|
|
Email this Article
|  |
Parenting
with Gary & Anne Marie: Preschool
Parenting Your Child's Emotions
"My two-and-a-half-year-old son doesn't like it when I correct his four-year-old brother. He becomes sad because his brother is being taken away for correction and he will lose his playmate. What should I do?" the mother asked. "I'm thinking it might be better if I didn't correct my four-year-old if it makes my two-year-old sad."
Every child enters life with the propensities for both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. Most parents realize this truth and consequently attempt to find ways to make childhood a happy time for their offspring. Parents recognize that a happy child is a pleasure to be with, easier to teach, and exhibits longer sustained periods of self-control and self-entertainment. But is happiness really the ultimate goal of parenting?
One of the greatest mistakes a parent can make is to attempt to parent a child's emotions and not the child. Please note this distinction. We are not saying a child's emotions are not important, but rather that attempting to parent the single category of emotions is not the same thing as parenting the whole child. Every child will experience both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. Hopefully your child will know much more of the first than the second.
The experience of positive emotions, like joy, happiness, affection, esteem, and the sense of discovery, leads to feelings of security and confidence. This in turn helps the child face and properly react to the negative emotions of worry, jealousy, envy, fear, disappointment, anxiety, and frustration. But parenting to create all the right emotions and avoid all the negative emotions is both unwise and unhealthy. Such an approach holds the parents hostage. Everything is guesswork.
When you attempt to create all the "right" feelings, you abandon other significant values necessary to raise a well-adjusted child. In our opening example, the mom was willing to put aside her four-year-old's wrong behavior to satisfy the happiness of her two-year-old. She was willing to suspend a needed lesson in virtuous self-control, a tool of life, for a momentary state of happiness.
If happiness is the highest value to offer children, then other good values such as honesty, compassion, self-control, self-entertainment, obedience, submission, and patience are all subservient. If there is a context that pits virtues with the emotion of happiness, then happiness must dominate. But the developmental fallout with this approach are numerous. The child that is pampered or shielded from unpleasant experiences is ill-prepared to meet the disappointments, frustration, and other unpleasant experiences that life brings. Parenting a single emotion or a range of common emotions is a poor substitute for parenting the whole child-his heart, his head, his body, and his emotions.
Article
by Gary Ezzo / Anne Marie Ezzo
