitative analysis of students’ views. Frontiers in Psychology, Oct 13. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9612881/
2Housman, D.K. (2017) The importance of emotional competence and self-regulation from birth: a case for the evidence-based emotional cognitive social early learning approach. ICEP 11, 13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40723-017-0038-6
3 Miller, J. S., et al. (2018) Parenting for Competence and Parenting With Competence: Essential Connections Between Parenting and Social and Emotional Learning. School Community Journal, V. 28 (2) p. 28. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1201828.pdfMorereferences
As of Weds morning, there are many jubilant Americans and many devastated Americans.
What can I say that will add anything at this point?
I myself am in a news blackout. That is what I need to do to continue to keep an even keel.
And, at this point everyone needs to find a way to keep themselves stable.
Whether you immerse yourself in the victory or you seek refuge in nature or poetry or music or Netflix or sleep.
And we need to do this so that we can be available to those who need us – most especially our children.
Whichever category you fit into, try to remember how you behave and how you speak about the election results in front of your children will influence and affect them.
This will be a confusing time for them.
They are hearing all sorts of things at school, from their friends, on social media and elsewhere. There is a great deal of emotion – elation, anger, sadness, dire predictions, threats, and promises – any of which may or may not be welcome.
So, if, as parents you are overjoyed at the win, if you are celebrating, remember, your kids are watching and you are sending a message about how to handle victory.
Or, if you as parents are upset, frightened, furious or disheartened, also, remember what message you are sending.
Are your children thinking they can lord the win over their friends who wanted a different result? Are your children upset and afraid about what’s to come?
Children need to be reassured: this is what democracy looks like. There was an election, there was a winner and we must live with the results.
Children also need to know that the adults in their lives will work to make sure there are other elections in 2 and in 4 years and we will have a choice again then.
They need to know that if we don’t like what happened this time, we can work to tip the scales back in a direction we like better in two years – and we can start to work on that as soon as we feel up to it.
AND parents need to try – no matter what – to reassure their children that they will keep them safe even if there are those who may talk about making changes to our system that we don’t agree with.
Children need to know that in their house, values of kindness and fairness still apply.
And if children are getting messages from other kids or teachers at school about who should have won or who did win, they need to know that you want to hear about it and talk about it with them.
However, if children observe parents doom scrolling, or panicking or feeling helpless or hopeless, they may feel that there is no one to help THEM with with their own anxieties.
So, here are some options:
– Whether you feel jubilant or hopeless, try to manage your own feelings in a way that will be tolerable to your children and teens.
– If your kids are anxious, if they are asking lots of questions or finding it hard to go to sleep at night, try to reassure them – especially your children twelve and under. Remind them that you are there for them and will work to keep them safe. Sit with them a little longer before it’s time to go to sleep. Read an extra book with them.
– Remind them that over the arc of history, there have been many heated political campaigns, many changes in government, and many scary and difficult events in this country – but that we are still here.
– Remind them that in this country there are still checks and balances and that the President does not have absolute power. Whether you want him to institute certain changes or you are afraid he will institute certain changes – it is not entirely within his power to do so.
– Keep the news and political commentary off the screen until your younger kids go to bed
– And with your teenagers, keep the conversation open. Talk to them about how they feel, don’t hide what you feel, but also try not to denigrate those on the other side of the political spectrum as you talk with them.
***Please comment on this post and tell us how you are feeling and WHAT you are doing – for yourself – and for your children***
A recent New Yorker article starts with the following:
“At the end of the summer, the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory on the mental health of the nation’s parents. Too many families, Murthy wrote, are beset by economic factors beyond their control, including the costs of health care, child care, elder care, housing, and groceries. Murthy cited alarming results from a survey by the American Psychological Association, conducted in 2023, in which forty-one per cent of parents said that “most days they are so stressed they cannot function,” forty-eight per cent said that “most days their stress is completely overwhelming,” and fifty per cent said that “when they are stressed, they can’t bring themselves to do anything.” 1
This is outrageous!
So many parents are so stressed!
We have to talk about this.
And it is also time to fully acknowledge how little support there is for families in this country.
Unlike other developed nations, we have little to no governmental support for the care of our young children. Parents are not subsidized to stay home to care for infants and young pre-school aged children – and at the very same time, the survival of most families AND the survival of our economy require both parents to work in most families.
But, as the article says, “insufficient or erratic child care is a major disruptor of parents’ work schedules”1 and “In eleven states and the District of Columbia, child care costs at least twice as much as typical monthly rent or mortgage payments, and two-thirds of parents nationwide report spending twenty per cent or more of their take-home pay on child care. For sole parents, this share rises to thirty-five per cent.”1
The Build Back Better bill, proposed by President Biden included funding for child care and early childhood education.
And yet, even knowing how important childcare is to family well being, the Build Back Better agenda did NOT receive widespread bipartisan support, and the provisions for daycare were completely cut from the final bill which was passed, called The Inflation Reduction Act. 2
The Democrats’ plans included universal pre-kindergarten, lower child care costs, paid family and sick leave and the enhanced child tax credit, among other provisions, but all of these were ultimately eliminated during negotiations between Democrats and Republicans. Those cuts became the ninth time in just two and a half years where proposed legislation aimed at helping women and families have been removed, according to a CNN analysis of data from the Congressional Budget Office and Congressional Research Reports.
Paid family leave alone has been trimmed down or dropped five different times since March 2020, and universal pre-kindergarten, paid family leave and an expanded child tax credit were all left out of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Now we have a presidential candidate who is introducing a six-thousand-dollar tax credit for parents of newborns, and a cap on child-care expenditures at seven per cent of a family’s income. She has also signalled her commitment to pro-family economic policy in choosing Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, as her running mate. As Governor, Walz has made school breakfast and lunch free in Minnesota and has made public higher education free for low-income students, he has added more than two billion dollars to Minnesota’s K-12 school budget, expanded the state’s child tax credit, and enshrined paid family and medical leave.
If instituted on a nationwide basis, these policies would do a LOT to decrease family stress –
and yet the presidential race is still neck in neck.
Obviously, many fathers and mothers are not putting help for families at the top of their priority list when choosing who to vote for.
It’s obviously time that we name the problem loud and clear: children and families are not considered important in our country.
To many, “it’s the economy, stupid” which is important.
But let’s connect the dots: the workers of today, parents, need to be less stressed to do their jobs. And the workers of tomorrow, children, need to be well cared for in order to be the healthy community members and the creative and productive workers the economy needs.
If this is the only argument that will get through to some people, let’s make it!
As Winter suggests in her New Yorker article, a coherent, constructive debate about how to help working parents—about how our politics and institutions can foster a care economy that exists, in one form or another, in virtually every other developed nation on Earth—is needed.
This is an updated version of a post written for the election two cycles ago.
As we approach the presidential election, it’s a good time to talk to your kids about winning and losing.
The subjects of sportsmanship, humility and grace come to mind – as well as braggadocio, sore losing and bitterness.
Whatever side of the electoral battle you are on, you and your children will be having strong feelings.
So what do we say to our children? And at what age are they ready to have this conversation?
Well, really children of any age, starting around 3 know about winning and losing – and they can talk about the feelings that come when they experience each. Of course, depending on your child’s age, you will speak about this differently.
But the place to start is to remind your child – whatever age they are – that how your family feels at this moment about who you want for President is not the way that everyone feels. Some people are for one candidate and some people are for the other. This is a time to talk about values and WHY you prefer the candidate you prefer, what values and policies they represent, and why you are in favor of these.
This is the time to talk about the history of our country and what democracy is all about – and this includes the fact that in our country we allow the people (represented by the electoral college) to choose the president and that we are honor bound to stick with this decision.
HOWEVER – and this is where the more nuanced part of the discussion comes in – it is important, whatever you or your child feel, to help your child to be aware that when other people feel differently than we do, that it is important to treat them and their feelings with respect.
Good sportsmanship is something that kids who play on teams should be learning. You can provide this as an example: after a game, your team shakes hands with the other team to indicate that you both played a good game and that there are no hard feelings left over from the competition.
The losers can feel upset but still lose graciously. This is a concept that can be introduced to a 3 year old and also to a 16 year old.
And the winners can feel happy and joyous – but they can also behave graciously by telling their competitors that they played well. Children can be reminded that bragging about winning is not the way to go, even though inside it feels so good to win.
You can tell your children the story of “burying the hatchet”: when Native American tribes had disputes or wars with each other, when they were over, the two formerly opposing sides literally buried a hatchet in the ground to symbolize the end of the disagreement.
This is a way to handle winning and losing an election too. After someone has won or lost, it is time to bury the hatchet, to accept the defeat or the victory and to move back to getting along.
It is also time to continue to cling to the values you hold dear and to not give up on them.
I fervently hope that both we and our children can do this both before and after the upcoming election.
Because of the news of a massive bombing campaign including the bombing of a Ukrainian Hospital today, I would like to post on war on children.
This is an excerpt from my book, How Children Grieve: What Adults Miss and What They Can Do to Help:
One psychiatrist said of both the children and the adults in the Ukraine, “(They) aren’t just grieving a person; (they) are grieving (their) entire existence.”[i]
And, as the United Nation International Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says:
“In war, children suffer the most”.
As I write, children are dying and losing loved ones every single day in multiple locations around the world, including Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, Russia, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Myanmar, Yemen, Congo and numerous other countries. These children are suffering in ways that are quite simply horrific and completely incompatible with normal development.
In fact, globally, one in four children, or over 400 million children live in a country affected by armed conflict, terrorism, or disaster.[ii] And armed conflict can last throughout a child’s entire life, such as in Liberia where civil war caused widespread trauma from 1989 to 2004.[iii]
The effects of war are innumerable. They extend far beyond the trauma that is experienced by the loss of loved ones and the witnessing and being the victim of violence. In wartime, children, teens and adults may all experience a brutal shattering of parts of their inner worlds. Their minds may become black holes of horror and despair and their mental functioning can be intruded upon and assaulted by destructive forces. [iv]
Moreover, they experience all the secondary losses of war including the loss of home and community due to fighting and bombardment. They include all the losses embedded in the experiences of evacuation and immigration including the loss of contact with friends, and the division of families. They include all the difficulties associated with adapting to one or more new living arrangements. And they include the loss of food security, the loss of the provision of proper public health measures and the loss of general health care including mental health care.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimated that approximately 20 million children and adolescents have been displaced from their country of origin as refugees in the year 2023.[v]
And we must remember that the numbers of children living through war and experiencing displacement are even larger than this because there are many kinds of war—including not only armed conflicts between nations – but also drug wars, gang wars, and more localized street fighting caused by conditions of poverty and social inequality – and these too cause people to suffer and to flee.
In the Ukraine alone, as of March 2022, half of all Ukrainian refugees were children.[vi] And this number does not even include all of the children who have been kidnapped and forced to adapt to life in Russia. Again, this is a LOT of children who have lost their homes, friends, neighborhoods, schools and so much more.
The past two decades have marked increasing interest in the psychological impact of war on children. Many researchers have studied this subject, it is well documented that exposure to adverse childhood events (including violence and war trauma) leads to a higher-than-average incidence of acute stress disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and physiological and mental illness).
The most important thing we know about the effect of war on children is that even above and beyond the exposure to risk and violence, the most traumatizing event for children is the threat of separation from one or both parents or actual separation from them. Given the intense attachment of children to their parents, this is the worst consequence of war for children and leads to the most suffering. [vii]
We also know that the most common mental health effects of exposure to war for children are elevated symptoms traumatic stress, depressive disorders, anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
There is so much more to say about the effect of war on children. See this site for more in the coming weeks.
[i] Fleming, LaKeisha, How the War in the Ukraine is Affecting the Mental Health of Survivors.
[ii] Gudrun Østby, Siri Aas Rustad, and Andreas Forø Tollefsen, “Children Affected by Armed Conflict, 1990–2019,” Conflict Trends 6.
[iii] Betancourt. T. S., et al., “The Intergenerational Impact of War on Mental Health and Psychosocial Wellbeing: Lessons from the Longitudinal Study of War-Affected Youth in Sierra Leone,” Conflict and Health 14, no. 62 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1186/s13031-020-00308-7.
[iv] Roth, Merav, Ten simple guidelines on initial therapeutic intervention with acute trauma following October 7, 2023. In Psychoanalysis in a Holy Land, Abramovitch, Cusin, Leo, Roth, Alaltiello and Volkan. Pgs. 135 – 162. Frenis Zero Press: Italy.
[vii] Masten AS, Best KM, Garmezy N (1990). Resilience and development: Contributions from the study of children who overcome adversity. Dev Psychopathol 2: 425–444.
“Be a room parent!” my son said. “I’ll get to see you, Mommy!”
With a nerf gun to my head, I took on the responsibility.
I figured this would help me keep an ear to the ground as they say. First of all, I could learn which of the teachers wanted to cut and run mid-year and I could support them every way I could. Second, I could spy on my son and see exactly how he was behaving at school!
But what did this job entail?
I had no idea.
As it turns out, it entailed countless meetings that could have been emails. And also having to send out countless emails that could have been skipped altogether.
Additionally, I had to attend all the grade level events.
And don’t get me wrong, seeing my son at his school interacting with his peers has been amazing.
But since August (when the school year started) I’ve had to chaperone several field trips. On one they gave me five kids to keep track of, and two of them had the same name. Why would they do that, you ask? Well why not? At least, I had one less name to memorize.
Afterwards, I took the extra step of texting all the parents pictures of their children on the field trip.
And throughout my time as room parent I’ve gotten to know the other students in my son’s class, met some parents, and regularly shown my support for the teachers. I’ve also volunteered at lunch a number of times.
Long before I became a parent I dreamed of participating in my future children’s school. And this fulfilled that dream. And, as a result of my involvement, my face has become more familiar around the school. The children and staff know me. An added bonus has been being able to infuse a little diversity into the mostly homogenous place we send our son to school.
Then, finally, the school year was three quarters over and the annual field day was upon us. Of course, room parents were required to be there. But I didn’t plan ahead and couldn’t make it. However, I was able to cajole my husband into going in my place.
For context, let me just say it was February and my son had been in this class since August and this would be the FIRST time my husband would be in our son’s classroom.
But back to field day – my husband went, he took on the role of getting the students from activity to activity, something he is far better at than I would have been. And in each of their events he encouraged the kids and assisted the teachers. When the two hour stint was over he and I met for a nice lunch.
That afternoon our son excitedly came home from school. His backpack was strangely full. And when I looked inside, what did I find? Not one but twenty-seven HANDWRITTEN NOTES, LETTERS AND PICTURES from his classmates. Each and every one thanking my husband for volunteering.
You would have thought he had given each child a pony.
I am willing to wager that despite my having been in that classroom or on those field trips or at lunch at least eight times this year, most of the students in the class don’t know my name.
But in each and every letter, my husband is addressed as “Dr. Misra”. He isn’t referred to as my son’s “dad” or as “Mr. Amit” – but “Doctor”. And the funny part is that my husband likes to tell people he’s a “water meter reader” instead of a physician…but we couldn’t expect our son to keep up the same pretenses.
And one of the handwritten notes included animation!!
All had ten dollar vocabulary words like “encouragement” and “persevere.”
Meanwhile, as of today?
I haven’t received so much as a thank you post-it.
**********
Tejal Misra resides in Arizona with her family. She has recently authored and published a children’s book that offers a unique perspective on the festival of Diwali through the eyes of Sita. If you’re interested in acquiring a copy of the book, see the link below:
Thoughtful Parenting 