Children, young people and adults explore many issues in the therapy room and they sometimes talk about parenting styles.
In this article I look at some of the subjects, themes and issues that come up that I hope will generate learning and reflection for parents who are raising children and young people and also for young people who are trying to make sense of their experiences.
Not all parents are good at what they do. This is an uncomfortable reality.
But most parents are doing great but want to do better.
I meet children and young people who tell me their parents are really great and I meet some who are having a really hard time. Some young folk are so mature and objective they may say things like, ‘well, it is not their fault…they are having a hard time and they probably didn’t have it easy when they grew up.’ Parents are fallible and we need to be understanding of them too. But there are things they could say and do that would help out more. This is why I wanted to write a series of articles for my blog to help parents and their children and youngsters.
Children and young people may come into therapy for a wide variety of reasons. They may have had very traumatising relationships with their parents such as living with a parent with bipolar or a mental illness, addiction or health condition that is difficult to navigate around. The young ones find it is like walking on eggshells around their parent. Other young people talk about abuse, control and manipulation by a parent. These areas require careful reflection.
This article is about children and young people who are not at severe risk but must navigate their life through challenging experiences at home, understanding why they are arising and what they can do about them. In this short article I talk about a few issues that affect young people: neurobiology, parent venting, offloading and over-disclosure, hate exposure, generational parenting, controlling and coercive parenting.
Neurobiology
Understanding youngsters and their behaviours requires a bit of psyche-education. So bear with me…
Children and young people are still growing physically and psychologically. The brain stem contains the limbic system, a sophisticated system that has one goal: survival. It sits at the top of the spine in the brainstem. This survival centre is the centre of emotions. Jaak Panksepp called them the 7 basic emotional systems – seeking, play, care, lust, rage, fear and panic-grief. When they are activated by other people, a strong surge of emotion comes with them. Strong surges of emotions can be caused by chemical reactions in the body like cortisol or adrenaline that put us on high alert, ready for fight or flight. Or they may be emotions like love and caring that release oxytocin and helps one feel calm and relaxed. This part of the brain is the first part of the brain to be created at conception. It is therefore the oldest part of the brain and therefore the most active and powerful. Children and young people are especially more influenced by this part of the brain, compared to the prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex at the front of the brain is the last part of the brain to form and mature and usually does by 24 years old generally. This part of the brain is connected with thinking, reflecting, analysing, past-present-future awareness, cause and effect understanding, and seeing things from other people’s perspectives. This is why we often criticise young people for being so self-absorbed, egocentric or finding it difficult to see a future consequence of a current choice or seeing the effect of a choice they would like to make in the now. It is not that they choose to, it is because their prefrontal cortex is not developed enough yet and the ‘instinctual-emotion’ part of the brain, at the back, is more influential.
Remember those terrible twos when children stamp their feet and say ‘I want…’ or ‘No… I don’t want to…’ They are in the here-and-now emotion of their seeking instinct. They want gratification now and cannot see anything outside of that. Parents with young children can relate to these kinds of meltdowns. But the same is also true for when parents are having a meltdown in front of their children or young person. The young person cannot always understand why the parent is behaving so irrationally or emotionally because they are also automatically reacting via their own emotional systems. When a parent, who is supposed to be their protector and carer, can no longer be in that role because they are venting with anger, rage and aggression, crying with uncontrollable sobbing or pouring all their financial problems and relationship problems to their children, the children respond with a trauma response initiated by this limbic system. They may feel anger, a need to flee and abandon the situation, feel paralysed and confused not knowing what to do or how to do it. Their limbic system may initiate the people-pleasing behaviours, so the child starts to give the parent what they need/crave. The child may begin to feel anxious and even depressed (a behaviour that suggests the child is experiencing persistent traumatic situations over a long period of time). These responses in the child are accompanied with intense chemical reactions in their body that over long periods of time and frequent episodes can cause harm to their body. Adrenaline and cortisol are examples of chemicals that are ok in small infrequent doses, but regular episodes can harm brain development, long term emotional dysregulation, a paralysis of their learning and concentration skills, their academic work suffers and social problems adapting to school life and peer friendships.
To help children, parents need to be calm, positive and activate the thinking, reflection and information processing parts of the brain – the prefrontal cortex. When the child feels safe and secure the back of the brain, limbic system switches off, and the safe and thinking parts of the brain go on. Parents can say things like: ‘tell me how you feel…use your words…do you feel safe?…what can I do to help you?…I want you to feel safe and help other people feel safe and loved and listened to…’ This conversational process is very healing and calming because it switches on the language centres and switches off the reaction/instinct/emotion centre. We will explore how to work with children who have severe meltdowns in Part 2 of this series.
Parent Venting, Offloading and Hate Exposure
I often hear young people talking about people, not just parents, but also other adults and peers criticising and offloading, venting and being angry. When adults are constantly criticising other people, family members, neighbours, friends, partners and even people on TV, young people internalise a long list of values, strategies and techniques that they take forward into their own relationships or they grow up thinking, ‘I will never do that in front of my kids’. This venting and offloading in front of the kids damages the parent-child relationship and sets up patterns that get inherited. If your mum always criticised and nagged the father all the time, offloaded and vented their anger at him, more than likely the children will grow up and start doing that to their partner. If the daughter sees the mother behaving like that then they are more likely to do that to all men. If the son sees their father behave aggressively and critically to the mother then they will do that with their partners one day too. This article in the link explores these dynamics more. Do explore…
One of the more recent patterns to arise in the therapy room is exposure to hate. Children and young people are bringing in values and opinions that are usually expressed by older generations. One of my therapist colleagues talked about their young clients talking more about racist, xenophobic, homophobic and transphobic views. Young people think there is a threat out there that they need to worry about, something that presents a challenge to many therapists and how to work with those issues.
Conspiracy theories and paranoia are rife online and some parents over-disclose their own ‘toxic views’ inappropriately in front of their children. Sometimes when I hear the young person’s views being expressed, it is not the words of a child or young person that I hear, but words that are being repeated from their home or things that are being repeated from online from another adult. Again these issues cultivate fear, anger and hatred; all very strong emotions that come from the limbic system that are a direct response to perceptions and feelings of lack of safety even when there is no threat to be had in the immediate environment. When young people come together as a collective at school or university it creates a form of emotional amplification that sparks off paranoia and fear that young people and children do not need to be consumed by. When I see young people radicalised by fear, hatred and paranoia I wonder where our society is heading…
Generational Parenting
Adults and some children and young people in therapy talk about family traits that get handed down through the generations. Granny treated her daughter (the child’s mother) in exactly the same way as what mummy does to the child in therapy. They talk about their mum or dad talking about granny and grandad and how they behaved. Sometimes these patterns are inherited. Gran and Grandad argued and poured out their problems in front of their children so when their parents grew up and had them, they did the same; the pattern is generational, but so many young people vow never to do that to their own children when they grow up. They vow to break the pattern…hopeful to hear.
Parents need to be mindful of not presenting high-intensity emotional episodes on their children as it is a form of harm and even abuse. Long-term effects for these children and young people mean they lose their childhood because they need personal therapy and support at school or a private therapist to help them process these episodes of their parents at home. Childhood should be protected and nurtured. Children and young people should not be exposed to traumatising adult content.
Parents who over-disclose to their children and young people need to reflect and speak to an adult and maybe get therapy to process their situations and emotions. Sharing deep-seated anxieties like complex grief, dire financial situations, when a partner may be abusing and being violent, where there are frequent and intense episodes of arguing and fighting are all forms of abuse to a child or young person.
Controlling and Coercive Parenting
Parents may also be highly critical and over-controlling with their children because they may have a form of compulsive behaviours, and these behaviours can be replicated in the children and young people. One of our human needs is the need for autonomy and control and I have found that children and young people who have parents who are very controlling tend to develop eating issues and obsessive and compulsive habits. Controlling and coercive parents may also amplify and exaggerate a child or young person’s insecurities about their identity and make them worse. They may also develop and/or amplify obsessive and compulsive patterns in the child or young person. Where they feel their life is controlled and monitored so much, youngsters can internalise this pattern and begin to control their own identity characteristics, as well as what and when they eat. They may develop intrusive and compulsive thoughts and opinions about themselves and others.
To help counteract this parents need to help children and young people initiate and develop their passions and interests, social interactions, choosing sports, careers, jobs that are not to please others but to please themselves. If parents are too critical or controlling, they can shut down the child’s ability to choose and do things for themselves because they fear not pleasing the parent. It is not healthy for children and young people to develop people pleasing behaviours to keep controlling and critical parents off their back. The parents are creating a bigger problem further down the link in the young person’s life.
We need to share healthy emotions with children and young people. We need to help them process and grow. Examples of healthy emotions are sadness, worry, joy and happiness, connections of caring and support, love and safety, fear and anger, loss and grief. When these feelings arise, we talk about them with children and young people to normalise them and understand that beneath an emotion is a need met or unmet as Panksepp explains so well.
Anger means a need is not being met or the individual is not meeting a need for themselves or someone else.
Fear means there may be a threat in the environment that needs to be addressed. When we feel safe and good it means people around us are doing the right thing to meet our needs – food, warmth, clothing, safety.
Panic-grief may arise because we feel alone and not part of a group.
Jaak Panksepp helps us understand and realise these important needs that are common to all mammals, even our pets.
We also talk to children and young people when these feelings and emotions get too much and what to do if they are starting to harm us. In significant amounts these emotions can cause long-term harm. They can destroy feelings of safety and trust with others and create a feeling of risk and distrust within the self; that is, the child can start to hate themselves because they have these emotions they don’t understand or don’t want to have. Addictive behaviours may develop and other self-harming patterns like cutting. Therefore, parents need to be aware of the impact their emotional episodes can have on their children and if they feel they are getting too much they need to seek help and avoid over-disclosing to their children.
A happy family is based on needs met – positive attachment relationships, feeling safe and secure, respect for autonomy and control, finding greater purpose and meaning in family life and life at large, feeling that we all have a place in society and can give something of worth and value, and experiencing joy and happiness in our relationships, workplaces and society, having creative and artistic and physically healthy activities to channel our energy. When children have these needs met they feel safe, can trust others and in that environment can trust themselves.
I heard an inspiring story about a group of people called the Fathers and Daughters Group. It was a group to cultivate positive relationships between dads and their daughters. There was a group of about 20 of them and they would visit a fun place together. It created a network for dads to talk and share and a place for young girls to make friends with their peers. It also created an opportunity for dads to deepen their relationship of trust and connection without mobile phones and distractions getting in the way. It made the girls feel loved and tended to and the dads feel they can talk with their child. Creating positive experiences that promote safety, connection and love is important and allows a relationship to grow and where necessary help the young person know they have a caring adult they can approach if they need support.
In the next part of this series I am going to explore some of the main issues that parents talk about when they are raising children and some of the frustrations and fears so many parents have to face and how we can support parents and how they can self-care more effectively.
If you would like to talk about some of these issues then you call me for a free consultation on
martinhandy@protonmail.com
07864 029868
Or call the Samaritans available 24/7
116 123
Support Links
Websites
https://www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/support-for-parents/
https://www.familylives.org.uk/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/parents
Books
Axline, V. M., (1990) Dibs: In Search of Self. Penguin Books, UK.
Bradshaw, J., (1996) Bradshaw On: The Family: A New Way of Creating Solid Self-Esteem. HCI; USA.
Erikson, E. (1968) Identity, Youth and Crisis. Faber and Faber, UK.
Haley, J. (1993) Uncommon Therapy: The Psychiatric Techniques of Milton H. Erickson. W W Norton and Company, USA.
Mahler, M. (1975) The Psychological Birth of the Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation. Basic Books Inc., USA.
Panksepp, J. & Biven, L. (2012) The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions. W. W. Norton and Company, USA.
Stallard, P. (2019) Think Good, Feel Good. Wiley, UK.
