| Parents who work at being 'good parents' often get into power struggles with their children. As parents, we have strong beliefs about the way our children should behave but our children, for various reasons, frequently resist these ideas. These days it is not enough to wield parental authority: parents have to be smarter about teaching their children the lessons of life.
According to Gottman's latest book, the emotional interactions between child and parent are of utmost importance. Parents who can help their children understand their emotions and how they influence behaviour are likely to have greater success in shaping the child's behaviour. To this effect, Gottman's book aims to provide parents with a theoretical as well as a practical basis to develop their children's emotional intelligence.
The type of successful parent-child interactions to which Gottman refers includes: parents becoming aware of their child's emotions, parents recognising their child's emotion as an opportunity for closeness and teaching, listening empathetically - validating the child's feelings, helping the child find words to label the emotions they are having and setting limits while exploring strategies to solve the problem at hand.
In his book Gottman shows parents how they can help their children better harness their emotional reactions by providing them with more direct feedback about their emotional state. He provides a swag of typical parent-child interactions that many Australian parents will readily recognise and be able to transpose into their own family situations.
For example, if a boy hits his little sister it might be quite easy for a parent to say: 'You shouldn't have hit your sister - go to your room.' In short, this type of response would be quite typical of many parents' reactions but it doesn't help the child identify the roots of his reactive behaviour. It is likely that when his sister annoys him again he'll react the same way because he doesn't know how to better harness his emotions.
On the other hand, if parents are able to put their understandable annoyance on hold while focusing on the child's emotions, they can help the child not only to identify unacknowledged emotions, but also to 'track' his emotions and better identify the links between reactive behaviour and emotions. In time the child can be trained to manage his emotions and behaviour more appropriately.
According to Gottman, the key to successful parenting is not found in complex theories, elaborate family rules or convoluted formulas for behaviour. It is based on your deepest feelings of love and affection for your child and is demonstrated through empathy and understanding. The Heart of Parenting is about being involved in children's lives when it counts.
The Heart of Parenting by John Gottman, published by Bloomsbury, 1997.
Michael Hawton is a counselling psychologist based on the Northern Rivers of NSW.
This page was last built on 21/1/03; 1:06:10 PM. It was originally posted on 27/2/99; 8:48:07 AM.
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