Children who feel they cannot engage their parents emotionally often try to strengthen their connection by playing whatever roles they believe their parents want them to. Although this may win them some fleeting approval, it doesn’t yield genuine emotional closeness. Emotionally disconnected parents don’t suddenly develop a capacity for empathy just because a child does something to please them.
People who lacked emotional engagement in childhood, men and women alike, often can’t believe that someone would want to have a relationship with them just because of who they are. They believe that if they want closeness, they must play a role that always puts the other person first.
— Lindsay C. Gibbon, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents (2015)
when i was really little, my babysitter only spoke spanish with me so i became bilingual but i never knew when i was speaking spanish or english. one time i told my mom i wanted an avocado & she understood but then when i said the same thing to my babysitter later that day, she burst into tears with laughter because i was saying “quiero abogado” which means “i want a lawyer.”
imagine a two year old repeatedly saying “i want a lawyer!” as an adult laughs at her.
Reminding me of also funny story: So my piano teacher of many years when I was a kid had a baby when I was in my teens. This little girl was super bright, and also bilingual in Mandarin and English from her first word.
I do not speak Mandarin. At all.
One day as I’m waiting for my mom to pick me up after the lesson, Baby Girl is playing in the kitchen and hears me sneeze! And she runs over and says, “You need [incomprehensible]?”
Now here’s the thing: I knew she was not speaking Mandarin. I don’t speak it, but my aunt and uncle both do, and a close family friend’s family growing up would code-switch quite comfortably around us. I was old enough and it was sufficiently different from English that because there was no formal teaching, I never derived anything from it? But I was very familiar with how it sounds to an uncomprehending ear.
What she said did not sound like Mandarin at all. It sounded like gibberish. Like English baby gibberish.
As I clearly didn’t understand, Baby Girl repeats, “You need [gibberish]!” and then, when I still don’t understand, she stamps her foot and makes Angry Noise at me, which attracts her mother’s attention.
Bewildered, I relate what’s going on. Her mother covers her face and says, “She wants to know if you want a kleenex.”
And then my piano teacher explained that Baby Girl had figured out that some people didn’t speak English and some people didn’t speak Mandarin and she needed to confine herself to one language around them.
But sometimes, as is very natural especially for quite young children, she’d run up against realizing she didn’t know the word for something – and sometimes she knew the word in one language, but not in the other!
And it seemed intuitive to her that the way to fix this was to say the word from the other language … with the right accent.
So what she’d been doing was taking the word for “tissue” or “kleenex” in Mandarin and saying it like an Anglophone would: no tone-change and different vowel shapes and all. And it made Baby Girl VERY FRUSTRATED when this did not solve the problem, and at that point she seemed to believe that the adults around her were being stupid on purpose.
i’m sitting at a starbucks in barnes n noble and there’s a small family w a little baby and the baby went “SCREEEEEEEEEgdblbghlb” and the dad goes “HEY! what does that even mean”
Teaching kindergarten is like being an ambassador to beings from another planet and teaching them how to assimilate to our culture.
“No, we do not LICK water fountains. Perhaps that is acceptable on your planet, but here on earth we prefer to DRINK from water fountains.”
“Physics might be a little different on your planet, but here when you throw things they typically fall and break.”
“Grabbing people and shaking them violently is not considered a proper greeting on this planet.”
I was having this conversation with some friends the other day about how smart a
toddler can be, while also being dumber than a bag of birds. Momo seems
to grasp things intuitively, as all toddlers do. I mean, no one ever
tells a toddler that the sounds coming out of our mouths mean things;
they just independently invent the whole field of linguistics
themselves. They are so smart, and often in ways that we’ve forgotten
how to be smart: by trusting their experiences and constantly shifting
their worldview to compensate.
I don’t give much truck to any argument that hinges on something
being wrong because of that old refrain, “how am I supposed to explain
that to my children??” I mean… the same way you explain other concepts
to them… or, not at all, and they’ll figure it out. It’s when we get all
our adult baggage into the conversation that it obfuscates the truth
that they understand intuitively.
And then, of course… there are the times they’re dumber than a bag of birds.
Parents’ beliefs about whether failure is a good or a bad thing guide
how their children think about their own intelligence, according to new
research from Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
The research indicates that it’s parents’ responses to failure, and not
their beliefs about intelligence, that are ultimately absorbed by their
kids.
“Mindsets—children’s belief about whether their intelligence is just
fixed or can grow—can have a large impact on their achievement and
motivation,” explains psychological scientist Kyla Haimovitz of Stanford
University, first author on the study. “Our findings show that parents
can endorse a growth mindset, but they might not pass it on to their
children unless they have a positive and constructive reaction to their
children’s struggles.”
Despite considerable research on mindsets, scientists have found
little evidence to suggest that intelligence mindsets are handed down to
children from their parents and teachers. Haimovitz and psychology
researcher Carol Dweck, a pioneer in mindset research, hypothesized that
parents’ intelligence mindsets might not transfer to their kids because
they aren’t readily observable. What kids might see and be sensitive
to, the researchers speculated, is their how parents feel about failure.
Haimovitz and Dweck surmised that parents convey their views about
whether failure is positive or negative through their responses to their
children’s setbacks. For example, parents who typically show anxiety
and concern when their kids come home with a poor quiz grade may convey
the belief that intelligence is mostly fixed. Parents who focus instead
on learning from the poor grade signal to their kids that intelligence
can be built through learning and improvement.
In one study, the researchers asked 73 parent-child pairs to answer a
series of questions designed to tap into their individual mindsets. The
parents rated their agreement with six statements related to failure
(e.g., “Experiencing failure facilitates learning and growth”) and four
statements related to intelligence (e.g., “You can learn new things but
you can’t really change how intelligent you are”). The children, all
4th- and 5th-grade students, responded to similar statements about
intelligence.
As expected, there was no association between parents’ beliefs about
intelligence and their children’s beliefs about intelligence.
However, parents’ attitudes toward failure were linked with
how their kids thought about intelligence. Parents who tended to view
failure as a negative, harmful event had children who were more likely
to believe that intelligence is fixed. And the more negative parents’
attitudes were, the more likely their children were to see them as being
concerned with performance as opposed to learning.
And the researchers found that parents’ beliefs about failure seemed
to translate into their reactions to failure. Results from two online
studies with a total of almost 300 participants showed that parents who
adopted a more negative stance toward failure were more likely to react
to their child’s hypothetical failing grade with concerns about their
child’s lack of ability. At the same time, these parents were less
likely to show support for the child’s learning and improvement. Their
reactions to the failing grade were not linked, however, with their
beliefs about intelligence.
Most importantly, additional data indicated that children were very much attuned to their parents’ feelings about failure.
“It is important for parents, educators, and coaches to know that the
growth mindset that sits in their heads may not get through to children
unless they use learning-focused practices, like discussing what their
children could learn from a failure and how they might improve in the
future,” says Haimovitz.
According to Haimovitz and Dweck, these findings could be harnessed
to develop interventions that teach parents about the potential upsides
of failure, showing parents how they can respond to their children’s
setbacks in ways that are motivating rather than discouraging.
This is such an important thing to teach kids. For the last two years of high school and the first three years of college, I believed 100% that when I got a bad grade it was because I wasn’t smart enough to learn the subject material. Analyzing failures and trying new learning strategies until you improve is a life skill. One of my top five goals as a future parent is to teach this.
“It ran away.”
No. That’s not fair.
It’s dead. It’s not coming back. Don’t do that to a child. Death is really important to understand.
YES they might be heartbroken over it but you need explain the truth to them as best you can depending on their age. It will help them understand loss.
I learned about death from an early age watching lions rip apart buffalo on animal planet. That bitch is DEAD. lol.
When my cheap ass fish would die, they where dead. They went up to “fishy heaven”. When one of my cats died, it was dead. It went to “kitty heaven”. My mom used to read me a book about how things that die go to heaven. I was sad but my tiny, imaginative child brain could grasp the concept of my animals going to a “happier” place because they were sick.
I just don’t see why or how lying is better other than to protect their little feelings. No one wants to see their child sad but like I said before, I think it’s important to understand loss. Kids get hurt, it happens, it prepares them for adult life.
I’m no parenting expert and I know there are plenty of reasons I wouldn’t understand as to why people think lying would be better. This is all just a pet peeve of mine.
Okay so I’m a mortician-in-training and, right now, I’m taking the required thanatology class which is all about death, dying and bereavement. Our most recent readings were all about children and how to help them make sense of the loss and separation of a loved one. Apparently, most adults seem to think children don’t grieve but they do. Children essentially have seven stages of grief: shock, alarm, disbelief, yearning, searching, disorganization, and resolution. Their grief is harder to understand and assess because they have neither the vocabulary nor life experience to easily express their feelings and needs. A child’s belief structure and how they respond to death is determined by their age/developmental level, the manner of the death, and their relationship with the deceased.
Birth – 2 yrs: only non-specific distress reactions
2-5 yrs: don’t understand the permanence of death; concerned about physical well-being of deceased; not capable of cognitive reciprocity; may want to see and touch deceased’ repeatedly asks same questions about deceased; may act as if death never happened or in a regressive manner; may experience guilt (like, if they once said something like “I wish so-and-so would go away forever, they might think they caused the death)
6-9 yrs: more complex understanding; realize death is irreversible and that its universal; find it difficult to believe that death will happen to them (believe it happens only to older people); death can be personified and this allows them to run and hide from it; tendency to engage in “magical thinking” (don’t let them do this, its as bad as you lying to them; keep them grounded in the reality of the death), have strong feelings of loss but have extreme difficulty expressing it; often need permission to grieve
9-12 yrs: have cognitive understand to comprehend death is a final event; can understand and accept a mature, realistic explanation of death; short attention spans (they could be sad and grieving one moment and laughing joyfully the next, and someone could see that and negatively comment on it. Like, “how can so-and-so be acting like that?” This can intensify their already fluctuating emotions and present feelings of guilt and low self-worth); their vocabulary is advanced enough to express their feelings but they may not want to talk about what’s bothering them (they’ll let it build up and manifest in behavioral problems); interest in the physical aspect of death and what happens after; may imitate decreased’s mannerisms
13-18 yrs: understand the meaning of death; realize its irreversible and happens to everyone; normal puberty will intensify grief by adding to already conflicting emotions; often put in position of being the protector, comforter, caregiver (feel they must comfort others t their wen emotions are suppressed; they’ll look find on the outside but be falling apart inside); experience conflicting feelings about death (try to overcome fears by confirming control of their mortality; risk taking behavior); males are more likely to express grief in aggressive behaviors while females need comfort, to be held and reassured
There’s basically 10 rules:
Tell them ASAP: its important to start with what they know about death and then expand on that; be gentle and trustful; tell them in a comfortable, safe and familiar place and make sure its in language they’ll understand; never assume they understand the way you do
Be truthful: kids can sense dishonesty ok?! So don’t create lies to protect them; don’t make up stories that’ll have to be changed later on cause that only confuses them and promotes emotional instability; don’t withhold information either (within reason, see #3), place emphasis on the facts, and avoid euphemisms (i.e., “passed away”, “departed”, “went away”, “got sick” (they’ll associate illness and death go hand-in-hand and may think a common cold will kill them), etc)
Share only details they’re ready to hear: truthfulness should be balanced with their readiness for details (like, tell them someone died in a horrible auto accident but maybe not say they were decapitated and their head flew off down the highway in the process); children with actualize a crisis like an adult; its not uncommon for them to ask about a death later in life and that provides the opportunity to deliver info that wasn’t previously shared (i.e., the decapitation)
Encourage expression of feelings: a child will experience stages of grief very similar to those of adults (adults typically follow the Kubler-Ross 5 stages while kids have 7, seen above) and they rely on adults for permission to “feel” loss; best way is for them to learn is to hear and watch adults because they get their understanding of grief through their senses; its not unusual for them to go up to people and just make a statement like “My dad died” cause they want to see how that person will react and give them a clue as to how they should react, so its important for adults to “feel” their grief in the presence of the child; explain why you’re sad and reassure them that its okay for them to feel sad and cry and that its okay if they aren’t
Take child to the funeral: seeing is believing; they should be given the option to view the body but don’t force them; a funeral can be a positive experience but their level of involvement in the funeral process should be their individual decision; give them the choice as to the extent of their involvement
Take child to the cemetery: it can be comforting to them to know where the body is buried and how it got there; it can also help them direct their grief at an appropriate object (this lessens emotional disorganization), and it lessens the child’s chances of denying or avoiding the death
Let them tell others about death: adults “talking over” kids creates anxiety; when the child can explain it to another person, in their own words, they feel more in control and have a greater understanding; let them speak!
Encourage talk of the loss: this allows feelings to be expressed and incorrect ideas about any aspect of the loss to be corrected
Be available to answer questions: you need to answer each question as sincerely and accurately as possible; understand that some can’t be answered but simply being available is important; and be patient cause they will ask the same question repeatedly
Never tell them how they should or shouldn’t feel: you don’t like it when people do it to you, so don’t do it to kids; they should be encouraged to express any feeling and they should feel accepted for it; being told “not to feel” a certain way leads to emotionally “playing dead” and that’ll create repression, which creates interpersonal conflicts in later life due to inability to communicate emotions
This was a super interesting read.
ALSO IMPORTANT:
regardless of your religious beliefs (especially if they’re strong and pervasive to your day-to-day life,) be careful and deliberate when you portray death as ‘part of god’s plan’ and meaning someone is in ‘heaven’. it can lead children to suppress their grief reaction because if an all-powerful god decided their little sister should die and she is now in heaven, they’re not allowed to be sad or angry about it. they’ll still be sad and angry about it, but they might not talk about it or even admit that they are.
