FAQs on Emotional Literacy and Emotional Development

1. How much time does the average parent in American spend interacting with their child?

2. What Do You Mean by Limbic Bonds?

3. What can I do as a mother to help my child to develop emotional strength? You can:

4. What do you mean by emotional literacy?

5. My little girl is just seven months old but I can tell she understands what I say especially when I talk directly to her at her level. Am I crazy or is this really happening?

6. When my little boy meets strangers he gets all clingy. Is this normal?

7. My little three year old wants to be part of everything, sometimes I get sick of it but it means a lot to her. What's going on?

8. Sometimes I feel that home isn't a much enriched environment and I should be giving my kids more lessons and stimulation. I feel like I'm just not enough.

9. Sometimes I just want to scream at my kids, I don't feel very forgiving when they don't mind me or screw up plans. Any suggestions?

10. My neighbor just yells at her kid all the time and it breaks my heart. Then she will suddenly be nice to her daughter. My neighbor is unpredictable. Her daughter is getting to be a really anxious little girl; she either acts withdrawn and weird or sort of babyish and annoying. I don't how to handle her when she comes over.

11. When my son gets needy I get sick of it and push him away, then he just gets clingier. What should I do, I'm so frustrated?

12. My children are seven and nine. They both seem much more settled and I can't always tell what's going on in their minds. Any tips on how to help with emotional development at these ages?

13. Everyone is always saying that kids are so resilient and that they don't even remember their childhoods when they grow up. Are they? Is all this work even necessary and will they remember it?

How much time does the average parent in American spend interacting with their child?

A study in USA Today from the 1980s reported that most parents spend less than seven minutes a week talking with their kids.

Another study conducted by Michael Resnick of the University of Minnesota found that limbic bonding was a stronger factor in predicting teen pregnancies, substance abuse, violence or suicidal behaviors than more traditional markers like single-parent families or insufficient resources of time and money. Teens who reported feeling loved and cared about got into significantly fewer problematic behaviors than their counterparts who did not.

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What Do You Mean by Limbic Bonds?

The limbic bonds that we create in and with our children are the blueprints that they will be working off of for the rest of their lives. The patterns theses bonds carry will influence who our kids choose to spend time with, marry or be in relationship with, as well as how they relate to themselves and their world. 

Seven minutes a week, according to Dr. Daniel Amen, author of Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, is not enough time to create a sustaining limbic bond with your child. Amen actually gives a four-point prescription for developing healthy limbic bonds with our children, which are, as the research reveals, their greatest immunity against problems.

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What can I do as a mother to help my child to develop emotional Strength? You can:

Spend twenty minutes a day with your child doing something that he or she would like to do.” He advises that you protect that time by telling the child that you feel time together is important and you really wish to be with them

·     During this time there are to be no parental commands, no questions, and no directions. This is the time to establish an intimacy that feels mutual and sustaining.
Notice as many positive behaviors as you can. Noticing positive behavior is much more effective in shaping behavior than emphasizing the negative.
   Do much more listening than talking.
   Tune into your baby/child.

·    Double your child's experience. The “double” is an inside voice. The double brings the baby to the threshold of his own experience. E.g. A baby coos and the mother coos.

·    Be sensorially close and attuned to your child, touch releases the bonding chemical oxytocin in both mother and child. Touching strengthens the parent/child bond.

·     Let your child lean into you for support physically and emotionally.

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 What do you mean by emotional literacy?

Emotional literacy or the ability to accurately label, articulate and process our feelings, requires that we have access to our emotions. This means that we can actually feel what we are feeling and that we have the language necessary to label process and comprehend what we're experiencing. 

Building the skills involved with emotional literacy is a lifetime task that begins at birth. In the following paragraphs, I'll attempt to outline a developmental approach to building skills of emotional literacy.

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My little girl is just seven months old but I can tell she understands what I say especially when I talk directly to her at her level. Am I crazy or is this really happening?

You aren't crazy at all, in fact you sound very attuned. Between birth and two years old your child is developing relational skills, language skills, social skills, fine- and gross motor-skills and learning through all his senses. She learns; mostly form her primary caregivers, what the world is about. This is where, as Erik Erickson says, children learn “trust versus mistrust.”

The baby is learning: “Is my world a safe and loving place or, cry as I might, will my needs never feel adequately met? Am I understood by those closest to me? Can they understand what I'm trying to say to them, feel along with me, join me in my tiny, flailing efforts to communicate with them, or are they emotionally distant, unable to see who I am? Am I left in my own world of pain or pleasure, or do soft sounds and loving arms surround me when I'm hungry, aching or want to share my pleasure at being alive? What is it like to be alive and feel my way into this world?”

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When my little boy meets strangers he gets all clingy. Is this normal?

Your child should seem bonded to you. It is natural for a bonded child to want to stay close to the mother when encountering strangers or new situations. Let them adjust slowly. Let them be close to you for security and move away from you gradually as they begin to feel more at ease. They may want to return to you frequently for comfort and security.

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 My little three year old wants to be part of everything, sometimes I get sick of it but it means a lot to her. What's going on?

By this age, the child is up and around, interacting fully with her environment and testing it for veracity, dependability and excitement. She has a sense of herself, and her parents have a sense of her. Her language development is well established and her emotional personality is significantly begun.  

Around this age a subtle shift begins to take place between caretaking and companionship. These little ones love to be included in everything that is going on in the family. They want to feel important and long to be Mommy's little helper. It is a stage that Erickson refers to as “industry versus dependence.” Allowing them to feel useful and industrious by breaking down small tasks into a manageable size feels wonderful to these little children. They can help prepare meals, put away groceries, make decisions about their day, and feel like a vital part of family life

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Sometimes I feel that home isn't a much enriched environment and I should be giving my kids more lessons and stimulation. I feel like I'm just not enough.

No one, repeat no one is more important to your child's sound emotional development than you and home is their first and most important classroom. Development of emotional literacy remains a dynamic interactive process between the child and her ever-expanding world. Her primary world and interactions are still with family, and the content and quality of her interactions and those she witnesses in her relational environment will set the foundation for how she interprets and understands the world. We pay considerable attention, time and money these days to early education. Mathematical concepts and letters of the alphabet are constantly in front of us and few among us fail to recognize the importance of this period for early learning. But emotional literacy is a concept only beginning to be understood. It, too, can be taught, and much emotional learning is taking place simultaneously with other kinds of learning.

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Sometimes I just want to scream at my kids, I don't feel very forgiving when they don't mind me or screw up plans. Any suggestions?

These annoying little moments can be seen as an important time to set a good foundation for self-esteem. Small children are constantly straining the nerves of those around them, pushing our limits and challenging the most peace-loving among us to keep our cool. This is a period when the child is making sense and meaning of the interactions and events of her world with the powers of reasoning available to her at this stage of her development. Children, whose little transgressions are quickly and easily forgiven, are likely to internalize this as a pattern for how to treat themselves. When children make mistakes and are reprimanded they experience shame. When parents use these moments as fruitful time to learn bring growth can actually happen. Say your son breaks a glass that he carelessly puts on the table. Well, the broken glass is a lot of instant feedback for him, he knows something went wrong. If you can help him to understand what to do next time he can feel the combination of shame and repair. This really strengthens a kid's resilience because they learn that mistakes can be overcome, that we needn't freeze in fear and feel terrible every time we look at a glass or worry that Mommy hates us. It also actually makes the brain sprout new neural pathways. This is emotional literacy building.

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 My neighbor just yells at her kid all the time and it breaks my heart. Then she will suddenly be nice to her daughter. My neighbor is unpredictable. Her daughter is getting to be a really anxious little girl; she either acts withdrawn and weird or sort of babyish and annoying. I don't how to handle her when she comes over.

Children who are dealt with harshly learn to scold themselves mercilessly. And then, if parents feel guilty and suddenly get nice it can set up a worry in the child's mind that they have to be perfect or they get lots of disapproval. Again, the key is balance: enough accountability and reality so children come to understand that glasses really do break, and people have genuine feelings that get hurt, overtaxed and pleasured. Too much indulgence and the child does not develop enough sense of reality to tolerate the slings and arrows that she will inevitably encounter in making her way through the world; too little indulgence and she learns to raise defensive walls to shut out the world, put on a false face and keep her true feelings hidden, even from herself.

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When my son gets needy I get sick of it and push him away, then he just gets clingier. What should I do, I'm so frustrated?

Children can be very needy at this stage. They idolize the parents who have the power to grant their wishes for anything from an ice-cream cone to a peaceful evening, who can turn their world upside down and inside out if they choose to, and upon whom they are still totally dependent. Their neediness makes them tremendously vulnerable to both our love and our scorn, both of which they take wholly to heart. They learn big lessons at this stage about whether it is safe to need, love and depend on other people, and whether mistakes and imperfections are tolerable and forgivable. Letting your child depend on you and lean into you for support when they need to helps them to feel secure which, over time, will probably make them less anxious and needy.

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My children are seven and nine. They both seem much more settled and I can't always tell what's going on in their minds. Any tips on how to help with emotional development at these ages?

Seven to eleven are commonly called “the latency years,” when children are considered calmer and more educable than they are either previously or during adolescence. The task of teaching emotional literacy at this time might be compared to diagramming a sentence. By now, children have their basic emotional vocabulary in place, and if they've grown up in a relatively healthy environment, they have the right word attached to its appropriate, corresponding feeling. The sense the small child makes of experience is heavily tinted with what psychologists call “magical thinking.” (Thinking that is not necessarily reality-based; thinking, that is, through the eyes of a child.) There is still magical thinking present in the minds of latency-age children, but they learn more about the world and reality each year. They are learning to make basic sense of their emotional life. While the younger child may say, “I am mad,” in a general sort of way (that is, the feeling seems pervasive and not too specific), the latency-age child is learning to break down her emotional experience in a more specific manner. She is developing some emotional order. “I am mad at my mother because she won't let me watch TV”, might be an example of what she would say. Or “My feelings are hurt because I wasn't invited to Susie's birthday party, and I'm mad at her.” Or “I'm happy because I got the part I wanted in the play. I'll have fun at rehearsals. Everyone wanted the part, so I feel special.” Learning to break feelings down into understandable components at this age can help to sustain internal order when adolescence hits.

Here, too, the child is learning lessons on emotional security. Can I be my authentic self and sill be loved and accepted by my family or my school world, or do I need to put on a false self in order to gain support and acceptance? As parents, we need to forgive ourselves for not knowing the right answer to all their questions and to learn to say, “I don't know, but maybe we can find out together.”

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Everyone is always saying that kids are so resilient and that they don't even remember their childhoods when they grow up. Are they? Is all this work even necessary and will they remember it?

Lessons learned at this stage, though they may seem quiet, have resonance throughout life. I have also heard parents say over and over that kids are “so resilient” when they're young. But I beg to differ. I think that what parents interpret as resilience is oftentimes the latency-age child's ability to “fall asleep and wake up better in the morning.” Or parents read silence to mean that their children are not bothered by something. But this ability to wipe the emotional slate clean can also cover up anxiety or upset that may be building beneath the surface. Though this is a relatively placid period of development, children are sponges soaking up the values, expectations and moral parameters of their environments. This is an age where children can continue not just to rely on natural resilience, but also to actively build it by talking about what is going through their minds in simple, unobtrusive ways. They can learn how to work with their emotional world simply by experiencing it in a safe and natural way. They can explore and define the boundaries of their inner terrain. Their parents can help by being good-enough listeners, and by respecting the burgeoning autonomy of the child and their growing need to move into their own, individuated world while remaining securely connected to family.

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