brain rule
Labeling emotions calms big feelings
“Not CARROT!” shrieked 2-year-old Tyler as his mother, Rachel, tried to provide a sensible alternative to his growing interests in sweets. “COOKIE! Tyler wants COOKIE!” Tyler collapsed into a screaming heap, fists pounding the floor. “COOKIE! COOKIE! COOKIE!” he raged. When Tyler found out about chocolate-chip cookies, his sole goal in life became to stuff as many as he could into his mouth.
Rachel, a hyper-organized marketing executive turned stay-at-home mom, had been someone who rarely lost her temper. Or her to-do list. But these battalion-strength temper tantrums were too much. And they were inescapable. If Rachel left the room, Tyler became a cruise missile. He would stop crying while he sought her out and then, maternal target acquired, would throw himself back on the floor and resume his explosive grand mals. Most days, Rachel would become furious, then hide, sometimes locking herself in the bathroom and putting her fingers in her ears. She told herself that any feeling—joy, fear, anger—was good to express, whether hers or her son’s. Tyler would eventually work things out by himself, she hoped, if she left him to his own devices. Instead, Tyler’s behavior steadily worsened. So did Rachel’s. Familial clouds regularly gathered in the morning for a day’s worth of behavioral storms. Rachel became increasingly anxious and uncomposed as the day progressed, rather like her son. Nothing in her life—professional or personal—had prepared her for anything like this. She wanted to take parenting one day at a time, but when Tyler acted like this, she felt as if several days assaulted her simultaneously.
Rachel, along with every other parent, can do some concrete things to increase the probability of raising a happy child—regardless of the temperamental dictates we discussed in the previous chapter. I start with Tyler’s tantrum because of a startling fact: How Rachel responds to Tyler’s intense emotions profoundly matters to his future happiness. In fact, her response is one of the greatest predictors of how he will turn out as a young man. It affects his ability to empathize with people and thus maintain friendships—big factors in human happiness. It will even affect his grade-point average. Starting with the process of bonding with baby, parents who pay close attention to the emotional lives of their children, in a very particular manner, have the best shot at making them happy. The point of this chapter is to explain what “very particular manner” means.
Attentive, patient ping-pong
One excellent person to start off our discussion is a researcher who has studied the emotional lives of children—and how parents interact with them—for decades. He sports a name right out of a 1950s science-fiction movie, Ed Tronick.
Tronick has a ready smile, deep-blue eyes, and a shock of white hair. He likes to attend Boston Red Sox games, though he can practically watch them from his research office, which overlooks the players’ entrance on Yawkey Way. He was an antiwar activist in the 1960s and one of the first “parenting” researchers to live in other cultures, spending quality time with moms and dads in Peru, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in plenty of other places. But he’s most known for something you can see in a game of peekaboo. It’s the power of two-way communication in cementing relationships between a parent and child. Here’s an example, taken from Tronick’s research files:
The infant abruptly turns away from his mother as the game reaches its peak of intensity and begins to suck on his thumb and stare into space with a dull facial expression. The mother stops playing and sits back, watching.… After a few seconds, the infant turns back to her with an inviting expression. The mother moves closer, smiles, and says in a high-pitched, exaggerated voice, “Oh, now you’re back!” He smiles in response and vocalizes. As they finish crowing together, the infant reinserts his thumb and looks away. The mother again waits … the infant turns … to her, and they greet each other with big smiles.
Notice two things: (1) the 3-month-old has a rich emotional life, and (2) the mother paid close attention to it. She knew when to interact and when to withdraw. I have seen dozens of delightful research videos showing this choreography between thoughtful parents and their babies, and every one of them looks like a wonderful, messy ping-pong game. The communication is uneven, doled out in fits and starts, mostly led by baby, and always two-way. Tronick calls it “interaction synchrony.” Attentive, patient interactivity actually helps your baby’s neural architecture develop in a positive way, tilting her toward emotional stability. The brain of a baby who doesn’t experience synchronous interaction can develop very differently.
In that game of peekaboo, it is obvious that the baby and his mother have already formed a reciprocating relationship. In the late 1960s, researchers coined a term to describe it: attachment.
Attachment theory springs from the finding that babies come into this world preloaded with lots of emotional and relational abilities. At birth, babies appear to express disgust, distress, interest, and contentment. Within six months, they experience anger, fear, sadness, surprise, and joy. Give them another year and they will feel embarrassment, jealousy, guilt, and maybe even pride. These emotions are like RoboCop’s tags (or Post-it notes, if you prefer) telling the brain, “Pay attention to this!” Different kids tag different things. It’s as random as a newborn’s fascination with Dad’s beard, an infant’s distress at wearing socks, or a toddler’s fear or love of dogs. Knowing what your kids tag—what things they have an emotional reaction to—and then responding to that knowledge in specific ways is not only part of the attachment process, but one of the big secrets to raising happy kids.
Babies are born with the ability to relate for the evolutionary reasons we discussed in the Relationship chapter: It’s an especially handy skill for a helpless infant who needs to quickly establish secure relationships with those who can feed him. Given that most adults are oddly moved by the presence of a baby, the relationship soon becomes an exercise in mutual tagging. As this two-way communication solidifies, the baby is said to become “attached.” Attachment is understood as a reciprocal emotional relationship between an older baby and an adult.
The attachment bond is made stronger and more intimate through a variety of experiences, many involving how attentive a parent is to the baby in the early years (though genetic factors appear to play a strong role, too). If the bonding process runs into turbulence, the baby is said to be insecurely attached. These kids don’t grow up to be as happy. Their scores on social responsiveness tests are almost two-thirds lower than those of securely attached children. As they grow up, they exhibit more than twice the emotional conflict in their interpersonal lives as do securely attached infants. They show less empathy and tend to be more irritable. They also get the poorest grades.
Attachment takes years
Attachment theory has been wildly misinterpreted in the media, at one point couched as if babies were born with a quick-drying relational paste. Immediately after birth, all kinds of things had to be done in hurry—setting the baby on mom’s belly was popular—before the paste dried and the critical attachment period passed. These notions are still out there.
One colleague told me he had just finished a lecture on attachment when a woman named Susan came up to him at the lectern. “I am not sure what to do,” she began. Susan had had her first baby a month prior, and after an extraordinarily difficult labor, she had fallen into an exhausted stupor. “I slept through my attachment!” Susan said, tears welling in her eyes. “Will my baby still like me?” Susan was in a panic that her relationship had been permanently damaged. She had heard from a friend that one maternity ward had put up a sign saying, “Please do not remove babies from mothers until after bonding has taken place.” Good grief.
My colleague tried to reassure her that nothing was wrong, that no developmental insult had irreversibly exerted itself, and that she could look forward to many mutually fulfilling hours with her newborn.
Attachment is more like slow-drying cement than quick-setting superglue. Infants start to develop flexible working models of how people relate to each other almost as soon as they are born. They then use this information to figure out how to survive, with parents being the natural first target. The relationships that form from this activity slowly develop over time, perhaps two years or longer. Parents who consistently apply attention—especially in these early years—statistically raise the happiest kids.
Is synchronously playing with your baby on a sustained basis all you need to do? Hardly. It may be necessary (and delightful) to interact with your 3-month-old, but that is not enough to turn him into a happy citizen. Kids have to grow up sometime, a process that naturally changes their behavior and complicates their relationships with just about everybody. As a parent, you will have to adapt to their changes. Parenting is wonderful. But it is not for sissies. How radical can these behavioral changes appear? Listen in on these parents:
How the hell did my sweetie pie daughter turn into the devil overnight upon turning 3? Today she told me that she doesn’t like me and is going to stab me. She tried to step on the fingers of a 14 month old and exclaimed, “Goddammit” out of the blue.
Ugh. I just screamed at my 5 yr old. I asked him to stop running around several times because I have things out that he and his sister keep tripping over. (I’m cleaning). He looked at me with a snide grin and kept running. Like a test. I LOST it. I’d tried giving him stuff to help me with to keep him occupied, but he wanted to run around instead. I felt bad about losing it, but geez, what do you do when nice doesn’t work?
You can feel the transitions occurring in the hearts of these poor mothers. But even though potty-mouthed 3-year-olds and strong-willed preschoolers almost certainly exist in your future, there is also this:
I fixed my 3 year old daughter’s hair today, and she looked in the mirror, gave me a thumbs up and said “Rock on, girlfriend!” LOL!!!
This strange sinner/saint combination of behaviors is often described as the terrible twos (though it is actually threes, fours, and beyond, as these forum posts attest). By the second year of baby-world, moms and dads are evolving, too. They have begun switching from cooing caregivers and glorified playmates to rule-breathing, hair-pulling, count-to-10-before-you-yell parents. The transition is natural. So is the frustration. Most people learn a lot from kids at these stages, including how little patience they possess. Soldiering on is a must, of course, but the way you do it matters if your goal is to raise a happy kid.
A terrific kid
What kind of kid are we talking about? I think of my friend Doug, who attended my high school in the early 1970s. Doug was as sharp as a whip—really good at math, but he could just as easily have joined the debate team. He held his own in just about every subject to which he applied himself. Doug would eventually become valedictorian, a fact he seemed to take as a given even as a freshman. Doug was also athletic (wide receiver on varsity), comfortably self-confident (with an easy smile), and graced with an almost pharmaceutical-grade optimism. To top it off, Doug was as disarmingly humble as he was socially confident. This made him extremely popular. By all appearances Doug seemed intelligent, gifted, motivated, well socialized, happy. Was it all an act, or was it something in Doug’s physiology?
A fair amount of data suggests that kids like Doug are, in fact, measurably different. Their unconscious ability to regulate their autonomic nervous systems—something we call vagal tone—shows off-the-charts stability. Doug is emblematic of a small but very important cadre of terrific kids who exist all over the world. These children:
• have better emotional regulation, calming themselves more quickly.
• have the highest academic achievement.
• show greater empathetic responses.
• show greater loyalty to parents and have a higher compliance rate with parental wishes, the obedience coming from feelings of connection rather than from fear.
• have fewer incidences of pediatric depression and anxiety disorders.
• have the fewest infectious diseases.
• are less prone to acts of violence.
• have deeper, richer friendships, and lots more of them.
That last fact gives them their best shot at being happy. These findings have prompted more than one parent to ask:
“Where do you go to get kids like this?”
Doug’s parents weren’t psychologists. They were owners of a moderately successful grocery store, married for 20 years, apparently happy and well-adjusted. And clearly they were doing something right.
Researchers, too, wanted to know how to get kids like Doug. It’s about as important an issue to the success of a culture that exists. In the absence of rigorous, randomized, longitudinal studies, some terrific investigators did the next best thing. They studied families who consistently produced terrific kids, then analyzed what their parents did that was so darned nourishing. They wondered if perhaps these parents had a few things in common. In other words: Did certain parenting skills correlate so strongly with the hoped-for outcomes that they could predict how any kid turned out?
Yes, it turns out. Though the data are associative, they are sophisticated. Regardless of race or income, parents who end up with great kids do similar kinds of things over and over again. We can certainly argue about what a happy kid really looks like and the fundamentals of parenting practice. But if those bullet points look compelling to you, we know how to get you there. The research is statistically complex, but I will recruit a recipe from one of America’s favorite chefs to help us describe those common traits. His name is Bobby Flay, and his recipe is for barbecued chicken.
Bobby Flay has red hair and a New York accent, owns a line of successful restaurants, and has been celebrity chef in chief of the United States for years. He is known for creating Southwestern recipes for people who enjoy taking regular trips to the top of the food pyramid, where all the fats and meats dwell. Fortunately for health-conscious consumers, Flay has also created tasty dishes that don’t add girth simply by inhaling their aromas. One of them is a dry rub for baked chicken. Dry rubs are spices mixed together, then massaged into the meat to season it before cooking.
For our purposes, the chicken is your child’s emotional life. The spices, six of them, are your parenting behaviors. When parents properly spice this chicken on a regular basis, they increase their probability of raising a happy kid.
Emotions must be central
Parents face many issues on a daily basis in the raising of kids, but not all of them affect how their children turn out. There is one that does. How you deal with the emotional lives of your children—your ability to detect, react to, promote, and provide instruction about emotional regulation—has the greatest predictive power over your baby’s future happiness.
Fifty years of research, from Diana Baumrind and Haim Ginott to Lynn Katz and John Gottman, have come to this conclusion. That’s why your child’s emotional life takes the central role, the chicken, in our metaphor. You won’t get any of the other benefits of the recipe unless you have placed the meat of the matter squarely in the center of your parenting behavior. The critical issue is your behavior when your children’s emotions become intense (Gottman would say “hot”) enough to push you out of your comfort zone.
Here are the six spices that go into this parental dry rub:
• a demanding but warm parenting style
• comfort with your own emotions
• tracking your child’s emotions
• verbalizing emotions
• running toward emotions
• two tons of empathy
1. A demanding but warm parenting style
We know a great deal about what works thanks, in part, to developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind. She was born in New York City in 1927 to lower-middle-class Jewish immigrants. She is spicy as cayenne and known for taking a fellow researcher to task over an ethics violation (Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who duped a group of undergraduates into thinking they were shocking people to death). Baumrind had a second career as a human-rights activist and was investigated for un-American activities by Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. She does her science at—where else?—the University of California–Berkeley. In the mid-1960s, Baumrind published her ideas on parenting, a framework so robust that researchers still use it today. You can think of her ideas as the four styles of child rearing. Baumrind described two dimensions in parenting, each on a continuum:
• Responsiveness. This is the degree to which parents respond to their kids with support, warmth, and acceptance. Warm parents mostly communicate their affection for their kids. Hostile parents mostly communicate their rejection of their kids.
• Demandingness. This is the degree to which a parent attempts to exert behavioral control. Restrictive parents tend to make and enforce rules mercilessly. Permissive parents don’t make any rules.
Putting these dimensions in the form of a two-by-two grid creates four parenting styles that have been studied. Only one style produces happy children.
Authoritarian: Too hard
Unresponsive plus demanding. Exerting power over their kids is very important to these parents, and their kids are often afraid of them. They do not try to explain their rules and do not project any warmth.
Indulgent: Too soft
Responsive plus undemanding. These parents truly love their kids but have little ability to make and enforce rules. They subsequently avoid confrontation and seldom demand compliance with family rules. These parents are often bewildered by the task of raising kids.
Neglectful: Too aloof
Unresponsive plus undemanding. Probably the worst of the lot. These parents care little about their children and are uninvolved in their day-to-day interactions, providing only the most basic care.
Responsive plus demanding. The best of the lot. These parents are demanding, but they care a great deal about their kids. They explain their rules and encourage their children to state their reactions to them. They encourage high levels of independence, yet see that children comply with family values. These parents tend to have terrific communication skills with their children.
Neglecting parents tended to produce the worst-behaved, most emotionally challenged kids on the block; they got the worst grades, too. Authoritative parents produced Doug.
Baumrind’s insights were confirmed in a massive 1994 study involving thousands of students as they entered adolescence in California and Wisconsin. Based solely on parenting behavior, researchers successfully predicted how the kids would turn out, regardless of ethnicity. Further work has supported and extended Baumrind’s initial ideas. This later generation of researchers asked a simple question: How did the parents come to fall into one of those four parenting styles? The answer is in our next spice.
2. Comfort with your own emotions
Imagine your best friend is over for a chat, and her 4-year-old fraternal twins, Brandon and Madison, are playing in the basement. Suddenly, you’re interrupted by shouting. The twins have gotten into an argument: One wants to play “army men” with some figurines; the other wants to play house with them. “Gimme those!” you hear Brandon shout, trying to corral the figurines for himself. “No fair!” shouts Madison, grabbing some from Brandon’s stash. “I want some, too!” Your friend wants you to think she has little angels, not devils, and she marches downstairs. “You brats!” she bellows. “Why can’t you play nice? Can’t you see you’re embarrassing me?” Brandon begins to cry, and Madison sulks, glaring at the floor. “I am raising a bunch of wimps,” she mutters, marching back upstairs.
What would you do in that situation, if you were the twins’ parent? Believe it or not, psychologists can, with some certainty, predict what you will do. John Gottman calls it your meta-emotion philosophy. A meta-emotion is how you feel about feelings (“meta” literally means ascending, or looking from above).
Some people welcome emotional experiences, considering them an important and enriching part of life’s journey. Others think that emotions make people weak and embarrassed and that emotions should be suppressed. Some people think a few emotions are OK, like joy and happiness, but some should stay on a behavioral no-fly list; anger, sadness, and fear are popular choices. Still others don’t know what to do with their emotions and try to run from them. That’s Rachel at the beginning of this chapter. Whatever you feel about feelings—your own or other people’s—is your meta-emotion philosophy. Can you discern Baumrind’s four parenting styles in these attitudes?
Your meta-emotion philosophy turns out to be very important to your children’s future. It predicts how you will react to their emotional lives, which in turn predicts how (or if) they learn to regulate their own emotions. Because these skills are directly related to a child’s social competency, how you feel about feelings can profoundly influence your child’s future happiness. You have to be comfortable with your emotions in order to make your kids comfortable with theirs.
3. Tracking emotions
You can get a snapshot of family life by the way people talk about it. Sometimes an entire relationship spills out of a few sentences. Gwyneth Paltrow, star of stage and screen, grew up in the business, her mom an actress, her dad a director. Her parents stayed together their entire lives, which, given the gravitational pull of the profession, is something of a miracle. In Parade magazine in 1998, Paltrow related the following story about her dad.
When I was 10, we went to England. My mother was shooting a miniseries there… . My dad took me to Paris for the weekend. We had the most amazing time. On the plane back to London, he asked me, “Do you know why I took you to Paris, only you and me?” And I said, “Why?” And he said, “Because I wanted you to see Paris for the first time with a man who would always love you.”
When Paltrow won an Oscar in 1999, she gave a famously gushing and tearful acceptance speech, saying she was full of gratitude that, because of her family, she could know what love is. Bruce Paltrow died four years later. But his loving comment remains an excellent example of what I’ll call “balanced emotional surveillance.”
Earlier I mentioned parents paying close attention to the emotional lives of their children in a particular manner. You could see it with the mom and baby playing peekaboo in Tronick’s laboratory:
The mother stops playing and sits back, watching… . After a few seconds, the infant turns back to her with an inviting expression. The mother moves closer, smiles, and says in a high-pitched, exaggerated voice, “Oh, now you’re back!” He smiles in response and vocalizes.
The mom was extraordinarily attuned to her child’s emotional cues. She knew that her baby’s turning away probably meant he needed a break from the sensory flood he was receiving. Mom withdrew, waited patiently, and did not resume until baby signaled he was no longer flooding. He could then be delighted when mom returned, smiling, rather than staying overstimulated by her persistence and probably crying. The total elapsed time was less than five seconds, but, stretched over years, this emotional sensitivity can make all the difference between a productive kid and a juvenile delinquent.
Parents with the happiest kids started this habit early in their parenting careers and then continued it over the years. They kept track of their children’s emotions the way some people keep track of their stock portfolios or favorite baseball team. They did not pay attention in a controlling, insecure style but in a loving, unobtrusive way, like a caring family physician. They knew when their kids were happy, sad, fearful, or joyful, often without asking. They could read and interpret with astonishing accuracy their child’s verbal and nonverbal cues.
The power of prediction
Why does this work? We know only a couple parts of the story. The first is that parents who possess emotional information gain the great power of behavioral prediction. Moms and dads become so acquainted with their children’s psychological interiors, they become pros at forecasting probable reactions to almost any situation. This results in an instinctive feel about what is most likely to be helpful, hurtful, or neutral to their child, and in a wide variety of circumstances. That’s about as valuable a parenting skill as you can have.
The second is that parents who continue paying attention over the years are not caught off guard by their children’s ever-changing emotional development. That’s important, given the tectonic shifts that occur in the brain’s development during childhood. As kids’ brains change, their behavior changes, which results in more brain changes. These parents experience fewer surprises as their children grow up.
Emotional surveillance comes with a caveat, however, for it is possible to give too much of a good thing. In the late 1980s, researchers were somewhat startled to find that when parents paid too much attention to their kids’ cues—responding to every gurgle, burp, and cough—the kids became less securely attached. Children (like anybody) didn’t take too well to being smothered. The stifling seemed to interfere with emotional self-regulation, messing with a natural need for space and independence.
In that game of peekaboo, note how many times the mother backed off in response to the baby’s cues. Most parents initially have a tough time understanding when their children are feeling loved and when they are feeling crowded. Some never get it. One probable reason is that the ratio is different from one kid to the next—and maybe from one day to the next. Nonetheless, you need a balance (go ahead and insert our entire Goldilocks discussion right here). Parents who resisted giving in to their inner helicopter helped create the most secure attachments.
4. Verbalizing emotions
“I don’t like it,” the 3-year-old muttered to herself as the guests left. Miserable throughout her older sister’s birthday party, she was now growing angry. “I want Ally’s doll, not this one!” Her parents had bought her a consolation present, but the strategy went down like a lead balloon. The girl threw her doll to the floor. “Ally’s doll! Ally’s doll!” She began to cry. You can imagine a parent making any of several choices in the face of this bubbling brew.
“You seem sad. Are you sad?” is what the girl’s dad said. The little girl nodded, still angry, too. The dad continued. “I think I know why. You’re sad because Ally’s gotten all the presents. You only got one!” The little girl nodded again. “You want the same number and you can’t have it, and that’s unfair and that makes you sad.” The dad seemed to be pouring it on. “Whenever somebody gets something I want and I don’t, I get sad, too.” Silence.
Then the dad said the line most characteristic of a verbalizing parent. “We have a word for that feeling, honey,” he said. “Do you want to know what that word is?” She whimpered, “OK.” He held her in his arms. “We call it being jealous. You wanted Ally’s presents, and you couldn’t have them. You were jealous.” She cried softly but was beginning to calm down. “Jealous,” she whispered. “Yep,” Dad replied, “and it’s an icky feeling.” “I been jealous all day,” she replied, nestling into her daddy’s big strong arms.
This big-hearted father is good at (a) labeling his feelings and (b) teaching his daughter to label hers. He knows what sadness in his own heart feels like and announces it easily. He knows what sadness in his child’s heart looks like, and he is teaching her to announce it, too. He is also good at teaching joy, anger, disgust, concern, fear—the entire spectrum of his little girl’s experience.
Research shows that this labeling habit is a dominant behavior for all parents who raise happy children. Kids who are exposed to this parenting behavior on a regular basis become better at self-soothing, are more able to focus on tasks, and have more successful peer relationships. Sometimes knowing what to do is tougher than knowing what to say. But sometimes saying is all that’s needed.
Labeling emotions is neurologically calming
Notice in the story that as the dad addressed his daughter’s feelings directly, the little girl began to calm down. This is a common finding; you can measure it in the laboratory. Verbalizing has a soothing effect on the nervous systems of children. (Adults, too.) Thus, the Brain Rule: Labeling emotions calms big feelings.
Here’s what we think is going on in the brain. Verbal and nonverbal communication are like two interlocking neurological systems. Infants’ brains haven’t yet connected these systems very well. Their bodies can feel fear, disgust, and joy way before their brains can talk about them. This means that children will experience the physiological characteristics of emotional responses before they know what those responses are. That’s why large feelings are often scary for little people; tantrums often self-feed because of this fear. That’s not a sustainable gap. Kids will need to find out what’s going on with their big feelings, however scary they seem at first. They need to connect these two neurological systems. Researchers believe that learning to label emotions provides the linkage. The earlier this bridge gets constructed, the more likely you are to see self-soothing behaviors, along with a large raft of other benefits. Researcher Carroll Izard has shown that in households that do not provide such instruction, these nonverbal and verbal systems remain somewhat disconnected or integrate in unhealthy ways. Without labels to describe the feelings they have, children can remain confused by a cacophony of physiological experiences.
I’ve seen the power of labeling firsthand. One of my sons could easily conjure up Richter-scale tantrums. I knew from the research literature that occasional tantrums are normal for kids in the first couple of years, mostly because their sense of independence plays a game of chicken with their emotional maturity. But my heart would sometimes break for him. He seemed so unhappy and sometimes quite scared. I would always move as close as I physically could to him when this occurred, just to reassure him that someone who will always love him was nearby (everyone can learn from Bruce Paltrow).
One day, as he was subsiding from a particularly fierce temblor, I looked at him squarely and said, “You know, son. We have a word for this feeling. I would like to tell you that word. Is that OK?” He nodded, still crying. “It is called being ‘frustrated.’ You are feeling frustrated. Can you say ‘frustrated’?” He suddenly looked at me as if he had been hit by a train. “Frustrated! I am FRUSTRATED!!” Still sobbing, he grabbed my leg, holding on for dear life. “Frustrated! Frustrated! Frustrated!” he kept repeating, as if the words were some kind of harness tossed to him from a first responder. He quickly calmed down.
There they were, just as the research literature said: the powerful calming neurological effects of learning to verbalize one’s feelings. Now it was my turn to become misty-eyed.
What if you’re not used to examining emotions?
You may need to practice labeling your own emotions out loud. When you experience happiness, disgust, anger, joy, just say so. To your spouse, to the air, to God and His host of angels. This can be tougher than you think, especially if you are not used to delving into your psychological interiors and declaring what you find. But do it for your kids. Remember, adult behaviors influence child behaviors in two ways: by example and through direct intervention. Establish a habit of labeling emotions now. Then, by the time your little bundle of joy goes verbal, she will have a heaping dose of examples to follow while you raise her. The benefit will last the rest of her life.
Just one note: The point of this training is to increase your awareness. You can be aware of your emotions without being highly emotive. You are not obligated to perform an emotional striptease to just anybody simply because you are aware of what you are feeling. What’s key is that:
• you know when you are experiencing an emotion.
• you can identify the emotion quickly and can verbalize it on demand.
• you can recognize that same emotion in other people just as quickly.
10 years of music lessons
There’s another powerful way to fine-tune a child’s hearing for the emotional aspects of speech: musical training. Researchers in the Chicago area showed that musically experienced kids—those who studied any instrument for at least 10 years, starting before age 7—responded with greased-lightning speed to subtle variations in emotion-laden cues, such as a baby’s cry. The scientists tracked changes in the timing, pitch, and timbre of the baby’s cry, all the while eavesdropping on the musician’s brain stem (the most ancient part of the brain) to see what happened.
Kids without rigorous musical training didn’t show as much discrimination. Their brains didn’t pick up on the fine-grained information embedded in the signal and were, so to speak, more emotionally tone deaf. Dana Strait, first author of the study, wrote: “That their brains respond more quickly and accurately than the brains of non-musicians is something we’d expect to translate into the perception of emotion in other settings.”
This finding is remarkably clear, beautifully practical, and a bit unexpected. It suggests that if you want happy kids later in life, get them started on a musical journey early in life. Then make sure they stick with it until they are old enough to start filling out their applications to Harvard, probably humming all the way.
5. Running toward emotions
It’s every parent’s worst nightmare: your child caught in a life-threatening situation, clinging for dear life by the slimmest of margins, you impotent to help. In February 1996, 15-year-old Marglyn Paseka and a friend were playing in Mantanzas Creek when they were suddenly swept up in a central California flash flood. Her companion managed to scramble up the bank, running to safety. Not Marglyn. She was left clinging to a branch, water racing around her like rush-hour traffic, for 45 minutes. By the time the first responders arrived, she did not have much strength left. Onlookers, including her mom, were screaming.
Fireman Don Lopez did not scream. Without hesitation, he lowered himself into the raging, frigid waters and began trying to attach a safety harness to the young girl. He failed, once, twice … several times. The girl’s strength was nearly exhausted when Lopez, at the last second, finally got her attached. Photojournalist Annie Wells was on the scene working for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and she captured that moment (along with a Pulitzer Prize). It is an incredible photo to see, the weakened teenager nearly letting go of the branch, the muscular fireman saving her life. Like first responders everywhere, when everyone else was either screaming, sitting on the sidelines, or running away, Lopez ran toward trouble.
Parents who raise kids like my friend Doug, the valedictorian, have this type of courage in spades. They are fearless in the face of raging floods of emotions from their child. They don’t try to shoot down emotions, ignore them, or let them have free reign over the welfare of the family. Instead, these parents get involved in their kids’ strong feelings. They have four attitudes toward emotions (yes, their meta-emotions):
• They do not judge emotions.
• They acknowledge the reflexive nature of emotions.
• They know that behavior is a choice, even though an emotion is not.
• They see a crisis as a teachable moment.
They do not judge emotions
Many families actively discourage the expression of tough emotions like fear and anger. Happiness and tranquility, meanwhile, make it to the top of the list of “approved” emotions. To parents of Dougs all over the world, there is no such thing as a bad emotion. There is no such thing as a good emotion. An emotion is either there—or it is not. These parents seem to know that emotions don’t make people weak and they don’t make people strong. They only make people human. The result is a savvy let-the-children-be-who-they-are attitude.
They acknowledge that emotional reactions are reflexive
Some families deal with hot emotions by actively ignoring them, hoping their kids will “snap out of it” as adults do. But denying the existence of emotions can make them worse. (People who deny their feelings often make bad choices, which is what usually gets them into trouble.) Parents in the studies who raised the happiest children understood that no technique known to humankind can make a feeling go away, even if nobody wants the feeling around. Initial emotional reactions are as automatic as blinking. They don’t disappear simply because someone thinks they should.
How might the attitudes of discouraging or ignoring emotions play out in real life? Imagine that the family goldfish, the only pet your 3-year-old son Kyle has ever known, suddenly dies. Visibly upset, Kyle mopes around the house all day, saying things like “I want fishy back!” and “Bring him back!” You’ve tried to ignore him, but his moodiness eventually grates on you. What do you do?
One response might be: “Kyle, I’m sorry your fish is dead, but it’s really no big deal. He’s just a fish. Death is part of life, and you need to learn that. You wipe those tears away, son, and go outside and play.” Another might be: “That’s OK, honey. You know, the fish was already old when you were born. We’ll go to the store tomorrow and get you another one. Now put on that happy face, and go outside and play.”
Both responses completely ignore how Kyle is feeling at the moment. One seems to actively disapprove of Kyle’s grief; the other is trying to anesthetize it. Neither deals with his intense emotions. They give him no tools that might help him navigate through his grief. Know what Kyle might be thinking? “If this is not supposed to matter, why do I still have this big feeling? What I am supposed to do with it? There must be something really wrong with me.”
They know that behavior is a choice, even though an emotion is not
Day to day, parents of happy kids do not allow bad behavior simply because they understand where it came from. A little girl might slap her baby brother because she feels threatened. That does not make slapping OK. These parents understand that kids have a choice in how they express emotions, reflexive though emotions can be. They have a list filled not with emotions that are approved and disapproved but actions that are. And the parents put teeth into it, consistently teaching their kids which choices are appropriate and which are not. Parents of kids like Doug speak softly but carry an obvious rule book.
Some families don’t make a rule book. Some parents let their kids freely express whatever emotions they have, then allow whatever behavior the kid engages in to spew forth all over the world. They believe there is little you can do about a stream of negative emotions, except perhaps to scramble up the bank and let the flood pass by. Parents with these attitudes are descending into an abdication of their parenting responsibilities. Statistically, they will raise the most troubled children of any parenting style ever tested.
It’s a myth that releasing emotions makes everything better (that blowing your top will defuse your anger, for example). “Better out than in,” the saying goes. Almost half a century’s worth of research shows that “blowing off steam” usually increases aggression. The only time expressing anger in that style helps is when it is accompanied immediately by constructive problem solving. As C. S. Lewis observed in The Silver Chair, one book in the Chronicles of Narnia series: “Crying is all right in its own way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.”
They see a crisis as a teachable moment
Parents who raise the happiest kids constantly rummage through their offspring’s intense feelings looking for stray teachable moments. They seem to have an intuitive sense that people produce lasting change only in response to a crisis. And they often welcome these intense moments of possibility.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” is an attitude as common in these households as it is in certain political circles. The problem the child is having may seem ridiculously small to the parents, not something that should take up precious time. But these parents realize they don’t need to like the problem to solve it. They regularly replace the words “potential catastrophe” with “potential lesson,” which puts a very different spin on what a catastrophe is.
This has two long-term consequences. First, it makes parents remarkably relaxed in the face of the emotional meltdowns. That pays dividends, for it gives children a powerful example to emulate when their own crises come into their adult lives. Second, there are fewer emotional disasters. That’s because timing is important: The best way to limit the damage of a house fire is to put it out quickly. If you run toward the fire rather than ignore it, your repair bills are likely to be smaller. How do you put out the fire? That’s our sixth spice.
Let’s say you are waiting in a long line at the post office with your restless 2-year-old, Emily. She announces, “I want a glass of water.” You calmly respond, “Honey, I can’t get you water right now. The drinking fountain is broken.” Emily starts to whine. “I want some water!” Her voice cracks. You anticipate what’s coming, and your blood pressure begins to rise. “We’ll have to wait until we get home. There’s no water here,” you say. She retorts, “I want water NOW!” The exchange escalates in intensity, in danger of erupting into a very public fight.
What now? Here are three tactics you might take:
• You choose to disregard the child’s feelings and say brusquely, “I said, wait until we get home. There’s no water here. Now be quiet.”
• Anxious about a potential embarrassing meltdown, you condemn your child’s reactions and hiss, “Will you please be quiet? Do not embarrass me in public.”
• Not knowing what to do, you shrug your shoulders and smile limply as your child takes over. Her emotions reach critical mass, then explode all over your parenting skills.
Haim Ginott, one of the most influential child psychologists of his generation, would say none of those are good choices. He proposed a series of parental “to-dos” in the late 1960s that have since proved, after years of testing in John Gottman’s labs and others’, to be quite prescient.
Here’s what you are supposed to do instead: You acknowledge the child’s feelings and empathize. “You’re thirsty, aren’t you? Getting a big gulp of cold water would feel so good. I wish that drinking fountain was working so I could lift you up and let you drink as much as you wanted.”
Sound odd? Many parents would expect this response to make things worse, like trying to extinguish a flame by dousing it with lighter fluid. But the data are remarkably clear. Empathy reflexes and the coaching strategies that surround them are the only behaviors known consistently to defuse intense emotional situations over the short term—and reduce their frequency over the long term. Note how you’re running toward your child’s reactions in that fourth response rather than away from them. Note how you verbalize her feelings, validating them, signaling understanding. This is empathy. Lynn Katz at the University of Washington calls it the “coaching of emotions.” So does Gottman. The idea springs directly from Ginott’s insights about how to raise happy children. So what should Rachel have said to Tyler, the kid who wanted cookies instead of carrots at the beginning of this chapter? She should have started with stating the obvious: “You want a cookie, don’t you, dear?”
We think there are several physiological reasons empathy works, thanks to seemingly unrelated research efforts: an attempt to understand crowd behavior and an attempt to characterize the optimal doctor-patient relationship.
Emotions are contagious
A person tends to experience feelings generated by the emotions of surrounding crowds. If people around you are fearful, angry, or violent, you often “catch” the same feelings, as if they were a virus. Investigators interested in how mobs influence individual behavior discovered this emotional contagion. It applies to a broad swath of emotional experiences, including humor. You have been exposed to this for years. In an attempt to get you to “catch” feelings of humor, TV-based sitcoms often include laugh tracks.
Empathy calms the nerves
The second set of studies looked at how to optimize doctor-patient relationships. It was puzzling: Therapists whose heart rates and skin temperatures were synchronized to their patients’ during clinical interviews found that their patients got better faster, and more completely, than therapists whose physiologies didn’t synchronize. The term is called, appropriately enough, physiological synchrony. Patients of these “empathetic” doctors routinely recovered from colds faster, bounced back from surgery more quickly and with fewer complications, and were less likely to sue for malpractice. The presence of empathy is actually a health-cost issue.
This biological finding led directly to the discovery that empathy calms people down. When the brain perceives empathy, the vagus nerve relaxes the body. This nerve connects the brain stem to other areas of the body, including the abdomen, chest, and neck. When it is overstimulated, it causes pain and nausea.
This may take practice
It’s understandable if you find it hard to project empathy on a sustained basis. You may discover when you first have children how profoundly your former world was about you, you, you. Now it is all about them, them, them. This is one of the hardest parts of that social contract. But your ability to move from you to them, which is what empathy forces anyone to do, makes all the difference to your child’s brain.
Even though empathy seems to spring from innate sources, children must experience it on a regular basis to become good at expressing it. “Empathy comes from being empathized with,” says Stanley Greenspan, clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine, in his book Great Kids. In order for you to grow empathetic kids, practice empathy on a regular basis, with your friends, with your spouse, with your coworkers. As in tennis, novices learn to play the game best when they can practice regularly with pros. The more empathy your child sees, the more socially competent he’ll become, and the happier he’ll be. He in turn will produce more empathetic grandkids—nice to have in old age, especially in a rickety economy!
Fortunately, to give your child the gift of emotional regulation, you don’t have to juggle all six spices 24 hours a day. If 30 percent of your interactions with your child are empathetic, Gottman contends, you’ll raise a happy kid. Does this mean 70 percent of the time you can cut yourself some slack? Perhaps. Really, the statistic points to the great power of paying attention to feelings. A lot of parents don’t raise kids like my friend Doug. But there is no reason why you can’t.
Key points
• Your infant needs you to watch, listen, and respond.
• How you deal with your toddlers’ intense emotions is a huge factor in how happy your child will be as an adult.
• Acknowledge, name, and empathize with emotions. Save judgment for any unacceptable behavior arising from emotions.
• One parenting style is most likely to produce terrific kids: demanding and warm.