Child Development

How often are you fully and completely present when you are with your children? One of the greatest gifts we can give to our children is to be fully present with them. Being fully present can often be a big challenge.

When my children were growing up, I worked full time as a counselor, wrote books, traveled on book tours, and pursued my passion as an artist – in addition to spending time with my husband. The only way I could be fully present when I was with my children was to set aside “time alone” with them. “Time alone” was the daily quality time I spent with each of my children, doing whatever they wanted to do. During this time, I did not answer the phone or deal with the many running issues. It was time set aside to be fully present with them, not even thinking about other things.

When you don’t spend quality time being fully present, the message you give to your children is that they are not important. When answering the phone, or getting things done, or thinking about what you have to do tomorrow is more important than being present with your children, they get the message that being with them and knowing them is not very important to you.

When I was growing up, my mother was always busy. She never had the time to be with me. She never wanted to know about my thoughts and feelings or how things were going at school. She never had the time to play with me or hang out with me. While she said that she loved me and that I was important to her, I never felt it. Words don’t cut it when the actions don’t follow.

If it is not important to you to be with your children – talking with them, playing with them, taking a walk, holding them, listening to them, sharing love with them – then they will likely not feel loved by you. No matter how many things you buy them or how often you tell them you love them, if they are not important enough to you to be with them, they will likely not feel loved and cherished by you.

Your children need your focused attention, and when they don’t get it, they may pull for it in various ways. They may chatter on and on, trying to keep your attention. They may act out by fighting with each other, or by not listening to you, or going into resistance regarding chores, homework, hygiene, bedtime, and so on. For many children, even negative attention feels better than no attention. This may create a very negative vicious circle, in that the more they act out, the less you feeling like being with them, but the less you are with them lovingly and attentively, the more they may act out.

Think about how you feel when someone gives you his or her full attention. Doesn’t it feel wonderful? How often does someone look you in the eyes and give you his or her full attention? How often do you feel listened to and heard by someone? Unfortunately, many people are so intent on being listened to and heard that they don’t listen and hear.

The simple act of being fully present with your children will do more for them than you can imagine. You have an opportunity to give your children a great gift – being fully present with them with your love, compassion, empathy, interest, sense of humor, playfulness, and affection. Each day, you have the opportunity, even if it is just for half an hour, to fully cherish them.

They grow up so fast. Don’t miss this opportunity each day.

Why should you want your child to be an optimist? Because, as Dr. Martin Seligman explains: “Pessimism (the opposite of optimism) is an entrenched habit of mind that has sweeping and disastrous consequences: depressed mood, resignation, underachievement and even unexpectedly poor physical health.”

Children with optimistic thinking skills are better able to interpret failure, have a stronger sense of personal mastery, and are better able to bounce back when things go wrong in their lives.

Because parents are a major contributor to the thinking styles of their children’s developing minds, it is important to adhere to the following five steps to ensure healthy mental habits in your children.

How Parents Can Help

Step 1: Learn to think optimistically yourself. What children see and hear indirectly from you as you lead your life and interact with others influences them much more than what you try to ‘teach’ them.

You can model optimism for your child by incorporating optimistic mental skills into your own way of thinking. This is not easy and does not occur over night. But with practice, almost everyone can learn to think differently about life’s events – even parents!

Step 2: Teach your child that there is a connection between how they think and how they feel. You can do this most easily by saying aloud how your own thoughts about adversity create negative feelings in you.

For example, if you are driving your child to school and a driver cuts you off, verbalize the link between your thoughts and feelings by saying something like “I wonder why I’m feeling so angry; I guess I was saying to myself: ‘Now I’m going to be late because the guy in front of me is going so darn slow. If he is going to drive like that he shouldn’t drive during rush hour. How rude.’”

Step 3: Create a game called ‘thought catching.’ This helps your child learn to identify the thoughts that flit across his or her mind at the times they feel worst. These thoughts, although barely noticeable, greatly affect mood and behavior.

For instance, if your child received a poor grade, ask: “When you got your grade, what did you say to yourself?”

Step 4: Teach your child how to evaluate automatic thoughts. This means acknowledging that the things you say to yourself are not necessarily accurate.

For instance, after receiving the poor grade your child may be telling himself he is a failure, he is not as smart as other kids; he will never be able to succeed in school, etc. Many of these self-statements may not be accurate, but they are ‘automatic’ in that situation.

Step 5: Instruct your child on how to generate more accurate explanations (to themselves) when bad things happen and use them to challenge your child’s automatic but inaccurate thoughts. Part of this process involves looking for evidence to the contrary (good grades in the past, success in other life areas, etc).

Another skill to teach your child to help him or her think optimistically is to help your child see that the bad event may not be as bad or will not have the adverse consequences imagined. Few things in life are as devastating as we fear, yet we blow them up in our minds.

Parents can influence the thinking styles of their children by modeling the principals of optimistic thinking.