The emersion of language in children misleads many parents into thinking that their children have developed the capability to make sophisticated plans that they can carry out. It leads caregivers to shouts of aggravation, when there is more to be understood about the situation.
A misconception is that children who can talk are presumed to be able to reason and make analytic decisions the way an adult does. However, simply because a child can express him or herself, and can receive a parent’s explanation of logic, does not mean that the child can formulate, hypothesize, or conclude the way their calm parent can.
Think of it this way…
Can you solve for h?
4 ≤ 2(h + 7) – 12
But, you know how to add, subtract, multiple, and divide? Why can’t you do this? Maybe just looking at this you decided that you couldn’t do it. It’s overwhelming for those who don’t use this sort of math frequently.
Whether or not you can do it, this illustrates the point. Just because we know the components of something doesn’t mean that we are ready to seamlessly integrate the process of utilizing those components in moment of high stress, frustration, excitement.
Because logic is the language many adults communicate in, parents often demand it of their children, or try to coax logic out of them in a “teaching moment.” Although there is nothing inherently wrong with demonstrating logic when showing a child how to arrive to a conclusion, when parents put pressure on their young children to come up with logical conclusions, they are likely pushing their kids to the outside of their sphere of mental processing.
Your child is legitimately having a hard time telling you why they drew on the wall, why they are playing baseball in front of a window, or what they thought would happen if they trounced through mud outside, and then walked across the house in muddy shoes to their room.
The part of the brain that is most prominently responsible for analytic thinking is still in it’s early development and is still just coming on line even at age 5. Granted there is a huge ramp-up of capability from 3 – 5 years old. However, your child’s mental response calculations might be better understood as operating from a survival driven and emotionally fueled set of adaptive brain circuitry that connects to a feedback loop of executive (decision-making) circuitry.
What that means is that your child’s first order of response to a situation is based in how your child is feeling in the moment, how those feelings impact her sense of safety, and as she interacts with her environment she is checking it against what she already knows from past experiences. It’s a system of adaptation, not stratagem.
This is not to say that your little ones lack any reason or logic skills. Return to our example of the algebra equation. Anyone with a 6th grade education could do the basics of adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing, to help them figure out a recipe or identify the value of the markdown of a sale. In the same way, your growing youngster can apply logic in some controlled circumstances, but that may not be what it looks like.
More often then not, your child is relying more on utilizing a memory of past interactions, truisms that you’ve taught them, and most importantly, modeling that they have picked up for you; not developing a logical reason for saying or doing something.
Research shows that biological factors predict how reactive children are, but interpersonal (the interactions between caregivers and children) predict how much emotional control a child has in their reactive moments. The reality is, your child has been developing his ability to respond to frustrating situations since he was a stressed out infant crying about his belly feeling empty. Since way back then he has been taking cues from you about how to manage stress.
It’s not uncommon that, when their child is not responding well to a situation, what frustrates caregivers is something that the caregiver does when he or she are caught up in emotions. How many times have you found yourself shouting at your child to calm down? Perhaps you’ve found yourself scolding your child for hitting when he is mad, only to later find yourself pounding the table in frustration. Maybe you get frustrated when your daughter gets bent out of shape when some small thing doesn’t go her way, but then catch yourself blowing your own top over a minor infraction when your child doesn’t do things your way.
Children learn how to cope from caregivers. They are watching what we do with our stress, frustration, and emotions. We are the adults and we need to be the people we want to see our kids become. However, we fall victim to the algebra problem. When the pressure is on, the emotions rise, the intensity of our own survival system surges through us, it’s hard to check in with the thinking brain, and we lose that ability to tackle the algebra problem with our basic arithmetic skills.
As was mentioned before, the feedback loop in those moments returns to what we know from the past. So caregivers, we need to start creating a better plan now in the present to reflect back on in future situations, because as adults we have a more developed capability to access the logical part of our brain in a heated moment. We need to have conscious plan in place to activate when we do this, and we have to consciously stop to access that plan.
What Can you take Away?
- Caregivers can tell their children what to do and how, but ultimately how we, the caregivers, handle ourselves in those intense moments dictates the coping/calming strategies our children learn.
- Logical arguments will, to our frustration, fall flat in emotional moments (no matter how unreasonable the emotional outburst may seem).
- During emotional outbursts, take the time to have compassion on the experience your child is going through. They are in their own pit of distress, despite (not “in spite” of) how aggravating it is for their caregiver.
BTW:
4 ≤ 2(h + 7) – 12 — 12 + 4 ≤ 2(h + 7) – 12 + 12 — 16 ≤ 2(h + 7) — 2 / (16) ≤ 2(h + 7) / 2 — 8 ≤ h +7 — 8 – 7 ≤ h + 7 – 7 — 1 ≤ h
Sources
Carlson, S. M., Davis, A. C , & Leach, J. G. (2005). Less is more: Executive function and symbolic representation in young children. Psychological Science, 16, 609- 616. Eisenberg, N., Spinrad, T. L., Fabes, R. A., Reiser, M., Cumberland, A., Shepard, S. A., et al. (2004). The relations of effortful control and impulsivity to children’s resiliency and adjustment. Child Development, 75, 25-46. Fox, N. A., & Calkins, S. D. (2003).The development of self-control of emotion: Intrinsic and extrinsic influences. Motivation and Emotion, 27, 7-26. Zelazo, P. D., Muller, U., Frye, D., & Marcovitch, S. (2003). The development of executive function in early childhood. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 68(3, Serial No. 274)
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