Hiding your negative emotions to children is a bad idea | Moms and dads



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"Better not to argue in front of children", "If you think, we will solve what happened to you at work later" or "Then we will talk so that the child does not know you are wrong" are very common expressions, but they could be doing more harm than good to the normal development of our children According to one latest study, we must forget the standard of "best not in front of children" and express the negative emotions of all days before our children in a healthy way. " it's their hiding the truth, making them believe that they're idiots or not integrating them into family reality. "This is the main conclusion of a survey of experts from the University of Washington (WSU, Seattle) and that of Berkeley (California).

As explained in an article, Sara Waters, Assistant Professor in the WSU Human Development Department, in the magazine Emotion"Our goal was to define the consequences of the radical elimination of negative emotions and how they affect the interaction of parents and children." For the expert, this creates a very special situation in which the child knows that something is hidden, while parents think that doing it is something positive for his offspring.

With a sample of 109 mothers and fathers participating with their children, all from San Francisco, the group was split almost evenly to also examine gender differences. At first, the researchers gave parents a stressful task: to speak in public while listening to negative comments from the public. Then they received an activity to complete with their children. While some were chosen at random to suppress their emotions while doing their homework. Others have been told to act naturally. The activity was the same for all: set up a Lego project. With the peculiarity that the children, aged 7 to 11, received only the instructions on paper, that they could not touch the Legos and that the parents, for their part, had to assemble the toy without seeing the instructions. This forced them to work together to succeed.

"We wanted to see how they behaved, focusing on the response, the affection and the quality of the interactions between them, and observing how the parents guided their children," Waters says in a statement. text. At the same time, blood pressure, heart rate and stress levels were also measured. "After collecting the data, we realized that trying to remove stress made parents a worse teammate to ride the Lego and offered less help to the child." But this behavior "It was not just from the perspective of the father, his children were also less receptive and positive with them in turn." It was almost as if the parents were transmitting these emotions, "he adds.

Regarding the difference in sex between fathers and mothers, the authors found that children were more sensitive to the concealment of maternal emotions than to paternal emotions, but, as Waters points out, "more of research is needed because we do not know why. "

This is not the first time that a study concludes that the child is able to perceive how his parents feel and know that they are hiding something, "there are dozens of d & # 39; 39, investigations on this subject ", continues the expert. For her, the children know very well what is going on: "If you feel that something bad has happened and the parents are acting normally and do not tell you, this behavior defeats them and sends a confusing message. Expressing negative emotions to children in a healthy way helps them regulate themselves and solve their problems It is best if your son sees that you are angry or stressed, that you are telling him and that you also tell him what you are going to do to make this happen and that the situation improves, "he concludes.

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