There is nothing like becoming a parent to teach us that human beings feel before they can think and that babies and children are more about their feelings than anything else. How you respond and react to your child’s feelings is important because it is a fundamental prerequisite of human beings – big and small, you and me – to have our feelings witnessed and understood by the significant people in our lives.
A baby is pure feeling – a bundle of feelings, if you like. We won’t always understand everything they feel, we’ll sometimes have to soothe them for a long time before they feel soothed, but it is by putting in such loving work that you will build the foundations for your baby’s future emotional health. If you take their feelings seriously in their first few years, the baby will learn that if something feels bad, it will get better, especially if they can share how they feel with someone sympathetic.
You responding sensitively to your child’s feelings teaches your baby or child to have a healthy relationship with how they feel, whatever they are feeling, from the extremes of rage and grief, through contentment and feeling calm and relaxed, to the highs of joy and generosity. This is the basis of good mental health, and that’s why this section is probably the most important one in the book.
Ignoring or denying a child’s feelings is potentially harmful to their future mental health. I know that you, as parents, might not even know you’re doing this, or maybe you do it because you think it’s for the best. When other people, especially our children, are unhappy, denying their difficult feelings is sometimes our default option. It can feel like the right thing to do. It might feel right to try to belittle, advise, distract or even scold the feelings out of them. We don’t want the person we love to be unhappy, and being fully open to their unhappiness or their rage can feel dangerous and unsettling for us; it can even feel as if we are encouraging these feelings in some way. But when feelings are disallowed they do not disappear. They merely go into hiding, where they fester and cause trouble later on in life. Think about this: when do you need to shout the loudest? It is when you are not heard. Feelings need to be heard.
I do not want you to feel bad about how you might have reacted to your child’s feelings in the past, but I do want to emphasize how vital it is to acknowledge, take seriously and validate your child’s feelings. The most common cause of adult depression is not what’s happening to the adult in the present but because, as a child, they did not learn in their relationship with their parents how they can be soothed. If, instead of being understood and comforted, the individual was told not to feel, or cried themselves to sleep alone, or was left by themselves with their rage, their capacity to tolerate unpleasant or painful emotion becomes less and less possible as the number of emotional misattunements adds up. Their capacity to tolerate them diminishes. It is as though there is only so much space for difficult emotions to be pushed down into before that space gets too full and there is nowhere for them to go. When we are soothed, and soothed again, by our parents, whatever our feelings, we are liable to feel more optimistic about those feelings, which makes us less susceptible to depression or anxiety later on in life. There is no guaranteed way to avoid mental-health difficulties, but it certainly helps to instil in us a belief that, whatever emotion we experience, we are still acceptable and, however bad we may feel, it will pass.
Remember: all parents make mistakes, and it is putting these right that matters more than the mistakes themselves. So, if you have thought that the best policy for making your child feel better is to pretend not to notice when they are angry or unhappy, do not worry. You can change this pattern of how you respond to your child’s feelings so that they do feel seen and heard. It is likely to feel strange or even alien when you begin to act in this new way, but it can easily become your habitual way of responding. First, think about how you have responded to your child’s feelings in the past. There are three main ways – and your way can often be similar to how you respond to your own feelings. You may vary between the three, depending on the emotion or the situation.
If you are a repressor, your natural inclination is to push away strong feelings and say, ‘Shush,’ when you are confronted with them, or ‘Don’t make a fuss, nothing’s the matter,’ or ‘Be brave.’
If you dismiss a child’s feeling as unimportant, they are less liable to share any subsequent feeling with you, whether or not you might consider these to be unimportant.
On the other end of the scale, you might be feeling so much for the child that you become as hysterical as they are and cry along with them, as though their pain is yours rather than theirs. This is an easy mistake to make, for example in the first few days that you drop your child off at nursery, before you both get used to it.
If you take over a child’s feelings like this, they are also less likely to want to share how they feel with you. They may think that they are too much for you, or that you invade them by merging with their feelings.
Containing means that you can acknowledge and validate all your feelings. If you can do this for yourself, you’ll find it natural to do this for your child as well. You can take a feeling seriously without overreacting and remain contained and optimistic. You might say, ‘Oh dear, you are unhappy. Would you like a cuddle? Come to me, then. There we are, I’m going to hold you until you feel better.’
If a child knows they will be seen and soothed but not judged by you, they are more likely to tell you what is going on for them.
This is what a child needs: for a parent to be a container for their emotions. This means you are alongside them and know and accept what they feel but you are not being overwhelmed by their feelings. This is one of the things psychotherapists do for their clients.
Being able to be a container means witnessing anger in a child, understanding why they are angry and perhaps putting that into words for them, finding acceptable ways for them to express their anger and not being punitive or overwhelmed by the anger. The same is true for other emotions too.
We are all different when it comes to which emotions we are more comfortable with because of our own experiences in childhood. It depends what associations with each emotion were made by other people and so by us as we were growing up. If you grew up in a family who habitually have contact with each other through conflict, you might have become inured to raised voices or even shouting; indeed, they may even have associations of love for you. If, on the other hand, you come from a family who shied away from any confrontation, you may be deeply uncomfortable with anger. If you felt manipulated when you were growing up, you may distrust or feel uneasy with warmth and love because you expect it to be accompanied by a sting.
Exercise: How comfortable are you with your emotions?
This exercise is a good way to begin looking at your usual reactions to emotions, in both yourself and your child. One at a time, think about fear, love, anger, excitement, guilt, sadness and joy. Which emotions do you feel more comfortable with? Which ones make you feel less comfortable? Which are easier for you to cope with in yourself? And how about when they are directed towards you, or when you witness them in other people?
We need emotions, even inconvenient ones. Think about the inconvenient ones as warning lights on a dashboard. Your response to the petrol warning light flashing on empty should not be to remove the bulb so it doesn’t flash but to give the car what it needs in order to run better. And so it is with feelings. In the main, we should try not to be distracted away from them, or to deaden them, but instead to heed them and use them to work out what we need so that we can be aware of what we want, and, if appropriate, go for it.
Our feelings come into everything we do and every single decision we make. How we manage our feelings will have a bearing on how our baby or child learns to manage theirs. Feelings and instincts are closely linked, and if we deny how a child feels we are in danger of dulling their instincts. And a child’s instincts make them safer. For example, in the excellent book How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk, the authors tell a story of a child who goes with her friends to the local pool but comes home very soon after she left. ‘Why are you back so soon and on your own?’ asks the mum. The daughter explains there was an older boy at the pool who wanted to pretend to be a doggy and lick their feet. Her friends thought it was funny, but it made her feel icky. I believe it is quite likely that her friends had been trained not to react to certain things by their parents saying, ‘Don’t be silly, don’t make a fuss,’ rather than being encouraged to take their feelings seriously. If this was the case, it will have compromised their safety. It is too easy to dismiss a child’s fears about, say, trying a new food, but if we tell them not to be silly rather than listening to them, there is a danger that they will think they are being silly to feel what they do, when it isn’t silly at all.
Goodness, you may be thinking, it is hard enough to do all the practical things I need to do to keep my child safe, fed and clean. Now, as if that wasn’t enough, I need to feel with them too? But as much as I hate ‘tips’ and ‘life hacks’, if there is one big hack, it is this: do not get into a battle about what a child is feeling. Your eight-year-old might say: ‘I don’t want to go to school.’ Replying ‘You are going, and that’s that’ is something that can easily come out of your mouth when you’re in a rush and have your own agenda to worry about. But saying ‘You really hate school right now, don’t you?’ is easier for your child to hear. It opens up the dialogue rather than shutting it down.
And it is very rarely quicker to deny a child’s feelings. For example, we are often in a hurry, so we grab a toddler to try to put their coat on, and they do not like it. Then we ask them to put their coat on themselves but, by that time, they’re determined not to put it on. So, you see, it would have been better to put the time in first by respecting them and acknowledging their feelings. That means not grabbing them but warning them that it’s time to put their coat on, then observing, listening and reflecting what they feel back to them. If they refuse to put their coat on, you might say, ‘You hate being too hot, that’s why you don’t want to wear your coat. Okay, we’ll put it on once we are outside and you start to feel cold.’ And if you are always in a hurry in the mornings, get up earlier to give yourself the time to respect your child’s slower pace and to acknowledge their feelings. Then life is less likely to be a battle.
One mother, Kate, told me that when her child, Pierre, was a toddler, a few times a day something would upset him and he’d cry.
It was often something which to me seemed really minor, like the fact it was raining or he had had a little fall, or I told him swimming with the penguins at the zoo isn’t allowed. I tried to be understanding because I knew that what for me felt minor could easily feel like a catastrophe to a toddler. But by the time he was four, and it was still happening, I was beginning to think Pierre would never build up any resilience. I started to think I might be being too soft. And that perhaps I should start telling him he was making a fuss about nothing. What stopped me doing that was remembering how bad I felt when my parents told me off for being silly or that I needed to grow up.
Now Pierre is six, and I’ve realized we often go days and days without a tear. What, before, would have had him in floods of tears, he now deals with. He might say, ‘Never mind, Mummy, we can figure this out.’ Or ‘Give me a hug while my knee stings. It will stop in a minute.’ The change happened gradually and imperceptibly. I’m so glad I kept on accepting his feelings and soothing him.
Although it probably seemed extremely time-consuming at the time, Kate did choose the most expedient path. When we tell our children off for feeling bad we are giving them two things to cry about: the thing they were originally sad about and, in addition, they now feel bad because their parent is cross and they still feel sad. Stick with the philosophy of soothing the tears, feeling with rather than dealing with. If you take a child’s feelings seriously and soothe them when they need it, they will gradually learn to internalize that soothing and eventually become able to do it for themselves.
If you were brought up being disapproved of for having inconvenient feelings, it is all too easy to revert to that same model with your own child. One thing that may stop you making that mistake is remembering back to when you were made to feel bad for feeling sad, like Kate did. Feeling sad is part of life. But if being told off for feeling sad is still within you, even as an adult, you may find yourself apologizing for crying when something awful has happened.
It can be hard to accept your child’s feelings rather than telling them off for expressing them if, like Kate, your feelings were denied by your parents. It can feel like taking a leap into the unknown, and you are, it’s true: you are breaking the links in your ancestral emotional chain. But remember, you are laying down the foundation for your child’s good mental health. By the way, slip-ups in either under- or overreacting, especially when they are mostly corrected, are not going to ruin a child for ever.
Becoming comfortable with your own emotions, however strong, is the key to being able to contain and soothe your child’s. If you dismiss your own feelings as unimportant, you will not be able to be an adequate container for your child’s emotions. If you become hysterical, you are unable even to contain your own feelings, let alone your child’s.
You may need to practise dealing with your own emotions, not repressing them or becoming hysterical but acknowledging how you feel and finding ways of soothing yourself or accepting help from those around you to help you soothe yourself. One way of doing this is to define your feeling rather than yourself. You can do the same for your child. So rather than saying, ‘I am sad,’ or ‘You are sad,’ say instead, ‘I feel sad,’ or ‘It looks as though you may be feeling sad.’ Using this language means you define the feeling rather than identifying with it. This small thing can make a big difference.
It’s also important to be in the habit of talking about feelings, both yours and your child’s. As children mature, the logical part of the brain becomes more dominant. It’s not that they become solely logical – human beings will always be emotional – but they can learn to use pictures, drawing and language to talk about and understand how they feel. By doing this, their feelings start to work for them, rather than them being at the mercy of the feelings. When your child expresses feelings it can help to order and make sense of them if you put them into words or pictures.
It’s easy to say, ‘You seem happy about that,’ but it can feel harder to acknowledge difficult feelings, or feelings you wish your children did not have. If a child is crying because you’ve said no to ice cream before lunch, acknowledging difficult feelings doesn’t mean you give them ice cream, or that you give up work so they never have to go to the childminder again or give in to whatever it is they are unhappy about. It just means you take their feelings seriously, you take them into consideration when making decisions and you help to soothe the feelings, not by denial or distraction but by acknowledgement, understanding and not running away and distancing yourself from them. It can feel risky at first to acknowledge feelings you would rather they did not have – such as hating their sibling or visiting Granny – but if your child feels seen and understood, it does give them one less thing to protest and cry about.
In his book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, published in January 2019, Dr Tom Boyce talks about how he and his fellow researchers were collecting data to see how the stress of starting school affected children’s immune systems, when the 1989 Californian earthquake happened. At first, the researchers were dismayed because this extra stressor would jeopardize their study, but they decided to capitalize on it by researching the effect of the earthquake on the children’s immune systems. All the children were sent a packet of crayons and some paper and asked to ‘draw the earthquake’. Some children drew happy, cheery pictures of the disaster, while others showed more distress in their drawings and illustrated the dire aspects of the earthquake. Which group of children would you expect stayed the more healthy after the earthquake? The kids that drew happy, optimistic pictures of the earthquake sustained substantially more respiratory illnesses than the ones who depicted fear, fire, fatalities and disaster. Dr Boyce took this to mean that the human trait that stretches back throughout history, of expression through telling stories, through making art, is a way of taking ownership of the things that scare us, because the more we express ourselves about these things, gradually, the less scary they become. We express our sadness, although it may hurt to do so, because each time we express it the sadness, to a greater or lesser extent, diminishes.
In the book Dr Boyce talks about how some children are ultra-sensitive and their environment impacts them a lot. These he calls the Orchids. Other children are naturally more robust, and he calls these the Dandelions. There is no knowing really whether your baby is a Dandelion or an Orchid, but Dandelions benefit from having their feelings listened to as well. It is essential that parents are sensitive to an Orchid’s feelings, and all of us, whether Dandelion or Orchid, benefit from having our feelings seen, validated and understood – even if, in the same circumstances, we would have a different reaction.
The following case study is about an Orchid child called Lucas whose parents, like most families these days, both needed to work. These days, not many families have the luxury of one parent staying at home who is always available for their family, and it can feel unfulfilling to stay at home if that does not suit your temperament. A child will prefer to have happier parents than miserable martyred ones, and so I am not at all saying that one parent must stay at home, what I am saying is allow your children to have their feelings about their world, about any domestic arrangements and not be in denial about them. This is because not only will a child have more capacity for happiness if all their feelings are allowed, not just the convenient ones, but, if Dr Boyce’s interpretation of his 1989 earthquake study are correct, by being able to express how they feel and have those feelings listened to and understood, they’ll also have stronger immune systems. We want our children to be happy so desperately, because we love them so much, we can fall into the trap of our being in denial about how our children are feeling. I am hoping that Dr Boyce’s study and the following story will remind us that this is not the wisest course of action.
Annis and John are warm, kind people, devoted to each other and to their young son, Lucas, aged ten. They both own their own small businesses and have worked extremely hard at building up their reputations and their client bases. They have bought a flat and feel happy that they will have this investment as part of their future security but they continually feel financially insecure.
Lucas started nursery when he was small but never settled. So his parents employed a series of au pairs to look after him. In their financial situation, they didn’t feel they had any other choice but to have childcare. The au pairs would take Lucas to school, collect him and be there for him in the school holidays. In between au pairs, friends and Lucas’s granny would help out. Annis and John made sure they had time together as a family at weekends, and Lucas seemed happy enough. They each always held Lucas in mind by thinking about him and loving and caring for him, and they looked forward to seeing him, although often by the time they got home he was already asleep. If Lucas asked to see more of them, they would promise to take him for a treat at the weekend. Lucas seemed fine.
Yes, Lucas seemed fine, until, aged ten, he attempted to jump out of the window, six storeys up. He was prevented from doing so only because John had forgotten something so returned to the flat and managed to pull him back in. The au pair had been washing up in the kitchen. Now, I know this is alarming to hear, and I must stress that it is unusual for a child in reasonably happy circumstances like Lucas to try to kill themselves.
Lucas’s parents took time off work to be with him because they knew it was an emergency. They had had no idea that Lucas was so distressed. ‘I think,’ John told me, ‘we only saw what we wanted to see.’ John was also unsure about using the anti-depressant drugs their GP was talking about. He had a gut feeling something must be wrong, and numbing Lucas’s feelings with medication didn’t seem right to him. He took Lucas to a private therapist. Sometimes Lucas went to see the therapist alone, sometimes with one or other of his parents. Lucas talked to the therapist about the days he had in the holidays when he was shipped about from friends’ houses to Granny’s and then back home to an au pair. He felt like a nuisance because he heard his parents on the phone trying to organize the care for him, and it seemed so hard for them. On one level, he knew his parents loved him because they told him, but it was hard for him to feel loved. ‘Some days,’ he said, ‘I just feel like Pass the Parcel.’
He also told the therapist how he’d get fond of one au pair, only for them to leave and be replaced by another. Then he felt bad because he began to forget some of them, even though he had really liked them. And that made him feel they must have forgotten him too.
He couldn’t remember when he started to feel sad; he didn’t even know he felt sad. When he’d tried to tell Annis and John about how he was feeling, they had found it hard to listen so they’d tried to distract him or cheer him up, or flat-out contradict him.
As parents, we want more than anything for our children to be happy. So when they aren’t we want to convince them, and ourselves, that they are. This may make us feel better in the short term, but it makes our children feel unheard, unseen and lonely.
John: Before, if Lucas said or showed he wasn’t happy, I’d say something like, ‘Don’t be sad – we’re going to the zoo on Saturday,’ or ‘I’m buying you a new games console.’ Working it through with the therapist, we found out that he experienced that as me telling him off. I’d want to say, ‘I’m not!’, but the therapist would gently stop me, ask me to validate what Lucas was saying.
It felt that if I acknowledged to Lucas that, say, me not being there when he gets back from school makes him sad, I would be making him sadder. That was hard. But because we’d had such a massive wake-up call, we really did have to make changes, so we did what the therapist said.
When Lucas said he felt sad, I learned to ask him what it felt like, or where he felt it, or whether he knew why. When we accepted his feelings, he felt heard rather than pushed away, and that, to my surprise, did make him feel better.
We also learned that it’s not enough to tell Lucas we love him. We need to show him he is our priority. And he is – that’s why we work so hard. We need to show him we love him by being with him properly, not just saying, ‘Night, night,’ on Skype or taking him on weekend treats.
I got a loan so I could spend a month at home with Lucas. We hung out, watched cartoons, went to the therapist. Lucas didn’t talk much but, when he did, I listened. The therapist taught me to listen without having to fix, and I tried to put that in place that month.
Lucas is back at school now. We make sure at least one of us is home by 6 p.m. so he gets a good two hours of being the number-one priority with one of us every evening. We make dinner together, play together or just watch TV together. I’d like to say I never look at my phone during those two hours. I try not to.
Annis has found it all a lot harder. She feels so bad that she hadn’t realized how awful Lucas felt, scared they could have lost him or that he might have badly injured himself.
Parental guilt does not help us or our children; acknowledging our errors and making changes does. As I will keep emphasizing throughout this book, none of us is perfect and we all make mistakes. It is not the mistakes that matter so much, it’s how we put them right. The ruptures that cause problems in our relationships with our children and their mental health are only a problem if they are not repaired. I also want to emphasize what the therapist and Lucas found out was that it was not so much that both his parents went to work that was the problem but that he felt so very alone with how he felt about it. Just like with the children who lived through the earthquake – it was not the earthquake that made some of the children ill, but it was the children who could fully express how they felt about the disaster whose immune systems kept them safer.
I expect Annis’s guilt may have something to do with traditional gender roles, that she felt herself to be more responsible than John for Lucas. Of course, parents are equally responsible for their children, but it is hard to throw off the traditions of generations. That does not mean they should not be thrown off. These things need discussion so different members of a family are not assuming different things.
I hope Annis will be able to feel good in the future because both she and John realized what they’d been doing to contribute to how Lucas felt and they put it right. They both learned how to validate feelings and experiences, and they are great at doing this for Lucas now, as well as for themselves and for each other.
Thank goodness, most children do not attempt suicide. But do not wait for wake-up calls, whether it’s getting into trouble at school, anger issues, self-harm, depression or anxiety, to demonstrate to your child every day that you hold them in mind and that their feelings are to be taken seriously. Encourage them to draw how they feel or say how they feel and then accept those feelings. It is important to show them that what they feel matters.
Words, on their own, only go so far; deeds go further. You cannot delegate love – a certain amount of child-minding, yes, but love, no. Nor can you procrastinate about giving that love: it won’t wait until the weekend; children need it from at least one parent every day. The child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott noticed when watching children play Hide and Seek that ‘It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.’ This is also true in life. We may like some secrets, as adults and as children, but if no one truly sees and meets us as we are, where we are, and when we want it, it can lead to disaster.
When thinking about feelings, keep remembering about rupture and repair. I wish I could say that I never spoke harshly to my child, or that I never put my own feelings before my child’s – of course I did, like my parents had done before me. But the difference between how I was brought up and how my daughter was brought up is that my parents never admitted to being unjustified or wrong. Even when I was an adult child, my parents never apologized if they treated me unfairly or were proved to have been mistaken about something. I knew I did not like this, so I made a conscious decision not to repeat it.
Despite my good intentions, on occasion, I behaved in a way I regretted. When I did, if I caught myself, or realized later on, I would always apologize to my daughter, or change how I thought or went about something. My daughter’s father and I made changes when our behaviour wasn’t helping and we confessed to our daughter when we’d slipped up. I did not know how this would affect her. It was an experiment – creating a new link in the emotional family chain. But I began to find out quite early on.
One afternoon when Flo was about four years old she was eating a piece of cake in the kitchen, and she said, ‘Sorry I was grumpy in the car, Mum, I was hungry. I’m okay now.’ She was saying sorry. She was reflecting on her behaviour and trying to repair a perceived rupture. I was thrilled. I never expected that taking responsibility for my own bad behaviour, not justifying it or blaming someone else, would mean she would learn to do the same.
But, of course, she would. Children, like the rest of us, tend to do as they are done to. Being sensitive to feelings and following rupture with repair is always better than stand-offs, battlegrounds and winning and losing.
Another time I remember being thrilled was the first time my daughter said, ‘I’m going to get angry soon.’ Instead of acting out on her anger, she was putting it into words. I was able to say to her, ‘Yes, it’s really annoying, isn’t it?’ And she learned to carry on talking about how she felt rather than having a tantrum.
Dave, father of Nova, aged four, was frustrated that she seemed to cling on to her routines. He hated how she could get into a full-blown tantrum when she did not get her way, for example if she couldn’t sit in her favourite place in the car. He’d argue with her or cajole her to be more flexible, but they usually ended up just being very cross with each other.
Dave asked me what to do to help Nova learn to be adaptable and I explained the importance of validating feelings. He decided to give it a try:
Some of Nova’s cousins needed a ride, and one, unknowingly, sat in Nova’s usual seat. She started to cry. I’d usually have said either, ‘Don’t make a fuss, just sit somewhere else,’ or asked her cousin to move. But what I did was crouch down so we were on the same level and say softly and gently to her, ‘It’s really hard for you to see Max in your seat. You really want to sit there, don’t you?’ Her crying subsided a bit and she looked back at me. I really felt for her and I felt that she saw it in my face. I told her she’d be able to sit there next time. And I asked, ‘Where do you want to sit now, by the window or on the booster seat in the front?’ To my surprise, she went and fetched the booster seat and strapped herself in and began happily chatting.
Telling Nova off and cajoling her had just been making her more stubborn. When she saw that her dad really did feel sorry for her, she no longer needed to keep clinging to her point. Dave validated Nova’s feelings. Like steering into a skid when you’re driving on ice, if you steer away, the car keeps skidding in the same direction, but if you steer into it, aligning the wheels with the direction of travel, you regain control of the car – and then you can steer out of the skid.
One of the hardest times to acknowledge your child’s feelings is when you feel differently. For example, maybe your seven-year-old child sighs deeply and says, ‘We never go out.’ You may feel like countering, ‘But we went to Legoland just last week!’ or ‘We go out all the time.’ You may feel angry that the effort and expense of taking your child to a theme park seems to have gone unappreciated.
Denying your child’s feelings can start to alienate this person with whom you want a loving, life-long relationship, this person whose happiness you really care about. Changing your reaction might feel counter-intuitive, but all of us feel better when our experience is acknowledged and not argued with, and children are no exception. Realize that your child is only telling you what they feel and use this as an opportunity to connect with them, to talk about their feelings rather than pushing them away.
Denying unhappiness doesn’t make it go away, it just digs it in a layer deeper. Let us go back to our example.
CHILD We never go out.
ADULT You sound bored and fed up.
CHILD Yeah, we’ve been indoors all day.
ADULT That’s true, we have. What would you like to do?
CHILD I’d like to go back to Legoland again.
ADULT That was fun, wasn’t it?
CHILD Yeah.
The child is more likely to feel satisfied with this conversation, and it’s less likely to escalate into an argument. Your child isn’t daft – they know they can’t be in Legoland every day – but they need their parent to know they want to be with them and to feel this with them. It’s about soothing their feelings as they learn the unpleasant lesson that life does not always go their way.
This is true for everyone, child and adult. When we feel bad, we don’t need to be fixed. We want to be felt with rather than dealt with. We want someone else to understand how we feel so we do not feel lonely with that feeling.
My daughter, Flo, now an adult, told me the other day, ‘I feel so ashamed for failing my driving test.’ No one likes to see their child in pain and it’s easy to make the mistake of rushing in to try to fix it. ‘You don’t need to feel ashamed,’ I said, desperately trying to fix her. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I just need a hug.’
We all slip up, like I still do, but if we do feeling-with rather than trying to push the feeling away enough, the child will know what they need and be able to ask for it.
You do not have to wait until your child can talk to validate their feelings and take them seriously. You can do it by reading the situation, how you think the child is feeling, and putting that into words. Even when a child can talk they may not be able to articulate a feeling as well as you can, which is why, in the example above, the child describes how they feel as ‘We never go out’ rather than the reality of ‘I feel restless, cooped up and at a loss to know what to do with myself.’ The parent puts into words the feelings they observe the child having, which resonates with the child and leads to a moment of connection, when they reply, ‘Yeah …’
When they are very small, children may talk of ghosts or monsters under the bed. Rather than paying attention to the story or the reason they give, pay attention to the feeling they are expressing. Instead of dismissing the idea that there are monsters under the bed out of hand, name the feeling the monsters seem to be representing. ‘You sound scared, can you tell me a bit more?’ Or, ‘Let’s make up a story about these monsters. What are their names?’ If you do this, you may be able to vanquish the monsters. Do whatever fits your natural style; it isn’t so much the words we use, it’s staying with our children until they feel soothed rather than dismissing them as silly. For all you know, those monsters may be representing your impatience at bedtime or something else complicated that your child can’t articulate. Even when it’s impossible to trace the source of every feeling, that doesn’t mean the feeling isn’t real. It still needs validating.
And making your child feel silly with a ‘Don’t be silly – you know monsters are made up’ is unlikely to soothe them.
What’s important is to keep the lines of communication open. If you dismiss your child by telling them they’re being silly, they learn not only to clam up on the ‘silly’ communications but also those you wouldn’t consider silly.
The distinction between ‘silly’ and ‘not silly’ is so clear to us we might assume it is to a child as well. But nobody can help feeling what they feel, even if other people would feel differently in the same situation, even if other people think it is silly.
You want to be the person your child can talk to. If you tell them they are being silly to complain when Granny made them a nice lentil stew, they may feel they can’t tell you when the creepy piano teacher puts his hand on their leg. The difference between those two things is loud and clear to us but to a child they are both filed under ‘something icky’. And if some icky things are dismissed as irrelevant by you, your child is likely to feel it is not worth the humiliation of sharing any more of them.
You may think this is an extreme example because Granny’s stew and a piano teacher touching a child’s leg are so very different. But your child has not been in the world as long as you have, has not had all your experience, has not read everything you have read, has not yet understood sexuality. Your child may not have learned to register alarm at being touched inappropriately in the same way as they feel alarmed about eating something they don’t like. To them, both are an assault on their senses. Telling a child they are being silly about anything will close down communications from them to you, and that might be a dangerous thing to do.
If someone asked you what you’d wish for your child, you’d probably reply, ‘I want them to be happy.’ It is no bad thing to want your children to have a capacity for happiness. But do we perhaps have too much invested in the idea of ‘happy’, in a perfect picture of your family having a perfect time, gambolling in the meadow, having a lovely picnic among the wild flowers?
Happiness, like all feelings, comes and goes. In fact, if you were happy all the time, you’d hardly know it because you wouldn’t have other emotional states to compare it to. And for a child to be happy it’s necessary for parents to accept all their moods and all aspects of how they experience their world. It will be no picnic for much of the time.
It isn’t possible to be scolded, or even distracted, into happiness. The more fully you accept and love your child no matter what their experience is and how they feel about it, the more capacity for happiness they will have. This goes for you as well as for your children. We need to accept ourselves and all our moods as well.
I remember one of my parents’ friends asked me, when I was twelve years old, whether I was having a happy childhood. I told him, ‘No, not really, no. I d0 not feel particularly happy much of the time.’ My father overheard this and turned angrily to remonstrate with me. ‘What nonsense,’ he said. ‘You have an idyllic childhood, a very happy childhood. What rubbish.’ And, because he was my father – my beloved, if scary, father – I felt I must have been mistaken. I felt confused, unsure of my own feelings.
Parents tend to take it for granted that what they think would make them happy will make their children happy, but this isn’t necessarily the case – as you have most likely found out. You may feel like a failure if your child seems unhappy and rather than feeling such an uncomfortable feeling, you may, like my father, have tried to scold your children into happiness.
If I knew then what I know now, when my father contradicted me I would have been able to make more sense of what I was feeling, but at the time my brain just went into an unclear, confused fug. It’s the fug I feel when I feel something but someone I look up to tells me I do not have that emotion. And in the fug there was also shame, because I had got something – I was never clear what – wrong, and wrong again.
What my father missed was an opportunity to connect with me, maybe not at that moment but after his guest had gone. He could have asked me what I was feeling and not taken the answer, whatever it may have been, as though it were an attack on him. He could have helped me to articulate it and he could have tried to see the world as I saw it. I’m not saying he had to change his view of the world, but he could have tried to see that my viewpoint too was a valid way of seeing things and of seeing myself.
If you treat your child’s sadness, anger and fears not as negatives to be corrected but as opportunities to learn more about them and to connect with them, then you will deepen your bond with them. Then, there is every likelihood you will increase their capacity for happiness.
If you came home and said to your partner, ‘I had a foul day at work,’ and they replied, ‘It can’t have been that bad,’ you probably wouldn’t feel seen, heard or met by them. You might even feel batted away. If this is the sort of response you habitually get, you might give up confiding in them.
If your partner said instead, ‘Tell me about it,’ and you did, if you told them how unfair your boss had been and how you had to do everything twice because of her carelessness, and if they said, ‘No wonder you feel you had a bad day,’ you might begin to feel a bit better.
If, on the other hand, your partner started their reply with something like, ‘Well, you should …’ and gave you advice, you would probably feel worse. If your partner replied by saying, ‘Look at that cute squirrel out of the window,’ you might well stop talking about work, because what would be the point of going on and saying any more? The squirrel might help you forget you are unhappy, but the feelings, not having been worked through, would return.
Remember this: when your baby, or your child, your adult child or even your partner confides a painful feeling, although it might feel that you are making it worse by acknowledging it, you will in fact be helping them work through their emotions and so making it better.
It may be easy enough to be sympathetic with your child about a bad day at school. But what if you really do not like what they are saying? For example: ‘I don’t like the baby, I want you to take her back to the hospital.’ Then, it is even more important to listen, to try to understand and to validate how they feel. Say, ‘You have really been missing out on time with just you and me lately, no wonder you want the baby to go away,’ or, ‘It’s not fair that all the visitors coo over the baby and seem to not pay enough attention to you.’ Or even, ‘What does it feel like now you are a brother?’ Whatever the answer, accept it. You cannot tell a child that they love their sibling. They are aware of how they feel and they need a safe container for those feelings.
The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips said that the demand that we be happy undermines our lives. Every life involves pain and pleasure and if we try to banish pain and drown it out with pleasure, or otherwise numb it or distract ourselves or someone else from it, then we don’t learn to accept it and modify it.
People often have goals in life and assume attaining these goals will make them ‘happy’. Sometimes they may, but often our assumptions about what will make for a satisfying life are wrong. We can be unconsciously led astray by pictures of smiling, laughing, attractive people amid wonderful architecture, gleaming cars and beautiful objects, and such images condition us to assume, without putting anything into words, that this is what we want. There are no advertisements showing ordinary-looking people working through their demons, learning to accept inevitable pain and finding their spontaneity and joy in that way.
This is a truth that should be universally acknowledged: when you try to block out a ‘negative’ feeling, you remove positive feelings too. As therapist Jerry Hyde says, ‘Emotions don’t have a mixing board – they just have a master volume. You can’t fade out sadness and pain and fade up happiness and joy. You turn one down, they all go down.’
Before our babies and children are exposed to the culture of pleasure through things, they have a better idea of what is satisfying – and that is connection. It’s a feeling of being understood – ‘got’, if you like – by their parents and caregivers and finding sense and meaning in their environment and so feeling connected with it. To be ‘got’, a child needs us to accept all their feelings, their anger, fear, sadness and their joys. We are ill equipped to do this unless we are connected to our own feelings.
When you are wishing for your child’s happiness, despite what the gods of consumerism have drilled into our skulls, this is probably not about having stuff. Nor is it about being the cleverest, the richest, the tallest, or the shiniest, or anything else. It is about the quality of their relationships.
The way we learn to relate to our parents and siblings is habit-forming, a blueprint for all our later relationships. If we get into a groove of having to be right, having to be the best, having to have material things, having to hide how we really feel, not having our thoughts and feelings accepted as they occur, these types of dynamics can put a brake on developing our aptitude for intimacy and our capacity for happiness. But validating our children’s feelings strengthens the bond between us and our child.
Hilary is a single parent who runs a hairdressing business.
Tashi was three when her little brother Natham was born and I did the thing I was told to do, buying her a present from the baby. But she was not fooled by that. ‘A little baby hasn’t got any money and can’t go to the shops,’ she said. At first, she revelled in being told she was a big sister now and proudly told visitors that. But after a while the novelty of having a new baby in the house wore thin for her and she began having more tantrums, refusing to cooperate, started wetting the bed again. All through this, with my mistaken good intentions, I told her she loved being a big sister. But her behaviour just got worse and worse.
One night, I was thinking it over after an exhausting and, to be frank, perfectly horrible bedtime. I thought back to when my own little sister was born and how I’d hated it – and how I’d thought I was a very bad person for hating her. Then, as we got older, I knew I was a very bad person because everyone told me I was when I was horrible to her – but I couldn’t help it. I felt it was me or her. If I’m honest, I can still be irritated by my sister for no particular reason.
I realized that trying to force Tashi into liking Natham was working no better for her than it had for me. I began to feel sorry for her. I decided I’d really try to understand her feelings and articulate them to her and I’d keep doing it for as long as it took to make a connection, because I was feeling so far apart from her.
The next morning, I said, ‘You really hate Natham being here, don’t you?’ She didn’t say anything. And I went on, ‘I remember when your auntie was born, I really hated it too. And just like I have been doing to you, everyone told me I must love it, and I didn’t. I’m sorry, Tashi, that you are having such a hard time of it.’
That day, when she played up, I didn’t tell her off, I just kept it up: ‘You don’t like it when I’ve got to feed the baby instead of playing with you. Sorry, Tashi.’ Whenever she had to share me or wait for something or be inconvenienced, I described how I thought she must feel about it.
Tashi didn’t cheer up immediately but by teatime her behaviour had improved. We felt closer again because I wasn’t fighting her feelings, I was going with them. It was great to get her cooperation back. She even started to help, fetching nappies and passing wipes and telling me when Natham woke up from his nap. That night we had the first dry night since Natham was born.
What I learned is, when a child feels something, no matter how inconvenient, no matter how much I might want to deny it, I need to name the feeling, check with them I’ve got it right and validate how they are feeling. The other day we had to leave the park and Natham, who’s now three, wanted one last go under the fountains after I had just dried him off – which would have meant he’d be soaking wet in the car. My mum tried to persuade him he didn’t want to be wet in the car, but he wasn’t buying it. I stopped her and said to Natham, ‘You really want to get wet again, don’t you? I’m sorry you’re disappointed.’ She was amazed how he accepted this.
I’m also pleased to report that, although there are squabbles between Natham and Tashi, most of the time they either play together or separately without animosity.
Exercise: Feel for someone else
Practising feeling how somebody else feels will make it easier to do when a real situation arises. Think about a person or a group of people who have come to a different conclusion to you about something – say, for example, they vote differently to you. Rather than dismissing them as stupid, think about their circumstances, their hopes, their fears. Put yourself in their shoes and try to understand why they have reached a different decision to you. Feel with them about how they feel.
Empathy is harder work than it may at first seem. It is not about giving up your own point of view but about truly seeing and understanding why the other feels as they do and, most importantly, feeling with them.
Distraction is a tactic favoured by parents to divert children from having whatever experience they may be having. It’s commonly used, but it’s rarely appropriate. That’s because distraction is a trick and, in the long term, being manipulated will not help your child develop a capacity for happiness.
Look into a baby’s eyes and you’ll see nothing but sincerity. I believe our children, whatever their age, deserve nothing less from us. Distraction is not sincere on the part of the parent and it is manipulative. It can also be an insult to a child’s intelligence.
What message does distraction convey? Imagine you fall over and badly graze your knee. How would you feel if your partner, instead of being concerned or interested in the pain or the blood or the embarrassment, pointed out a squirrel or promised that you could play your favourite video game?
I’m not saying there is no place for distraction, but not as a manipulative tactic. If, for example, your child needs to have a medical procedure, it may be a good idea to tell them they will feel it less if, instead of concentrating on the injection, they concentrate on the sensation of your fingers stroking their forehead. In this example, you are not trying to trick them – they know what is going to happen – you’re offering distraction as a comfort.
Your children are liable to treat you in whatever manner you treat them. You would not like it if you asked to discuss their school report with them and they pointed out of the window and said, ‘Look! Squirrel!’
It is also a good idea to tell your child’s nursery teachers and childminders that you would prefer it if your child’s feelings were empathized with rather than something they were distracted from. Distracting a child away from a toy another child is holding to ward off a conflict will not help them to understand, and nor will it help them learn how to negotiate a struggle. Avoiding difficult feelings is not how we learn how to deal with them.
Besides, if your child wants something you do not want them to have, like your car key, say, they need to learn they cannot have it rather than just being temporarily distracted away from it. They need to hear that you don’t like them playing with your key rather than hearing you say something like ‘Ooooh, look at this dolly.’ You can help them with their frustration rather than distracting them from it by saying, ‘You are angry that I can’t let you have the key. I can hear you are furious about it.’ If you stay calm and contain your child’s feelings, this is how they will learn to contain them. It might feel like a longer process than simply distracting them away from the key, but the time invested will help them internalize these skills for themselves.
If you repeatedly distract your child from what they feel or from their experience, you are also unwittingly discouraging them from being able to concentrate. Think of it like this: if your child has hurt themselves, or had their feelings hurt or their wishes denied, if you distract them from what they feel rather than help them work through it, it will discourage them from holding their attention on difficult things. And you do not want your child to be easily distracted from doing a difficult task.
But I believe the worst thing of all about unwanted distraction is that it’s a bar to a good, open and close relationship with your child.
One of the reasons you might be tempted to make light of what a child is going through by distracting them from it or denying their feelings is because you see the situation through your eyes, not theirs.
For example, if you as an adult cannot go to work with your mother, it’s not the end of the world. But for a toddler, it may feel as though it is. We may also be feeling guilty about being the cause of their distress so it may feel more comfortable to deny it.
So, what do you do if one partner goes out to work and your toddler seems inconsolable about it? If you are the parent who’s leaving, leave with confidence. Your child will be more likely to feel secure if you are calm, firm and optimistic. It is important not to sneak out but to take your leave with concern and kindness. If you panic about going, you may become overdramatic, and this won’t help your child. If you ignore their hurt, you are not being the mirror for them you need to be. Acknowledge what they feel; give them a hug and say something in a kind way like, ‘You don’t want me to go to work, and I will be back at teatime.’
If you are the parent or carer left with the child, what you need to do is be with the child where they are emotionally. This means acknowledging what has happened, which may be: ‘You didn’t want Mum to go out. You feel sad.’ If you think about it, it is entirely appropriate that you should be sad when someone you love leaves. You can say when she will be back. ‘Mum will be back by teatime.’ Do not lie about how long someone will be gone. The child will either learn a distorted idea of time or just not believe you on the next occasion.
Be there for the child, be attentive and be mindful about your own discomfort. Be concerned, but do not overreact. Stay calm and do not leave the child alone to cry. Do not distract the child or ‘shush’ them or tell them they aren’t feeling what they are. Keep on listening, offer a hug if it is wanted. After a while the child may find an activity or you may suggest one, but not while they are deep in their distress. Remember how it might feel if you were missing someone you love so much you feel you cannot survive without them and another person comes along and pushes your deep, heartfelt feelings aside rather than respecting them. Once you have expressed yourself, when you are becoming resigned to the situation you will become more open to a suggested activity. That’s very different to someone ordering you to look at Action Man doing a funny dance while you are in the middle of your distress.
Exercise: Think about distraction
Think about occasions when you have felt upset. How much time did you need to put your feelings into words, to try to make sense of them and get used to them, before you were ready to distract yourself by watching a film or reading a book? Just because the things we and our children get upset about are different, it does not mean their feelings are any less intense or real than ours.
A baby can’t help but be their feelings. In time, a child can learn to observe their feelings as a way of containing them – but they cannot learn to do this alone. They need someone to accept and hold all their feelings as they grow up.
In our great need of wanting our children to be happy, sometimes we push them away when they are angry or sad. But for good mental health, children need to have their feelings accepted and to learn acceptable ways of expressing all their feelings – and the same is true for us adults. So, it is important to accept our own feelings rather than denying them, and essential to accept our children with whatever they may be feeling too. By helping a child put their feelings into words (or pictures) we help them to process them as well as to find acceptable ways for them to communicate what they feel.