| According to Martin Seligman, children can be inoculated against most forms of depression by being shown how to manage their self talk better. Seligman's research shows that a child's explanatory style can be pessimistic or optimistic, depending on what the young person has been taught to use. It is how a child explains the causes of a bad event in their life that can lead that child to feed depressed and confused.
For instance, a teenage girl who feels she is a 'dork' and acted stupidly when her invitation to a boy is rejected, is creating negative generalisations that result in her feeling miserable, hopeless and unlovable. Often parents and professionals are unaware of how much negative self talk kids expose themselves to.
The key to explanatory style is accuracy. The three critical dimensions that a child or young person uses to explain any good or bad event that happens to them are:
- Permanence (whether the event occurs sometimes versus always)
- Pervasiveness (specific versus global - that is, whether it happens
across situations)
- Personalisation (internal versus external - deciding who or what is the
cause).
The first goal towards improving children's explanatory style is to make sure the child takes realistic responsibility. That is, if the circumstances of a bad event in a child's life are accurately described, then an appropriate level of responsibility is applied to the various parts of the problem. The second goal is to get a child to use behavioural rather than general self blame. So, rather than saying 'I'm a dork and stupid for asking Kyle out', saying 'Kyle wasn't able to come out because he had to go and visit his father this weekend'. General self blame, because it is permanent and pervasive, not only damages self esteem but produces long-lasting and global passivity and despair.
Not surprisingly, children learn some of their explanatory style from parents, teachers and other adult caregivers.
Michael Hawton is a concelling psychologist based on the Northern Rivers of NSW.
This page was last built on 21/01/03. It was originally posted on 22/1/99; 3:53:57 PM.
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