054: Three reasons not to say “You’re OK!”

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. While I was still pregnant with my daughter, a friend showed me a video of a toddler falling down a flight of stairs. Once he'd tumbled all the way down to the bottom, he immediately bounced up and announced loudly for anyone who might be around, I'm okay, I'm okay.

At the time, I thought it was pretty cool. Who wouldn't want a child who can roll with the tumbles of life and be fine with it? I was working on some mental and emotional pregnancy exercises from a book at the time, one of which instructed me to write down my hopes for my yet unborn daughter. In the beautiful book that I had made for her by hand and that I hoped to one day give to her, the third entry on my list of my hopes for you was, I hope you'll be the kind of kid who gets up after a fall and says, I'm okay.

Fortunately, through studying for a master's in psychology and through researching podcast episodes for you, my wishes for my daughter as well as my skills have evolved, but I'm still learning all the time. Recently, one of my podcast listeners emailed me with a question. I hear parents on the playground all the time saying, you're okay, after their child falls over.

Often it does make the child stop crying, but doesn't it invalidate the child's feelings? After doing some research on this topic, it turns out that this question is related to a skill that psychologists call emotional regulation and learning how to regulate emotions is one of the most important tasks of childhood. There are three major ways that children learn about emotional regulation. The first of these is through direct teaching of emotional regulation, for example, by saying things like you're okay.

The second is through parental modeling of emotional regulation. And because I've been getting feedback from listeners saying that they love my show, but they find the content to be very dense. We're actually going to try a little experiment here and break these two topics down into two episodes.

So we'll look at you're okay today. And then we'll look at the parental modeling of emotional regulation in a future episode. These are not actually going to be any less dense than my regular episodes, although really, I'm not sure I make any apology for that. But hopefully making them shorter will make them a bit more digestible anyway. I would like to know what you think about this shift. So please do drop me a line at Jen at your parenting mojo.com with any feedback you might have.

The third way that children learn about emotional regulation is the emotional climate of the family, which includes parent-child attachment, the romantic attachment of the parents, and the presence or absence of marital conflict and how this is resolved. We've actually covered a lot of information in other shows about this already, like in our interview with Dr. Laura Fryan on how parenting affects child development, as well as in the episode related to how divorce impacts children, which had a lot of information on how conflict affects children and how resolving conflict productively can actually be very helpful for children to observe. So for that reason, we're not going to do a third show on this particular aspect of emotional regulation, but go ahead, show affection to your partner, be romantic, your kid is watching.

So there are three critical reasons we need to support our children's emotional regulation. Firstly, emotional regulation directly impacts an individual's well-being because emotions have a physical impact on both children and adults. Stress can have a direct physiological effect on a person, like increasing their blood pressure.

It can impact behaviors related to well-being, like alcohol and substance abuse, and can also contribute to mental wellness or illness, for example, depression. Secondly, emotional regulation helps children to make and keep friends. Research shows that aggressive boys and girls who fail to share and who get peers in trouble find it hard to make friends.

And finally, emotional regulation is really important for academic achievement. Pre-kindergarten skills related to emotional regulation actually predict later academic skills, probably because children who can sit still even when they want to fidget and ignore a taunting classmate are more likely to stay on task with the lesson. What I wanted to know next was, can scientists help us to understand how our actions as parents impact our children's emotional regulation? It turns out there's no real one aha study that neatly addressed these issues, but a whole slew of studies cast light on different pieces of the puzzle.

So there are two key ideas behind the incongruence of saying you're OK to Western children. Firstly, emotional expression is a really culturally driven thing. We Westerners tend to think that pretty much everyone thinks or should think like us. And while differences between individuals in a culture do, of course, exist, in general, researchers assume that people strive for independence, self-fulfillment and authentic expression of emotions based on autonomy, which is a quote from a research paper. But in many other societies, for example, in Asian societies, this is not a goal for raising children. Instead, Asian parents aim to know what their child needs before the child even says it.

Chinese children see this control as an expression of warmth and support, whereas European-American children find it stifling. Turns out that most psychological research that makes it into journals is conducted on Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic or weird college students. We've discussed this several times before.

And then researchers assume that it's just applicable to all Americans and maybe even people everywhere. But the hot way of studying the cultural issues behind emotionally driven behavior is to put some Western and some Japanese people into an uncomfortable situation and see what happens. They use Japanese people because the Japanese are typically considered to be the paragon of the Asian independent cultures.

So when researchers gave Japanese and German preschool girls a task that they couldn't possibly complete, German girls experienced distress associated with their failure for much longer than Japanese girls, whose distress quickly disappeared, to be expected in a culture where such expression is typically avoided. The girls' mothers were present during the experiment, and the German mothers expressed warmth to their daughters after the girls failed at the task. And the more sensitive the mother, the more distress the girls expressed.

In other words, the girls cried more, perhaps because the German mothers felt as though the girls were expressing their authentic emotions and so didn't try to get the girls to stop crying. So if we put all this together, we see that telling a child how they feel or should feel is a strategy that's really not well suited to raising children in a society where autonomy and independence are prized. We're attempting to control the child's experience of the world, which would help to build warmth between Chinese American children and their parents, but which European American children see as overtly controlling.

German mothers seem to have it figured out, or at least the few that participated in the experiment. Their children might cry more as a result of their warmth, and the mothers are allowing the children to express that emotion, but then the children learn the validity of their own emotions. It seems as though if American parents really do prize autonomy and independence, it would be a whole lot less confusing for their children if they were also a bit more tolerant of the expressions of emotions that can be seen as negative, like crying.

The second reason why it's incongruent for Westerners to tell their children you're okay is that children's emotional regulation develops as they age. Perhaps this won't be terribly surprising to parents. Emotional regulation before age 3 months is thought to be driven largely by innate processes, things like turning toward pleasant stimuli, like a parent's face, and away from aversive stimuli, like a loud noise.

By age 1, babies know that other people can help them to regulate their emotional states, and by age 2 they can use specific strategies to manage their own feelings, although they aren't always successful, which is why they have tantrums. The way children think about controlling emotions also changes as they get older. Young children actually seem to believe that parents can really change the child's emotions simply by saying, stop crying.

But older children and adults recognize that you don't just stop feeling something because someone tells you to, you just stop expressing the emotion. As we'll see in our next episode on this topic, this can have very negative impacts on a person's mental and physical well-being. So we do need to adjust our approach as our child gets older, and we can use what psychologists call scaffolding to offer our children more support when they're younger, or when they're just hungry or tired, and gradually withdraw that support as they get better at regulating their emotions.

As a reminder, we did a whole episode pretty early on in the show on how to use scaffolding to increase children's abilities. So what should we understand from these studies? Firstly, we socialize our children to succeed in our culture, and we should use strategies that help our children succeed in our culture, unless maybe we think that our culture relies just a touch too much on individualism, in which case we might want to adjust our approach slightly. So telling Western children you're okay when they're clearly not flies in the face of all the other lessons we try to teach them about living their own experience and respecting their feelings.

It might stop them from crying, but it's incredibly conflicting for them. Secondly, while our youngest children might think that we can change how they feel just by telling them, they eventually figure out that we can't, and they feel jipped. And finally, by supporting our children as they develop their own emotional control skills, rather than just telling them they're okay, we equip them with critical skills they need to succeed in learning and in life.

So why do we continue to tell our children that they're okay when clearly they know they're not? And if we're honest, so do we. The only explanation I can come up with is that we really hate to hear our children cry. We're actually wired to stop it as fast as we can, which we do by soothing our infants.

And when they get old enough that we can't easily soothe them anymore, we try to get them to stop using whatever means we can, even if it doesn't benefit our children at all, and may actually instead impede their emotional regulation skill development. All well and good, I hear you say. But what should we do instead of saying you're okay? Well, the next time your child falls over at the playground, consider taking these following four actions.

Don't go running over. Cement yourself to that park bench if necessary, and look to see if your child really is hurt. If he really is hurt, go over immediately, of course. If it's more likely to be just a bump, sit tight a little bit longer. Secondly, set an intention. Use this time while you're observing to also check in and see how you're feeling. Bring your full awareness to the moment, and set an intention to respond with your child's best interest in mind. Take note of whether you're feeling anxious. Take a breath. Resolve not to say you're okay. Thirdly, act. Reassess what your child needs. If he's not already up and running around, walk over and sit next to him. You could say something like, ouch, that looks like it hurt. Do you need a hug? If the child's kind of young.

If the child's a bit older, you could say, is there anything I can do to help you feel better? And then you could give the child a hug or a knock, depending on how they express their preference. Sit quietly until your child seems to calm himself. When your child's ready, you could consider replaying the incident without any judgment. So you could say, it looked like you were walking on the beam and you lost your balance. Then you can empathize and acknowledge any new feelings that occur. When they relive the episode, children do tend to start crying again. This is a healthy process, something that should be encouraged and not suppressed. Fourthly, move on. When your child is ready, which may be sometime after you are ready, or after you think that they are ready, ask a question.

Would you like to sit here with me for a bit longer? Or are you ready to play again? Or would you like to play some more? Or would you rather go home now? He may have other ideas about what he wants to do, but you may find giving him ideas to be more effective than just asking what do you want to do now, which might simply elicit an I don't know. So those are some strategies for how to deal with it in the moment. When you have some time, you might find some deeper reflection on this topic helpful.

Firstly, you may find that saying you're okay has become reflexive for you. You don't even think about it before you say it. If this is the case, try simply first to notice when you say it, without judging yourself. And then try to institute the pause that gives you the time that you need to think and say something different. Secondly, spend some time thinking about what skills you feel are important for your child to learn, and how you can support these through your relationship. If emotional awareness is high on the list, think about the messages you send your child when you discuss those emotions.

If you find that you frequently invalidate those emotions, for example, saying things like, of course you want to go to school, you love your teacher, or why wouldn't you want to go to the party? All your friends are going to be there. Then your words may be contradicting your intention. Don't be afraid to let your child experience her own sadness, frustration and anger, even as you support her by empathizing with her.

Your child learns more by experiencing these emotions and dealing with them than by suppressing them because you don't want to hear about them. Thirdly, cultivate a practice of mindfulness, of being in and experiencing the present moment, which can help you to institute that all-important pause, as well as develop your own healthy emotional regulation skills. I'm working on finding someone who might be interested in talking with us about bringing a practice of mindfulness to parenting as well, so stay tuned for that.

As always, the references for today's show can be found on my website, at yourparentingmojo.com forward slash you're okay with no punctuation. And please do let me know your thoughts on this shorter episode format by sending me an email to jen at yourparentingmojo.com. We'll see you next time on Your Parenting Mojo.