Tough love. It’s a strategy a lot of parents implement in order to raise kids with resilience and determination. But, is telling your kids to “suck it up” really the best way to instil those values in kids? According to a handful of child psychologists, no.
Recently a curious mother and writer for Slate interviewed experts in the field in order to find out the efficacy (if any) of utilising tough love as a parent.
What Moyer found was a unanimous agreement among these experts. She writes, “all [interviewees] agreed that, as much as it’s a bad idea to constantly hover over your kids, it may also be dangerous to act too aloof; parenting is not something that should be polarised.”
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Tovah Klein, director of the Barnard Center for Toddler Development and author of How Toddlers Thrive, told Moyer that the concept of a parent “either loving and caring, or hands-off and letting kids fend for themselves, doesn’t make sense.”
Klein suggests a more balanced approach wherein a parent caters to both sides of the spectrum. He suggests a strategy that displays a mentality of “I’m here for you, but I also trust that you can do this.”
In accordance with Moyer’s findings, Scary Mommy also reported a study on the effects of tough love. In this study, which analysed pre-school aged children, “researchers determined when parents reacted harshly to their child’s negative emotions, those children tended to have more meltdowns and intense emotional reactions to things. They concluded kids whose parents didn’t comfort them when they were upset found it, ‘relatively difficult to behave in a socially competent manner.’”
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Furthermore, an additional study from 2015 found that men around the age of 18-22 who were “punished as kids by their mums when they got overly upset had more anger management issues than men whose mums had been supportive when they were younger.”
“Children need to practice expressing emotions and learn to deal with them. That leads to resilience. The golden rule is that emotions are never the enemy, even when they are exaggerated,” claims Ashley Soderlund, a North Carolina–based developmental psychologist.
Clearly using the concept of “tough love” doesn’t lead to effective parenting, but neither does being overly caring. That is unless you’re constantly comforting your kid as part of a two-step process.
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In Moyer’s article in Slate she writes, “Once you’ve acknowledged your child’s emotions, you can suggest ways for him to calm himself down and move on.”
In summation, telling your kids to “suck it up” won’t do anything but cause emotional turmoil to your kids. The best way to teach kids to be resilient and tough is to embrace their emotions and how to efficiently manage them.
[H/T] Yahoo
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