Respect Your Child's Feelings
By Maureen Turner - Valley Kids Magazine
Paul Franz Photo
All children's fears are valid and worth hearing, Getoff has learned.
Not long ago, Sarah Getoff's 3-year-old daughter developed an inexplicable but very real fear of the backyard barbecue.
"I'd say, 'Oh, honey, don't be afraid of the barbecue. The barbecue's not going to hurt you,'" Getoff recalled recently. "And I'd bring her over to the barbecue and try to show her there was nothing to be afraid of."
Then one day Getoff was struck by the unintentional consequences her response could have. "I realized [I was] telling her, 'Don't feel what you're feeling.' I started to think about the long-term implications of 'Don't feel afraid when you feel afraid.' If I damp down that feeling of trusting her own fear, what happens when she's 9, and she's walking home from the school down the street, and some guy pulls up in a car and says, 'I lost my puppy—will you come in my car and help me find my puppy?' … I thought, oh, my god, I need to start teaching her right now to trust her inner voice when she's afraid.
"And so I changed my approach dramatically. The next time she said, 'I'm afraid of the barbecue,' I said, 'Honey, let's get away from the barbecue right now.' And I took her hand, and we got away from the barbecue. And I said to her, 'I'm so glad you told me you're afraid of the barbecue. Anytime you're afraid, I hope you'll come and tell me about it, and I'll help you.'"
Getoff, who told the story at a parenting talk she gave earlier this winter, is a Northampton-based psychotherapist who specializes in couples and parenting issues as well as a consultant who works with educators and parents. She laughed when she recalled the confidence she felt when she first became a mom: "I'm a therapist; I deal with feelings. I thought, 'Oh, my child is going to be able to have her feelings. I'm going to be good at this one.'"
But as Getoff's experience with her daughter shows, it's not always easy for even the most thoughtful parent to come up with the right response to the endless challenges that arise in the daily course of raising kids. In her work—including individual therapy, workshops and free talks she offers at libraries and other community sites—she tries to help parents find alternatives to the fallback position of rewards and time-outs. Instead, she urges parents to try an approach that, at its base, shows respect for the child as an individual, someone whose thoughts and feelings—even the ones that make parents grit their teeth—are valid and worth hearing.
"My philosophy is really very simple," Getoff said, "and I think it's also really complex when we start thinking about what it means: When children feel right, they act right."
Paul Franz photo
Getoff spends a few moments playing with her daughter.
For a child to feel right, Getoff continued, he needs to be able to identify and express his emotions; the adults in his life, in turn, need to really listen to those emotions without scolding or judging, dismissing or denying them. That's not easy, Getoff noted, pointing to her own unconscious resistance to letting her daughter express her fear.
For many parents, the taboo emotion might be anger. "[A child] might be feeling hateful: 'I hate you. I hate my brother. I hate my teacher. I hate this pork chop,'" Getoff said. Resist the urge to launch into a lecture about respecting your teacher or loving your brother, she advises; instead, employ the time-honored therapy strategy of "mirroring," simply repeating back what your child says.
"'Oh, you hate your brother right now'—I'll add in the 'right now,'" she said. "I think it's very important to make room for whatever the child is feeling."
Mirroring, she added, "is not agreeing, not disagreeing, not analyzing, not problem-solving, not criticizing"; it's simply letting your kid know you hear him.
The next step: validating. "'I can see why you feel that way. I'd probably feel that way in that situation, too.'… It's simply saying, 'I get how you feel, and it makes sense you feel that way.'"
That can be hard for parents, especially when they're the target of a kid's less-than-loving expressions, or when they're conscious of the judging eyes of the other parents on the playground. But when an adult invalidates a child's feelings—"You're overreacting." "That's not a nice thing to say." "You don't hate your brother; you love him."—those feelings don't disappear, Getoff noted. They either explode outward, in violence or other misbehavior, or they get swallowed, where they can trigger stress, depression, self-doubt.
"They start to believe: 'There's something wrong with me, because here I'm having this experience and nobody seems to get it,'" Getoff said. "And that's what shame is: that feeling of 'I'm bad and wrong.'"
Which does not mean allowing a kid to express his emotions about his little brother with a bonk on the head. Sometimes at workshops a participant might tell Getoff her approach is too soft. But, she makes clear, while a kid's feelings should never be limited, inappropriate behaviors—hitting, name-calling—should be.
She advises, however, against the sort of punishment many parents rely on, from time-outs and revoked privileges, to making a kid feel ashamed or guilty.
"Punishment entails power. If I take away a privilege it's because I have the power to do that," she said. It also relies on fear: of harsh consequences, of disapproval, even of losing a parent's love. And while those strategies work in the short-term, Getoff said, long-term, they damage the parent-child connection. "Nobody wants to be around someone who makes them feel bad, small, afraid, ashamed, guilty."
Instead, Getoff suggests describing to a kid how their behavior affects the people around them: "I don't like name calling. ...When you call someone 'stupid,' it hurts their feelings." A similar approach can reinforce desirable behavior: instead of issuing a vague, general "good boy," point out how sharing his toys made his playmate feel good, or thank him for picking up his toys so no one would trip on them.
And, reflexive as the impulse may be, Getoff advises against making a child apologize. Instead, she suggests modeling the behavior by, for example, approaching a child your kid might have hit and asking if he's all right. "I'm strongly against forced apologies and forced 'thank yous'" she said. "I believe that compassion and gratitude must be modeled and not legislated. As soon as we try to legislate them, we take away the inherent joy of them, because we make them a rule rather than a pleasure."