interaction. This finding shows us the powerful impact a single negative interaction can have on a relationship, and how much positive interaction is required to balance it out.
Consider for a moment your relationship with your child. For a day or two, keep track of the interactions you share, and create an honest accounting of net positive and net negative interactions. If you find (as most parents I have coached through this exercise have) that you are nowhere near that ratio, create more positive interactions with your child. Talk about interests, common or otherwise. Focus on something other than the homework she is supposed to be doing, or the dishwasher that needs emptying, or the attitude she’s been showing lately. Because this research is powerful and holds true. If you lack abundant positive interaction with your child, your influence in her life will be greatly diminished, increasing your frustration with parenting and driving a deeper wedge between you both emotionally.
This is among the most important exercises you can engage in as a parent.
Okay, this might sound harsh, but it’s important. To your child, your fear and judgment may look like disdain. She cannot bear the burden of your disdain.
Expectations, yes.
Disdain?
Well, that just may break her.
I bring the potential for parental disdain up for a reason. I see it, frequently. In therapy sessions, it is painfully clear and obvious when a parent is so baffled and upset by a child’s shifting behavior and affect that they express disdain. I find that, upon a moment’s inspection, that disdain is virtually always a reflection of fear and frustration on the part of the parent. Fear that we may be doing it all wrong, that we may not have any agency over our precious child. Frustration that they will not remain with the program, fall in line, and be better.
But this is a delicate issue, because what feels like fear and frustration to us falls like disdain on the senses of far too many of our children. And I can tell you, with an insider’s perspective, that most children carry a rather persistent thought that they may not be good enough on their own. Piling a sense that you hold disdain for them on top of that is often more than a child can bear. This produces many of the symptoms of anxiety, depression, and other emotional suffering I see in practice.
So please be very aware of showing disdain for your child. Now more than ever, it is critical to parse the difference between character and behavior. That is, your child may, and likely will, exhibit behavior of which you disapprove, and you can speak your mind on that.
But it is far more important that your child hears from you, and sees in the way you present to her, that she is fundamentally good, and good enough, regardless of what she may be doing in the moment.
So, at the very least, your children need your empathy. They need to know that you are available to them, free of fear and judgment and ego. They need to know that you see them and that you feel them. And in order to feel them, to truly experience empathy for your children, it is incumbent upon you to show that you understand them, that you are willing to step into their worlds.
This precept is one of those ideals that seem simple, but believe me, it can be very, very difficult. Because your child may very well be experiencing the very darkest of feelings and emotions, even if she offers a palatable and pleasant face to the rest of the world. I bear witness to this jarring paradox many times a week. Clinically, this mismatch between expressed and felt emotion can be a dangerous, even lethal emotional brew. For now, it is far more difficult to tell, on the face of things, whether your child is “okay” than it used to be. I have preached in the past that simply asking suffices and lets your child know you are available and in their corner.
But at eight, nine, ten, or eleven years old or older, we cannot expect our children to possess the insight to know whether they are “okay,” or even what “okay” looks and feels like. For the emotional dissonance they are experiencing may be the only state of being they have ever consciously known, and the “okay” label carries no more meaning than any other would.
So, we need to find empathy, with some degree of urgency. To do so, we need to be willing to hear the worst from our kids. And, in my experience, the darkest thoughts imaginable often haunt their young minds. For instance, in the past few years, I have heard the following from children as young as eight or nine:
“I hate the way I look.”
“I hate who I am.”
“I am a toxic person.”
“Everyone would be far better off without me.”
By far the most common negative sentiment I hear, on a very regular basis, goes something like this:
“I am not going to kill myself, but if I do not wake up tomorrow morning, that’s fine by me. In fact, that would be ideal.”
I had rarely heard this passive suicidality until about five years ago, but now it feels ubiquitous among young people. When I press them on it, I find that this is not a wish to die, but for internal suffering to end. It is critical to note that the management of their own internal anxieties and shifting emotions has become a primary task for children and is inextricably tied to identity development. This is a new challenge for our kids, one we need to be available to take on with them.
For children today hold themselves to impossibly high standards, the fallout being an almost inevitable feeling of not being good enough. For one, they consistently feel as if they must possess clarity of purpose, life purpose, sometimes before puberty even fully settles in. In their minds, they are failing and feel quite lost, if they fail to attain this. More on this as we move forward.
For now, please keep this parental mandate, this mandate free of disdain, fear, judgment, and ego, in mind as we begin to tackle the individual issues you will be facing as parents one by one.
I was talking with a brilliant fifteen-year-old girl, Katie, the other day about the changing nature of identity in her generation. She laughed when I asked her how she felt she and her peers defined “identity,” because it suggests we have only one.
“You must mean identities, Dr. Duffy!”
Katie used herself as an example in explaining what she meant. There was the identity she presented to friends. This comprised thoughtfulness, being fun and funny, and availability to help with any of their problems, among other things. She then talked about the identity she presented to her parents and family, one in which she was obedient and studious and upbeat and more interested in school than in social media and boys. She followed that up with her identity on social media, the über-popular, cute, clever, effortlessly awesome party girl with thousands of likes, literally.
Katie mentioned other identities she feels she needs to maintain as well. She has a different identity with boys than with girls. She feels she needs to act differently when in the company of different cliques, whether she feels she is a part of these groups or not. She needs to be pert and perfect with the popular kids, dark and pensive with her emo friends, and driven and strong on her soccer team. She carries different identities and presentations for teachers, coaches, and her boss.
Finally, Katie talked about who she really felt she was, deep down inside. She suggested this identity scared her the most, because it was real and not constructed. She had no control over the “real”
