The Counterintuitive Secret to Raising Kind Kids

This week's article summary is The Counterintuitive Secret to Raising Kind Kids.

There’s been a common motif to the past few article summaries: significant to helping children grow into kind, considerate adults is parents and teachers spending a lot of time talking with kids about and describing the full gamut of feelings from happiness to frustration to anger, especially when they’re young.

As the summary points out, a stern talking to or a lecture on the importance of sharing after kids misbehave does not help a child learn to share, be empathetic, or develop self-regulation. Punishment can actually result in the child recognizing he/she needs to be sneakier do as not to get caught. Dealing only with the infraction, i.e., providing a consequence/punishment, doesn’t deal with the cause of the misbehavior or help children learn about how their actions affect others. 

As I mentioned in Wednesday’s faculty meeting, the most provocative point from the article for me is that before children can understand others’ feelings, they need to understand and gradually learn to harness theirs. I’ve been in education for over 40 years and I wish I had learned this long ago as it would have dramatically changed how I worked with my students.

It can be a challenge for a teacher or parent to help kids voice how they feel after they’ve gotten into a spat, argument, or power struggle. Our tendency as adults often is to try to quickly fix situations and right the wrong. Yet we must keep the bigger goal for our kids in the forefront as well: guide them to learn from their both their successes and missteps. 

Regarding the ability to self-regulate emotions, ample research illustrates that we all need to be able to ’name it to tame it.’ Or as we say at Trinity, we helps our students ‘develop a strong sense of self and a sincere care, concern for others.’

Joe

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The world, as most of us have sadly noticed, seems to be filled with an increasing number of jerks lately. Most of us don’t want out kids to grow up and join their ranks. Which is why I'm pretty sure science writer Melinda Wenner Moyer's new book will fly off the shelves. It's brilliantly title How to Raise Kids Who Aren't A**holes and offers a deep dive into what research says about making sure your darling offspring end up kind and generous. 

In a recent interview with Scientific American, Wenner Moyer offered a sneak peak of what you'll find within. In the interview, she stresses that a lot of good science has been done on how to make sure your kid doesn't end up being a jerk that offers parents plenty of guidance. Some of it is quite counter-intuitive.

How to teach your kid empathy: Take the question of how to make sure your child is kind and generous. Almost every parent has experienced the embarrassment of your child being the one who refuses to share his or her toys on the playground, and most of us react the same way  -- you take your kid aside and deliver an age appropriate chat on the importance of sharing for friendship while pointing out how unpleasant it feels to be the one whose excluded from a toy or game. There's nothing wrong with this age-old technique of trying to lecture your kid into kindness, but Wenner Moyer claims research shows there is a more effective way. It's just not one that's instantly obvious to most of us. The secret to raising kind kids, according to science, is to talk about feelings more. This is counterintuitive. What your three-year-old is probably feeling when he refuses to share his ball is that he would like to play with that ball and sharing it with others is not very fun. So why would encouraging him to talk about how much he wants to keep his toy for himself lead to him willingly giving it up to another child? "Helping our kids understand their feelings gives them the capacity to understand others' feelings and helps them make decisions to help their friends and be more generous toward them," Wenner Moyer explains. "This is part of something called theory of mind--how to understand others' feelings." And it's not just talking about your child's feelings that helps. It's talking about your own too." Research suggests that the more parents talk about their feelings and other peoples', the more kids are likely to be generous and helpful," she adds. 

High EQ helps kids thrive: Helping your kid recognize and name their feelings and those of others, as well as developing strategies to cope with less-than-pleasant emotions, might seem like a small thing or too touchy feely for some tastes. But Wenner Moyer isn't the only one pointing out that the effects of this simple parenting move can end up being profound. For example, in her TEDx talk family therapist Lael Stone explains that the first step to developing the kind of high EQ that pays huge personal and professional dividends later in life is speaking openly and empathetically with your child about their feelings (and yours too). This teaches your child to recognize and sit with their own emotions, Stone explains, which later enables them to recognize and empathize with the emotions of others. While it may feel counterintuitive to name and validate your child's feelings when all you want them to do is think of the other kid's, science suggests making space to talk about emotions Isn't likely to turn them into self-obsessed navel gazers. Instead, it teaches them about the power of emotions generally, and understanding and acknowledging the emotions of others is the foundation of adult kindness and generosity.