When you’re a parent to a young child, you spend a lot of time talking about feelings: about having to share, about being disappointed because no you may not have a cookie instead of broccoli, about the grave injustice of a parent pressing the elevator button before the child has a chance to.
And in a parenting culture that’s increasingly concerned with centering children’s needs above all else, mothers and fathers have become adept at talking about their kids’ feelings while jumping through hoops to mask their own. (I will never forget the day I saw a three-year-old spit in their mother’s face only to hear her say afterwards it’s OK to have a difficult day.) But new research suggests that parents who hide their negative emotions are doing their children, and themselves, a disservice.
A study published in this month’s Personality and Social Psychology journal from researchers at the University of Toronto says that when parents put on a faux-happy face for their kids, they do damage to their own sense of wellbeing and authenticity. The front can even impede a “high quality parent-child bond”, the study says.
“For the average parent the findings suggest when they attempt to hide their negative emotion expression and overexpress their positive emotions with their children, it actually comes at a cost: doing so may lead parents to feel worse themselves,” researcher Dr Emily Impett, says.
It makes sense that parents often fall back on amping up the positivity for the sake of their children – there are a lot of things in the world we want to protect our kids from. But children are often smarter than we give them credit for and are quite in tune with what the people closest to them – their parents – are feeling.
There was a time about a year or so ago, for example, when I received some bad news over the phone; I was home with my four-year-old and so I did my best to put on a brave face. She knew immediately something was wrong though, and was confused.
When I finally let a few tears out and explained that Mom heard something sad about a friend, she was, of course, just fine. My daughter patted my shoulder, gave me a hug, and went back to playing. She felt better that she was able to help me, and the moment made a lot more sense to her emotionally than a maniacally smiling mom holding back sobs. I was glad that I could feel sad momentarily and not have to work hard to hide that.
The emotional energy of relaying positive feelings to your children when you don’t feel them is a move the researchers called high cost – that it may seem like the most beneficial to your child at the time but that parents should find other ways of communicating emotions that “allow them to feel true to themselves”.
But this is also about children seeing the world in a more honest way. Of course we will want to shield our children from things that aren’t age-appropriate or harmful – but parents having a range of emotions, even sad or angry ones, don’t fall into that category. It’s better to raise a generation of kids who understand that moms and dads are people too. (And that we’d probably be happier with that cookie over broccoli as well.)