Saturday, January 13, 2018

Anger—effect on your child

Effect of Anger on your Child

Anger has a silent but permanent effect on your child. Anger can affect your professional life, harm relationships, and has significant health implications. But quite apart from how it affects you personally, it affects your children. Children of angry adults have been seen to be more aggressive, oppositional and non-compliant. They are also less empathetic; and display poor overall social adjustment. Delinquency and anti-social behaviour are also more common in such children.

Is anger hereditary or learned?

  • A child experiences emotions from birth, but how he/she handles emotions is largely determined by learning. While a child may have an irritable temperament, no child is born with temper tantrums. A child learns that throwing a temper tantrum is rewarding (gets attention or gets him what he wants).
  • From infancy onward, children learn by imitation. As parents, we are the first role models. Our children watch us; and then model their behaviour on ours. A child will for example; notice that we talk to our elders respectfully, but that we talk brusquely, even rudely to our maids. They will soon behave the same way.So it is with anger. Children observe how we react in difficult situations, how we react to provocation; how we deal with differences. Do we negotiate and listen to the other person’s point of view? Or do we react immediately and aggressively? Do we talk amicably and or do we get what we want by threats and abuses? How we behave and act today is what our children will emulate tomorrow.
What is the effect on a child when adults behave angrily in front of them? It depends a great deal on the age, developmental stage, personality and emotional maturity of the child.
  • Young children, particularly, are scared and confused when they see adults who are ‘out of control’. When it happens often, they learn to think of this behaviour as ‘normal’; and they assume that verbal or physical aggression is the ‘normal’ way to deal with differences, to control others, or get what one wants.
  • Very often, children are at the receiving end of parental anger. This may be due to unfair and unrealistic expectations that parents have from their children; or misplaced anger that has its basis somewhere else. Fear, insecurity, and poor self-esteem occur almost universally. Withdrawal, anxiety, depression are some of the negative consequences of such anger. This affects optimal performance in school and peer relationships. 
  • Alternatively, the child may learn to defend itself by increasingly oppositional behaviour, bullying younger siblings or other children, or engage in other disruptive behaviours –truancy, aggression and violence.
  • Parental anger deprives children of the basic need for security and comfort in their own homes. It also perpetuates the legacy of anger and aggression; conflict and fear.

Anger management strategies for interacting with children

  • Stay calm when interacting with children. If you are fuming because you were held up in a traffic jam, cool off with a shower before interacting with your child.
  • Physical abuse is a strict no.
  • Try and understand the underlying issues behind your anger. Is your frustration resulting from an unsatisfactory day at work? Is your disappointment with your child’s academic performance related to your own expectations?
  • Learn about your child—his needs, his temperament, learning styles, even the normal development process. This will go a long way in modifying your unreal expectations.
It is possible to break the destructive chain of anger and to create an environment of safety and security in your home for your children. Start today.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Talk - not TV - for your toddler

No TV for babies
Turn off the television and speak to your toddler. Talking is the best thing you could do today for your child’s psychological development. Talking is an interactive process in which your child exercises a core feature of being human - communicating through speech. Your child's vocabulary is directly proportional to the amount of time you spend talking.

Talking primes your child for independence. Speech evolves through attempts to communicate needs and feelings. Infants and toddlers are driven by evolution to master this complex process. You, the parent, play a key role in this two-way interaction. Infancy and toddler-hood are stages for developing secure bonding and attachment. The child is primed to bond with the mother or caregiver. The initial bond is secured by direct contact with the caregiver - through warmth, touch and voice. A secure attachment bond enables the infant seeks to explore the environment by attempts to crawl and later walk. The exploring toddler returns often to the parent to re-experience attachment security. It is here that talking plays a crucial role in maintaining the attachment bond at a distance. The child is then able to explore the environment away from direct contact with the parent.

Your one-year-old is psychologically unable to follow or learn from video. Some parents are convinced that certain TV channels are ‘educational’ for their toddler. The ability to comprehend video arises between 18 to 24 months of age (Pempek 2010). Prior to 2 years of age TV has little or no educational impact on the child, whatever the claims by media groups vying for their ‘eyeballs’. TV programming meant for 2-year-olds delays language and vocabulary development (AAP 2011, Zimmerman 2007).

Television is not a substitute for parenting. Parents leave the TV on to distract the child while they are engaged otherwise. Television holds the toddlers attention through its series of changing visual stimuli. This visual stimulus is powerful and distracting. While interacting with parents with the TV on in the background, the toddler is forced to shift attention to the TV once every 20 seconds. Even in adolescents, background TV adversely affects mental processing, memory and comprehension. Having the TV always on in the toddlers home interferes with unstructured play time that is critical to developing problem-solving skills and creativity. Repeated research has shown no developmental benefits for television exposure in infancy (Schmidt 2009, ).

Talk to and play with your children. Television is a medium that encourages passivity. TV delays vocabulary growth and language development in toddlers. Turn off the TV.

References
  1. Academy of Pediatrics. Policy Statement. Media Use by Children Younger Than 2 Years. Council on Communications and Media. PEDIATRICS Vol. 128 No. 5November 1, 2011. pp. 1040 -1045 (doi: 10.1542/peds.2011-1753)
  2. Pempek TA, Kirkorian HL, Richards JE, Anderson DR, Lund AF, Stevens M. Video comprehensibility and attention in very young children. Dev Psychol. 2010 Sep;46(5):1283-93. 
  3. Schmidt ME, Rich M, Rifas-Shiman SL, Oken E, Taveras EM. Television viewing in infancy and child cognition at 3 years of age in a US cohort. Pediatrics. 2009 Mar;123(3):e370-5. 
  4. Zimmerman FJ, Christakis DA, Meltzoff AN. Associations between media viewing and language development in children under age 2 years. J Pediatr. 2007 Oct;151(4):364-8. Epub 2007 Aug 7.