Nora’s daughter came home from school feeling sad. A friend had not saved her a seat at lunch, and it all came out at the kitchen table.
“That’s not worth getting upset about,” Nora told her. “You’ll sit together tomorrow.”
Her daughter stopped talking about it and took her homework upstairs. Nora went on with her day, relieved that her daughter’s tears had passed.
Nothing in that exchange looks harmful, and that’s what makes it so invisible.
Do you ever respond to your child as Nora did?
If so, you are in very good company. As a psychologist who has specialized in childhood emotional neglect for years, I have watched this way of managing a child’s feelings pass quietly from one generation to the next.
Emotional intelligence (EI) is your ability to manage and understand emotions and relationships, your own as well as others’. I have observed that it is more vital to life success and satisfaction than general intelligence. This makes EI a very important skill for parents to teach their children.
The good news: children automatically learn EI when they are raised by parents who have it themselves. Parents with EI are able to understand what their child is feeling and why. Their emotionally attuned responses to the child model and teach them how to read, understand, and respond to their own and others’ feelings in a healthy way (Zinsser et al., 2021).
The bad news: a parent who struggles with EI themselves may lack the skills necessary to be able to teach them to their child. In other words, you can’t teach your child what you don’t know. This is how low EI automatically trickles down through generations of families.
Childhood Emotional Neglect
One way to be sure you don’t teach your child about emotion is to simply ignore their emotions while you are raising them, like the example of Nora above. That is childhood emotional neglect. It’s not about what you do to your child. It’s about what you do not do for them.
If, often enough, you seem not to notice that your child is upset, sad, angry, hurt, or anxious, you are subtly telling them that their sadness, anger, pain, or anxiety don’t matter. You are teaching them to ignore their own feelings.
Emotionally neglected children grow up to experience a variety of challenges, only one of which is low emotional intelligence. As adults, these children also struggle with excessive guilt and self-blame, feelings of emptiness, and a general lack of joy in life.
If you see yourself in that, please know it’s not your fault. When feelings go unnoticed in a home, no one growing up there learns how emotions work, and that may simply be what happened to you.
No loving parent wants to set their child up for that scenario. But parenting is probably the most complicated job in the world. In fact, it is built into the natural process of parenting that even the most loving parents will pass their own strengths and weaknesses on to their children. Often, the only way to stop that cycle is to consciously make the effort to override it.
Three Things to Start Doing
1. Pay attention. Work hard to see your child’s true nature. What does your child like, dislike, get angry about, feel afraid of, or struggle with? Feed these observations back to your child in a non-judgmental way so that your child can see themselves through your eyes and feel how well you know them.
Life advantage: Your child will see themselves reflected in your eyes, and they will know who they are. They will realize that, no matter their strengths and weaknesses, they are lovable, and they are enough. This will give them confidence in their life choices and will make them resilient to life’s challenges.
2. Feel an emotional connection to your child. Strive to feel what your child is feeling (empathy), whether you agree with it or not. When you feel your child’s emotion, they will feel an instant bond with you.
Life advantage: Your child will learn empathy and will have healthier relationships throughout their life.
Emotional Intelligence Essential Reads
3. Respond competently to your child’s emotional needs. Do not judge your child’s feelings as right or wrong. Look beyond the feeling to the source. Help your child name their emotion. Help them manage the emotion.
Life advantage: Your child will have a healthy relationship with their own emotions. They will naturally know that their feelings are important and how to put them into words and manage them.
If those three tips describe something you did not receive yourself, do not despair. You can learn all this now, at the same time your child does. Start by noticing your own feelings and putting words to them. The more you do that for yourself, the more naturally you will do it for your child.
It Is Not About Perfection
No parent can follow these tips perfectly, of course. This is not about perfection; it’s about making the effort. Effort in itself shows love and care. When your child sees you trying to understand their feelings or feel their feelings, whether you succeed or not, they receive a powerful message: Your feelings matter to me.
And what your child will hear: You matter. They will internalize this valuable knowledge that will empower them for all of their life.
A version of this post also appears on emotionalneglect.com.
© Jonice Webb, Ph.D.
