Emotional Development
When dealing with yourself, use your head.
When dealing with others, use your heart.
Light a fire by warming a heart. You warm a child’s heart by meeting his or her emotional needs.
The capacity to trust is the most important gift that parents can give their children. The ability to depend on another for one’s need is essential for conducting intimate relationships — both human and divine. Without trust, vulnerability and interdependency are impossible.
Children develop an ability to trust when they grow up in warm, stable, loving environments where it is safe to be honest and exposed, and where emotional needs are met.
A child has seven emotional needs. These needs form the acrostic PARENTS. They are:
Protection, Acceptance, Recognition, Enforced Limits, Nearness, Time, and Support.
5.1 Protection
Your children need a safe and well-protected home to grow up in. They need a place where they can rest and be cared for. Children who feel safe are free to let down their defences and let their parents take care of them. They view trust as a positive experience and an effective way of meeting their needs. Children feel safe in environments where the relationships that they depend upon are stable and predictable. A safe home protects children from each other. In well-protected homes, ridicule, sarcasm, and name-calling are absent.
5.2 Acceptance
Children crave acceptance. They crave it from their peers, from their teachers and coaches, and, most importantly, they crave it from you, their parents. Children need to know that despite their natural limitations, physical imperfections and poor performance, they are still worthy of your love.
Our response to our children’s needs is the primary source of their self-perception. We are the first mirror into which our children will gaze. If our children don’t perceive our acceptance, they are likely to internalise a belief that they are unacceptable. When older children do not find acceptance that they need at home, they will seek it elsewhere. Children who suffer from an empty emotional tank will often turn to their peers to fill it.
5.3 Recognition
A teenager explained why he was vandalising: “Since I can’t please my father by doing right, I might as well do wrong!” It crushes a child to feel like a failure in his parent’s eyes. Your children have an intense desire to please you. They need to hear you say, “I’m proud of you! Good job! I respect you.” They need to feel your approval.
When we only see our children doing wrong instead of doing right, we embitter them and discourage them for trying to please us. It’s time we caught our children doing something right for a change. Here are practical suggestions that show you how to praise your children:
(i) Look for the specific good in what your child says and does;
(ii) Be genuine, be enthusiastic and sincere in your praise;
(iii) Put a ban on ‘dissing’ and put-downs. Make your home rejection-free environment;
(iv) Focus on character and attitude. These can be spotlighted by observing acts of kindness and responsibility and applauding attitudes of thankfulness and cooperation.
5.4 Enforced limits
Some parents feel that they will lose their children’s love if they stand up to them and enforce the rules of their homes. But without rules and limits, a child feels insecure. Firm guidance and boundaries demonstrate our willingness to help our children find the control that they seek. Discipline is training for the future; punishment is dealing with the past. Without loving discipline, children feel a lack of protection and care.
Choose the right way to encourage your children. Dictators engender fear. Nursemaids tend to coddle. Coaches inspire trust and devotion. Good coaches insist on complete co-operation but do not shame or humiliate their players.
Once our children know our expectations, they need to know that we intend to enforce them. Make sure that consequences fit the crime. Don’t be too hard or too soft. Children need moms and dads who are in charge. They feel safe when caring parents exercise their authority and hold them accountable for their actions.
5.5 Nearness
There is probably no more powerful way to assure a child that he is loved and safe than to hold him in your arms. Your touch (one of the five love languages) provides protection, comfort, warmth and nourishment to his soul. In the absence of touch, children show slower physiological and psychological development, especially among infants.
The following suggestions are offered for meeting your children’s need for nearness:
Make it a point to hug your spouse and children every morning. Have an open-arm policy with your children: whenever they come near, open your arms. Wrestle with your children. If you’re too tired to wrestle, find an alternative such as thumb wrestling or “paper, rock, scissors”. When they are feeling discouraged, sit down on the couch with your children, put your arms around them, and just hold them gently. No great words of wisdom are needed. Kiss and hug your children before bed each night.
5.6 Time
The child who does not feel that he or she is the centre of his or her parents’ attention and their main priority in life will struggle over time with feelings of abandonment and rejection.
More than your time, children need your involvement. Just being in the same room with our children — chopping carrots in the kitchen, reading a newspaper in the living room, or watching TV — does not always register as love. Our children are looking for an emotional connection with us. They need our attention as well as well as our attendance.
Do children need quality time or quantity time? Children need time — both quality and quantity time. Good relationships require focused attention (quality) and lots of it (quantity). Children need parents to spend special times centred on their children’s interest and concerns, and they need parents who are available.
Here are ways to manage our schedules that maximise time with our family:
Work Hours. Try to rearrange your work schedule in order to spend more time with your kids.
Dinner Time. Having dinner as a family ensures a regular time for sharing and interaction.
Holidays. You can’t afford not to go. Even a short get-away weekend provides an opportunity to get to know one another better.
Television. Turn the TV off and reconnect with your kids.
Find a common recreational interest. Bike riding, hiking, playing cards, board-games such as chess or snakes and ladders, or swimming can bring families together.
Dates. Schedule a date once a month with each of your children. With careful planning, resourcefulness, and commitment, even the busiest parents can make time for their children.
5.7 Support
Children will gravitate towards walls, trees or anything else that can be climbed. Things that are hard, sharp and high enough from which to fall and break an arm must be climbed. Our first reaction is: “Get down from there; you’ll fall!” “Do I let him go or hold him back?” Raw parental instinct says, “Hold him back. Don’t let him go”; but wisdom says, “If you don’t let him go, he may never learn to climb.”
If our children are to ascend to their callings, they will need the freedom to fall — but not too far. They will need guidance, protection and encouragement to step safely out into their callings. Like toddlers learning to walk, they need us to hold their hands as we let them go. This need for support is especially acute when our children enter their late teens. [1]
I also include the following two important emotional needs as well.
5.8 Laughter
If I were starting my family again, I would laugh more. I see now that I was much too serious. Although my children loved to laugh, often I must have conveyed the idea that being a parent was painful.
I remember when I laughed with my children — at humorous plays that they put on for the family, at the funny stories shared from school, at the times when I fell for their tricks and catch questions. I recall squeals of delight when I laughed with them and shared in their stunts on the lawn or living-room floor. And I remember the times that they told of these experiences with joyful expressions, years later. When I laughed with my children, our love was enlarged and the door was open for doing many other things together.
5.9 Self-Esteem
“Self-esteem is how you feel about yourself. Self-worth is what you are born with.” [2]
In psychology, self-esteem reflects a person's overall evaluation or appraisal of his or her own worth.
Self-esteem encompasses beliefs (for example, "I am competent/incompetent") and emotions (for example, triumph/despair, pride/shame). Behavior may reflect self-esteem (for example, assertiveness/shyness, confidence/caution).
Psychologists usually regard self-esteem as an enduring personality characteristic (trait self-esteem), though normal, short-term variations (state self-esteem) occur.
Self-esteem can apply specifically to a particular dimension (for example, "I believe I am a good writer, and feel proud of that in particular") or have global extent (for example, "I believe I am a good person, and feel proud of myself in general"). (Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-esteem )
How do you feel about yourself in a specific area of your life— good or bad? How you feel about yourself is self-esteem: your perception of how you are doing in the world. Self-esteem may go up or down, depending on what is happening to you. Get an “A” on a test and you feel great, but if you fail, you feel terrible. Self-esteem is changeable.
Self-worth differs from self-esteem. Self-worth is what you are born with. As one of the creations of the universe, you are worthwhile and have value that cannot be taken from you. You can’t lose it, though you can lose sight of it, by forgetting your value.
Self-image is the internal, mental and emotional picture that we have of ourselves. It is the way we see ourselves from the inside. A simple definition of a person's self image is their answer to this question - "What do you believe people think about you?" (Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_image )
From conception, we are being imprinted with good and bad messages that we receive in relation to others. We assimilate and interpret information from others’ opinions of us. Their external words and actions become the internal guides that help us to evaluate ourselves on three important levels:
· Appearance (How do I look? Beautiful? Handsome?);
· Performance (How am I doing? What mark did I score?);
· Importance (How important am I to you?).
Strategies for building self-esteem include conveying respect as well as love; instilling positive self-attitudes early; helping your child compensate for weaknesses by working on strengths; preparing your child to compete in a competitive world; and shaping the will without breaking the spirit.