Columns, Opinion

The Lack of Emotional Awareness in Parenting

I think we can all agree that parenting is a huge responsibility; after all, you’re taking care of an entire human being. There are many steps when it comes to the physical developmental stages of a child—when a child begins to talk, to walk, etc. There are many books and guides that concern these topics. But what about the emotional and psychological aspect of child development? 

A child’s emotional wellbeing is often ignored , and parents are one of the biggest culprits of this mistake. Emotional intelligence and healthy coping are  things  that don’t  come naturally and need  to be taught, and who better to teach these things  than the parents themselves? After all, they’re the ones who are supposed to teach us everything, from reading and writing to basic, polite, social interaction. 

Unfortunately, “coping with emotions is one of the things a lot of us don’t get from parents…generally speaking, we aren’t taught how to process big emotions,” says Ms. Dybdahl, San Mateo High School’s health teacher. And it’s not necessarily their fault.

This absence of emotional intelligence goes back through generations, and this problem shines through the lack of expression. There is a constant taboo attached to negative emotions that are especially linked to mental illness, such as sadness and stress, and this can travel down generations since it continues to be unaddressed. Because of this, people tend to lock those feelings away until it becomes unbearable. This type of repression is common in everyday life and because of that, parents tend to inadvertently advertise this as a normal behavior to their children, even if they tell children otherwise. 

“Children don’t really listen to what [parents] say,” says Ms. Dybdahl. She also mentions a stat that stated “Children only listen to 10% of what we say and they watch about 90% of what we do.” In this case, when children see that their parents are practicing unhealthy repression of negative emotions, they will continue to do the same, leading future generations into an nearly infinite vicious cycle.

The entirety of this situation boils down to one issue: parents just don’t know that they’re doing anything wrong. Their constant habit of repression is just unconscious behavior, and most have not been told that there is anything wrong with their parenting . However, this does not mean that we can let this problem persist; it has already plagued us for generations. One step we can all take is to analyze our own emotional behaviors and habits and determine whether or not they are healthy. 

I think one important question to ask yourself is, “Would I want my children to do the same?” The important part of this is to have the person recognize that some of their behaviors are not necessarily favorable and that help may be needed before having a child. “I really think it starts with yourself,” says Ms. Dybdahl. “If you’re not comfortable feeling your own pain, how are you going to walk your child through it when they’re feeling pain?”