The Best Thing You Can do For the Emotional Health of Your Child
In the modern era, there is a lot of discussion around how to raise emotionally healthy children.
It seems, for the most part, parents want the same thing. We want our children to know they are loved, we want to guide them toward happiness, cause as little harm to them as possible, help them have healthy relationships, develop the ability to self-regulate and persevere through the ups and downs of life.
Out of those desires has come a wide array of parenting techniques and approaches on how to make those dreams come to fruition. In general though, there are two styles of parenting that most people use (even fluctuate between), permissive or authoritarian. I’ll explain both now through an example.
Say you’re trying to make dinner and the garbage can in your kitchen is overflowing, it smells, and it’s starting to attract flies. It obviously needs to go out. But you can’t do it without seriously risking burning dinner. Your eight-year-old son is in the other room. You can have him take out the garbage or you can wait until dinner is done and do it yourself. What do you do?
We’ll begin with the permissive approach to parenting. The permissive parent treats a child’s emotions as king or queen of the family. A parent can make a suggestion or ask the child to do something but, through an expression of emotions, the child can accept or decline the invitation as he or she sees fit. So, in this scenario, the permissive parent is unlikely to ask the child to take the garbage out at all. The permissive parent doesn’t want to overburden or bother the child with anything. If they do (because it’s really disgusting!), the child is in total control of the situation. He can simply say something like, “My tummy doesn’t feel very good mommy,” and, not wanting to question or upset the child or because it’s simply easier, the parent will just let it go. The parent, if the situation is really bad, may even apologize for even suggesting the child help in this scenario.
For these parents, love is about understanding the child, eliminating as much pain as possible and attempting, with all their might, to ensure as close to a perpetual state of happiness as possible. It never involves challenging or pushing the child. To them, the child will be emotionally well if the parent validates their emotions without exception and simply lets the child be who they are.
On the other side of the parenting spectrum are the strict authoritarians. Those who consider emotions to be irrelevant. This parent never asks the child to do anything, they command the child. This parent creates an expectation through strict discipline and harsh consequences (especially of mistakes) that a parental command is to be followed without exception. What the child thinks, feels or desires pales in comparison to whatever success looks like. The choice for the child is simple, succeed or face severe consequences. A child of an authoritarian parent would take out the garbage if not for any reason other than fear of the wrath of the parent. If, God forbid, they did protest the punishment would be so swift and severe that the child would never forget it.
For these parents, love is about molding behavior. Discipline, responsibility, upstanding behavior, and virtuous action are the only focus. The inner world receives no consideration. Listening to the child, validating their emotions, understanding their perspective, none of that fits into the equation. It will only prove to weaken the child and stand in the way of their development. To them, a child will be emotionally healthy only if they are pushed and molded by the parent.
Both responses create a major gap in the emotional development of a child. On the one hand, left to their own devices, if children are never asked to take on any responsibility, if they are never challenged by their parents, and if they never experience “no”, it will cripple them for life. They will be afraid of everything. Doubt will overwhelm them. And everything in the world will seem so unfair. On the other hand, if a child is never taught how to navigate the inner life, if they are never validated or listened to, it will make it incredibly difficult for them to have anything resembling a healthy relationship with themselves or others. They may find success in the world and be an excellent employee but they will have no idea how to deal with their emotions and will be extremely likely to develop an addiction as an emotionally repressive tool just to get through the day.
The foundational mistake made by the parenting styles listed above, isn’t that one fosters weakness or that the other makes love predicated on success. It’s that they both unconsciously make the decision to take out the garbage about the parent and not the child. Their parenting style is more a reflection of their own needs than it is a response to the needs of the child. They may tell themselves that they are responding out of love for the child but they actually aren’t.
The permissive parent isn’t allowing the child to control whether they do the task or not for the child. They are doing it because they cannot emotionally handle a rupture with the child. Permissive parents respond out of fear, not love. Or worse yet, they may secretly want him to remain in a state of perpetual need to satisfy their own need to be needed. The same is true for the authoritarian parent. That parent responds out of a need to stay safe. He or she is petrified of their own inner world so they avoid it with their own child out of personal necessity. Or, worse yet, they rely on a command and control approach because they like how it feels. They like playing god and they like the feeling of having total control over someone in their life. Either way, everyone loses.
So, what is the proper, emotionally healthy, response to the situation? Should the child take out the garbage or not? And what should the conversation (if any) look like?
To find the answer, let’s look to the defining quality of God’s parenting style.
Well, while I cannot claim to fully understand God or how he parents, one thing is clear: the defining quality of his parenting style is a unidirectional love. In other words, his love for his children flows in one direction. God gives and we receive. He neither needs nor expects anything in return. Unlike the parenting styles described above, anything he asks or demands of us is for our good not his. We can’t do anything for God. We can’t take care of him, help him or protect him. As his child, everything he does, he does for our benefit, whether it feels good or hurts.
God’s unidirectional love is THE foundation of healthy parenting. A parent practicing unidirectional love never burdens their child with fulfilling any of their own emotional needs. They don’t rely on their children to fulfill their needs, dreams or desires. And they do not ask their children to fix their problems or serve as their emotional support system.
Better yet, when love is unidirectional, the parent is free to focus entirely on the child and the child is free to simply receive from the parent. More specifically, a parent healthy enough to practice unidirectional love is free to be responsive to the child, to see the situation for what it is, and to set proper limits for the benefit of the child. At a foundational level, whether the child takes out the garbage or doesn’t take out the garbage has nothing to do with the parent or the state of the kitchen. The goal (whether we always succeed in it or not is a different story!) is to make it about the child and not about us as parents.
So, what does that actually look like in this scenario? How would a parent operating from a place of unidirectional love solve the garbage/dinner conundrum?
Well, that depends on the state of the child, doesn’t it?
The parent calls their son into the kitchen and asks, “Son, can you take out the garbage?” Now, since the child is above the age of reason (unlike if they were younger) the parent also provides a reason for the ask. “The garbage is overflowing, flies are everywhere, and I don’t want them to get into the dinner.”
The child then has the opportunity to respond. For the sake of the exercise, let’s say he responds with, “I can’t do it, my tummy hurts and that garbage is making me feel sick.”
The parent then has a choice. Given the history of the child, how they look, and what their day was like, they get to decide what happens next.
If the boy looks really sick and is gagging at the site of the garbage, then don’t make him take it out! Validate his feelings and attend to his needs. Loving a sick child is more important than the garbage but it’s also more important than dinner!
But if he was just running around the house and playing and looks fine or has a history of excuse making, then it’s a different story. In that case, what the child needs is to be acknowledged, (because who really likes doing that job anyway) but then called out for his excuses and told the importance of doing it anyway. And the parent will remain steadfast in their request, not relenting to the excuses and petitions of the child.
Unidirectional love doesn’t force the desired response, it doesn’t manipulate it (guilting the child into it), yell or scream to make it happen, but it also doesn’t bow down to the emotions, fragility or excuses of a child.
Instead, unidirectional love validates the emotions of the child and then pushes them to do the hard thing anyway. Not for the sake of the kitchen or for their own sanity while making dinner. But because the child needs to learn to do things they don’t always want to do.
As a parent, because you’re not God, you’re going to get it wrong sometimes. You may push your child to take out the garbage only to see them vomit in the backyard because they really were sick. That’s ok. It’s not ideal but it can still be better than permissive or authoritative parenting. Because the unidirectionally loving parent will know that what the child needs next is an apology and loving care.
What matters here isn’t whether you make mistakes as a parent. That’s inevitable. What matters is the place and intention from which you act. In other words, the state of the child and who the child is matter most in their emotional development. And their need, either the need to be cared for or the need to be challenged into taking on responsibility, matters far more than the need of the parent to either avoid conflict or avoid confronting the inner life.
So, if you want to know the best thing you or anyone else can do for the emotional health of children, it’s quite simple but extremely hard: learn to love unidirectionally. Do your best to become more and more aware of the times when you are operating unconsciously out of your own brokenness. And strive with all your heart to find the healing and the support you need to to make it about what’s best for the child. In other words, work on yourself. Not for you. But so you can love your child as freely as humanly possible. That, above all else, will lead to an emotionally healthy child.
