Why Are We Always Trying to Be Positive Around Kids?
There are benefits to talking about sadness with your children. (Photo by efekt.net/Getty Images)
Being left hurts. About a month ago, my 2-year-old was crying at our front window as he watched his father climb into a car and drive away. This had become a daily spill that my husband and I hadn’t yet learned how to prevent or clean up. I simply didn’t know how to deal with the intensity of his sadness. I remember experiencing a similar blend of helplessness, confusion, and betrayal, but I was 8 and crying for my housekeeper who went home on Fridays. Since I considered her my second mother, it never seemed right that she would leave. At least she cried with me, which was something.
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I was nursing my infant in the back bedroom when I called out to my tearful son: Are you sad? I knew it was a stupid question, but I was trying something a parenting book—How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk—had suggested. Apparently children’s feelings need to be affirmed; they need to feel like someone is paying attention. My toddler shouted: Yes! So I asked: Very sad? And again he shouted: Yes! “Do you want me to draw it?” I didn’t hear anything back so I started drawing a sad face on a yellow sticky note and narrating what I was doing. Eventually he shouted Yes! and came into the bedroom to see. That morning we must have drawn 40 sad faces, all filled with tears and all yelling some version of my bilingual son’s complaints as he watched my husband pack his briefcase to go work at the library. One face cried: Up! Another pleaded: No biblioteca! A third shouted: Papi! A fourth said: No libros! He kept asking for more drawings about his sadness, and each one lightened his mood. That afternoon we drew happy faces until Papi got home.
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If affirming kids’ sadness makes them feel better, why do we hesitate to do it? Why do we typically resort to platitudes, distractions, or even downright denial of negativity? Platitudes don’t work because children know better. Whenever I unthinkingly deploy the usual troops in rapid succession, like “Papi will be back soon” or “There’s no reason to cry,” or “You’re fine, everything’s fine,” my baby cries harder. When we speak these shabby things, children rightly keep struggling to get us to hear their sadness. It’s like they’re trying to shovel sand into a bucket, but instead all they’ve got is one of those neon-colored sand-sifters with the plastic mesh bottom. I remember being 10 years old and running barefoot in the sand when a toothpick implanted itself into the bottom of my right foot. The woman who took it out—someone’s mother—sat me in her kitchen sink and tried to soothe me by telling me I was fine and that it didn’t hurt that much. I guess she had never been impaled by a toothpick.
Seemingly the easiest way to get my son to stop crying is to give him what he wants. I tried this once, and once was enough to know it doesn’t work. I gave my son the goldfish crackers he was crying for, but he didn’t stop crying—because I put them in the wrong bowl. This taught me that it’s never about goldfish. As far as tactics go, distraction works if your goal is to get your child to stop crying, but it also threatens to create an adult whose default coping mechanism is more distraction. This is not an acceptable option for me. Dismissing negative feelings is another common approach, for me the most insidious one. I’ve seen a parent refuse to pick up a crying child in an effort to toughen her up. The feminist in me doesn’t want my 2-year-old believing that big boys don’t cry, or that the way to deal with sadness is to suck it up. A different (and otherwise good) parenting book I read insists that it’s a good idea to tell children who are sad or frustrated or generally sour that you don’t want to see them until they are “fun” to be around. But being fun all the time is a tall order for a small child. Or a person of any size.
Instead of letting each other come face to face with negativity, too often we try to spare each other or fix it. We routinely fail to let our friends or family be unhappy, frustrated, or angry. On one level I get it: we don’t want our loved ones, especially our children, to feel sad, hurt, or disappointed. But maybe that’s because we are inept at sitting tight with our own sadness, hurt, or disappointment. And maybe our parents were too, and up the chain. Maybe we are awkward about our children’s negative feelings because no one ever helped us draw them out.
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Perhaps we are scared that talking about sadness will make it worse. Some parents have even suggested to me that to accept negativity is to cultivate it, that a child will cry harder if you feel sorry for her. The thing is, my son didn’t cry harder when I drew his feelings; he stopped crying. I didn’t make his father magically appear, or appease him with platitudes, or distract him, or dismiss his sadness. Apparently, I articulated what my son couldn’t. Instead of denying his negative feelings or trying to erase them, I drew the sadness out of his heart and onto a sticky note. By putting them on paper, I let his feelings take up space. I tried to be a bucket instead of a sand-sifter. And then he rested, having gotten through to me. His crying stopped when I stopped trying to get him to stop crying. Maybe this is why I was consoled by my housekeeper every Friday: she heard me say that being left hurts and affirmed it by crying. Empathy works.
My goal in nurturing the negative is not to prolong or exaggerate it, but to accept and even welcome it as one among many of life’s basic moods. By bringing my bucket and sticky notes, I hope to teach my son how to interpret, not bury, his negativity. I feel especially responsible for drawing emotions like sadness, fear, frustration, disappointment, and shame out of and for him, since as a boy he will inevitably be encouraged to negate them, or worse, to reduce them all to a single, more macho emotion like anger. Since that day I have drawn and named a lot of different emotions for my son, and I look forward to the day when he will be able to draw them out of and for himself. And if he becomes a father one day, I hope he teaches his children to honor the whole spectrum of emotions that he is only just beginning to see.
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