Myth: You shouldn’t respond immediately to a baby’s cry because they will grow up spoiled.
Truth: This myth is the reason I started writing about child development and parenting. The inaccuracy and potentially damaging consequences of believing it make me crazy. Listen, I don’t judge people who believed this. Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know.
Indeed, humans are genetically conditioned to respond to a crying baby. Hearing a baby cry activates the brain area responsible for emotional reactions. Our brain tags the sound of a crying baby as significant even before it had a chance to fully process it. Naturally, you become conditioned to respond to your baby’s cry. The baby also learns fast that when they cry, you come. However, I feel like that is the whole point. Crying is the only way through which babies can communicate their wants and need. If a baby is crying, it’s because he is hungry, wet, scared, or just wants to feel safe and loved in your arms. You should respond to it without worries. Feeling loved and cared for does not spoil a kid.
Babies are unable to calm themselves down. For the first two years of their life, you are responsible for tending to all their needs, maintaining stable routines, calming them down, and so on. When you let a baby cry, you are letting them cry themselves to sleep, or until they get tired and stop. Of course, you continue to play a major role in your baby’s life after his second birthday. Your job isn’t done yet. Still, your baby is about to acquire another important developmental milestone: language. As kids learn to speak, or even to use sign language, they have a new tool that allows them to communicate more efficiently their wants and needs. Now they have some control over their environment they didn’t have before.
Babies have not yet acquired object permanence. This means that out of sight is out of mind for your baby. When a baby doesn’t see or feel your presence, they assume you are gone. This is why babies are amused by playing peek-a-boo. As they grow, they develop the mental representations necessary to understand that even if they can’t see something at the moment, it still exists.
In the first two years of life, a baby forms their attachment style to the primary caregivers. The term describes the bond of love and care that develops between parents and their kids. A secure attachment style is the result of the baby’s certainty that you will consistently respond and tend to their needs when they need you to. An anxious, ambivalent, or disordered attachment style arises from an absent, neglectful, or inconsistent pattern of reaction to the baby’s needs.
Your little bundle of joy does not understand the world around him, cannot fully process it and is totally dependent on your care for survival. The reassurance that you will always be there when they need you gives them the feeling that the world is a safe place. How will that spoil a child?
Now, I don’t want you worrying your baby cried a little before you responded to them. That’s not how it goes. We are talking about a pattern of response, not isolated incidents. The attachment style we developed in early childhood will change and evolve with a person’s experiences. The best predictor of adult attachment style is the perception of the relationship quality one has with their parents, as well as their parent’s relationship with each other.
A secure attachment style was associated with higher self-esteem, enjoying intimacy in relationships, seeking social support, and having an ability to share feelings with other people. A plus is that kids with a secure attachment style seem to be more emotionally aware and less troublesome during childhood.
Even if we talk about an older kid, you should always be open to calm your kid when they are upset. You can soothe, hug, and tell your kid that you love them, and still hold the limit you want to establish. We need to stop equate love and affection with a laissez-faire attitude about discipline. Affection and discipline should both coexist.
Myth: Kids must be punished for their bad behavior otherwise, they will go out of hand.
Recently some distant family members have faced their teen’s (14, M) reckless behavior in online video games. He spent a considerable amount of money buying things online for his Minecraft game. His parents were frantic. They didn’t know how to handle the situation. Moreover, they were rightfully incensed that he didn’t seem to realize what he had done. He had zero regrets whatsoever.
What would you do if you were in the parent’s place?
The most challenging part as a parent is to figure out what to do in situations like this. Perhaps the first thought is that this kid should be grounded or otherwise punished. That was precisely what his parents did. They held him a long lecture and forbidden him to play online video games for a while. Did it work? No. With the first chance he had, he took their credit card and amounted to an even bigger bill.
Punishments do not teach appropriate behaviors. They are only a way to express your own frustrations. I said what I said, and I stand by it.
On the other hand, consequences teach a kid how one’s behavior led to a particular outcome and support taking responsibility. I go into more detail explaining the differences between punishments and consequences in my previous article.
If you think about consequences as “I ‘ll teach you a lesson!”, then there is no difference between the two. Regardless of the term you choose to use, your attitude should be “Here is how you can do better.”
It is no wonder my little cousins didn’t get why the big commotion. The whole situation didn’t have any tangible consequences for him beside the lectures and the interdiction to play video games. He has many other ways to entertain himself besides playing online, and his punishment eventually expired. Now you can understand why he wasn’t so concerned.
If he had to bring his lunch from home because the extra money had to go towards paying the bill. Any unnecessary expenses were cut. He had to contribute at least partially to the bill through a part-time job or doing chores. In addition to making your kids a part of taking care of the consequences their actions had, you should also teach them the skills they need to avoid the same kind of mistake in the future. In this case, my aunt and uncle should start teaching my cousin some financial skills: how to manage a budget, what should be your spending priorities, and so on.
His access to video games should be suspended for the moment because he broke his parent’s trust that he can handle this kind of activity. However, an interdiction is not a resolution. Why? Because he won’t have the chance to learn how to manage his gaming. I won’t go into more details on how to reduce the time your kid spends playing video games. There are a lot of things to take into consideration, and it would take me a whole article to do so. However, you can read about a general approach to the topic in one of my previous articles.
This whole unfortunate situation could have taught my little cousin an important lesson: online money have the same value as real-life money, and you have to work hard for them.
Once you carry your water, you will learn to value every drop of it. — African proverb
The best thing a parent can do is to ask himself: what does my kid need to learn from this situation? Remember that kids are just kids. They don’t have a big whiteboard under their bed on which they plan every night how to wreak more havoc in your life or piss you off the next day. Also, mistakes are a natural part of life. They are bound to happen. Why not use them as an opportunity to teach a lesson rather than to punish kids!
Myth: We never fight in front of our kids, so they don’t know about the problems we have.
Truth: Oh, they know. Actually, if you can handle a disagreement civilly (no screaming, no throwing things, no swearing, etc.), there is no need to hide from your kids. They might learn some valuable lessons about having conflicts and ways to solve them.
If you are fighting behind closed doors, your kids also know it. The heaviness in the air, the general volatility, the feeling that if you light a match the whole house will explode, these are things you cannot hide. Kids aren’t stupid. They might not know or understand exactly what is happening, but they can feel in the general emotional atmosphere of the house that something is wrong. Moreover, kids are inherently egocentric. They might start believing that they have done or said something, and the change is their fault. If you have marital problems do your best to solve them. Don’t kid yourself that just because your kids didn’t see you fight they don’t know that something isn’t right.
Myth: “We are staying together for the kids.”
Truth: Please don’t do that! In some cultures, you cannot easily leave a bad marriage for religious, financial, or social constraints. I am not talking about those situations. I am talking about couples who are aware that their marriage is on the rocks, and they come with “We’re keeping it together for the kids”
I can imagine getting a divorce is scary. The financial fallout, the emotional toll, custody battles, visitation rights, the renouncing of all the dreams, plans, and hopes for the future are very real. But please don’t put that on your kid’s shoulders. It’s selfish, not to say unrealistic.
Be sincere with yourself and admit the actual situation: “I still love my spouse. I don’t want to get a divorce.”, “I am not emotionally ready for this!”, “ I don’t know how to face the financial and logistical fallout.” or whatever it is. Hiding from the facts doesn’t change the current situation. Things won’t get any better by themselves. If you are brave enough to read the ugly writing on the wall, there is a solution. The trickiest part is to face facts and acknowledge the problem. You can get some therapy, you can make a plan, you can mourn the loss of your marriage. There are solutions.
I am not advocating for divorce. I am advocating for a safe, calm, and nurturing environment. The emotional toll of living in a tension-riddled, unstable household is higher for your kids than facing their parents’ divorce.
If you worry about your kids, you can talk to them and explain (in an age-appropriate language) what is going on; what this will mean for them; how will they keep in touch with their other parent; how this won’t diminish your love or your spouse’s love for them, etc.
The most terrible and emotionally damaging scenario is to play pretend. Pretend that everything is just fain, there is no dust under the rug, and never talk or accept what is happening.
Myth: Kids need perfect parents.
Truth: Good news, kids don’t need perfect parents! All parents doubt every parenting decision they have ever made. You are doing your best. The fact that you worry about your parenting skills tells me that you are already a good parent. I never met nor seen a less-than-ideal parent worrying about their childrearing skills.
On another note, apologize to your kid when you make a mistake; admit your guilt when you break a promise and make amends; allow yourself to be human.
Side note: Do you remember the moment you realized your parents are just regular people, who made their fair share of mistakes and simply tried to do their best? As kids, we saw our parents as these superhumans, who were never wrong, capable to fix anything and everything.
Truth be told, to your kids you will always be the most incredible human being to ever walk on this planet anyway. Still, we need to normalize making mistakes and sending the message that mistakes are excellent opportunities to learn and grow. What a fine legacy to leave your kids.
These myths bear emotionally loaded baggage for me. Perhaps that is why they irk me so bad when I hear them. The common denominator is that they are damaging for the kid’s mental and emotional health.
I don’t play pointing fingers in my articles. This attitude isn’t helpful, nor does it encourage honest communication. I merely aim to bring some awareness to the cause. Information is the nemesis of every unhelpful myth.
I hope you found this article insightful.
Until next time,
Thrive and develop!
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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