The healing power of parenting ’emotional coaching’

If the primary responsibility of parents is to keep their children safe and free from suffering, what can be done when circumstances conspire against them?

Whether it’s a death in the family, an injury or illness, or the threat of war, those responsible for a child must not only manage their own feelings, but also negotiate conversations that can be devastating with young minds that still struggle to understand the world around you.

Even news of seemingly distant events can generate great anxiety and disquiet, which need to be processed in the family. But the challenges will be much greater if the child himself is directly hit by the events.

Unfortunately, professional help may not be available. “For many children, parents are the only people who will offer support after a traumatic experience,” says Sarah Halligan, a professor of psychology at the University of Bath in the UK.

It goes without saying that love and understanding must be the basis of these dialogues. But recent research indicates that the specific tenor of interactions and the language used to address events can also have profound effects on children’s processing of emotions.

In addition to providing immediate comfort, family conversations can shape a child’s memories of what happened when his mind returns to it in the future, and the ways he will react to future adversity. In fact, if you think about your own reactions to traumatic events today, it is very likely that you are repeating conversations from your own childhood that have been internalized.

“Some people think that if they talk about negative events, they will traumatize the child or make the situation worse,” said Melanie Noel, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. “But these difficult conversations can teach children empathy, understanding and the ability to regulate their emotions.”

social sponges

It is well known that parent-child interactions play a key role in all types of cognitive development.

“Children’s brains are still developing and parents provide important support and structure to help them navigate their emotional worlds,” said Dylan Gee, a professor of psychology at Yale University in Connecticut, USA.

From birth, children’s attention will be constantly guided by indications from the adults around them. Realizing their parents’ fear can help them avoid, for example, a potentially dangerous animal or an untrustworthy person.

As a child learns to speak, caregivers’ words will also guide their thinking and reasoning, with repercussions that go far beyond knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Even the most casual conversations can shape a child’s memories so that they stitch the details into a narrative and begin to understand their feelings.

After a visit to the barbershop, a parent may ask how the child felt when the clipper went over his head, and if he felt ticklish. Or you can ask if the child was scared by the water sprayer. They can say how proud they were to see their child overcome his shyness, which reinforces the child’s sense of courage.

This better understanding of their emotions, in turn, can shape the child’s behavior so that they pay more attention to their actions, without giving in to their impulses.

In mid-2010, Diana Leyva, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania (United States), filmed 210 pairs of parents and children as they talked about positive and negative experiences in the children’s lives. During these conversations, some parents asked far more questions than others – and Leyva concluded that this could predict children’s behavior at school a few years later.

Children who had been encouraged to analyze their feelings were better able to maintain their attention and control their impulses in the classroom. Interestingly, conversations about negative experiences seemed to make the most difference, perhaps because these uncomfortable feelings are the most difficult to understand and regulate without parental guidance.

Gee calls this kind of productive conversation “emotional coaching.”

“Examples of effective emotional coaching include helping children identify their feelings, respecting and legitimizing children’s feelings, helping them identify ways to deal with more difficult emotions, and providing opportunities to openly discuss children’s emotions,” she explains.

Gee’s research examined how families coped with the pandemic. She found that parenting emotional coaching mitigated the effects of stress during this difficult time so that it had less of an effect on children’s mental health.

Talking about traumatic events

Considering these findings, it is only natural that parental behavior has a powerful influence on children’s reactions to other types of pain and trauma.

A few years ago, Sarah Halligan’s team at the University of Bath invited 132 families with a child who had suffered a traumatic event (such as a car accident or house fire) that resulted in a hospital visit.

In addition to answering various questionnaires, parents and children were asked to have a recorded conversation about the event, which was analyzed by the team.

Halligan concluded that parents’ assessment of events could predict children’s PTSD symptoms six months after the event. And it is important to point out that this occurred even after the parents controlled the child’s initial reaction.

The worst feature appeared to be “catastrophic thinking,” in which the father focused exclusively on the threat and its possible permanent influence on the child’s life. In these cases, the child was more likely to have lasting symptoms.

To some extent, the parents’ terror-laden beliefs had become self-fulfilling prophecies. But this does not mean that caregivers should soften the event, nor belittle the suffering.

“It’s important for parents to really recognize what their kids are going through. They shouldn’t pretend it’s not stressful,” advises Halligan. “But sometimes we see parents increasing the seriousness of the event.”

This exaggeration of the traumatic event and its effects appeared to lead to worse outcomes compared to families in which the father emphasized the child’s ability to recover from the trauma.

Further evidence comes from Melanie Noel’s research at the University of Calgary. In one experiment, her team recruited 112 children who underwent an operation to remove their tonsils.

Soon after the operation, each child rated the pain they were experiencing, based on an illustrated questionnaire that showed different levels of discomfort. Two weeks later, the team recorded a conversation between the parent and the child describing the experience and their recovery, which was analyzed for level of elaboration and emotional content. And finally, one month after the operation, the researchers interviewed the child again, to determine his recollection of the surgery and how much discomfort he had felt.

Overall, more detailed discussions of the children’s general emotions seemed to help them understand what happened. But this did not occur when the parents focused excessively on the physical pain suffered by the child. In these cases, the children recalled the operation and their recovery as being much more upsetting than they reported right after the surgery.

“Whenever you talk about some painful event, especially with children, you open up that memory to be altered and distorted,” says Noel. “And some kids develop these exaggerated, frightening memories.”

She argues that this is important, as much research has shown that our memories of pain seem to shape our future experiences. If we remember surgery as being very painful, we will be much more anxious – and suffer more discomfort – when we have another surgery in the future.

Noel and his PhD student Maria Pavlova designed a short training program on the best ways to have more constructive conversations.

They advise parents to avoid talking too much about physical pain. Instead, they are encouraged to focus on the most positive elements of the experience and praise the child for how well he or she was able to deal with that discomfort.

Consider, for example, an interaction in which the child recalls all the tears shed during the event. “I cried a lot,” she says. It is important not to overlook this fact, but the parent can try to remind the child how quickly he recovered. “Yes, you did, but only for a few minutes, remember? Because later we had ice cream.”

The parent can then emphasize the kindness of the staff and praise the child for dealing with that pain by taking a deep breath.

To prove the benefits of this intervention, Noel and Pavlova again invited families with a child who had had his tonsils removed. After the surgery, the parents received a short training session.

The intervention worked exactly as planned – reducing the children’s tendency to exaggerate their discomfort in later reminiscences – and formed more nuanced and realistic recollections of the event.

While the intervention was not specifically designed to alter conversations about physical pain, Noel suspects that reframing conversations in this way (so that they emphasize overcoming in addition to suffering) could help children process many other types of trauma.

choose your moment

For any family dealing with a traumatic event, one of the biggest challenges can be finding the right time to initiate these conversations.

Halligan says some parents try to avoid talking about it (even among themselves) if the memories add to the child’s suffering. But this can create the feeling that the subject is some kind of taboo.

“Children can often fear that they will upset their parents and end up being silent on the subject,” according to Halligan. For her, it may be best to allow the subject to come naturally.

Regularly asking your child how he or she feels should usually give him the space he needs to talk about what is troubling him. “You need to make sure your child knows they can have the conversation with you and actively provide those opportunities to talk,” she adds.

Even if the child does not talk directly about the traumatic event, he or she may be able to talk about other stressors, which can provide a good opportunity for emotional coaching.

Children may be more likely to open up when you are taking care of other daily activities, such as riding in the car or taking a walk in the park. “Parents often find good opportunities to talk to children when other things are going on,” says Halligan.

If you then follow the research-inspired suggestions—such as valuing the child’s feelings, emphasizing the good over the bad, and reaffirming the child’s ability to cope—you may be providing more comprehensive emotional techniques that will last for decades.

“If we want to encourage resilience in children, we need to teach parents how to have constructive conversations with them about traumatic, scary and stressful topics,” says Noel. “This could avoid a lot of problems in the future.”

* David Robson is an award-winning science writer and author of the book The Expectation Effect: How Your Thinking Can Transform Your Life (in free translation from English), published in early 2022 in the UK by Canongate and in the US by Henry Holt. Your Twitter account is @d_a_robson.

This text was originally published here