How Do You Deal with a Child’s Emotions? Q: Any good methods for helping children to learn emotional discipline, other than setting a good example? RK: How old a child are you talking about? Q: Five or six. RK: They are experiencing emotions and expressing them as they happen or are they exceptionally emotionally responsive to certain things that happen? Q: This one just seems to get awfully peevish when she does not get her way. Sometimes I use the reward system; if you will do so and so and I will do such and such. That seems to help, some, but not nearly all the time. I thought maybe I am missing something in understanding how a five- or six-year old brain works. RK: Life is awfully frustrating at that age to the child, you know. They do have emotional responses. One thing about children, whatever they are feeling is totally apparent. I think one of the things that helps is to empathize as much as you can with them about what they are feeling. I think that helps them to say, “I understand that this is frustrating and that is how you feel and when it happens to me I feel the same way. But this other good thing is going to happen later on in the day,” or something of that sort. You know, they are not hardly able to do anything well at that age and they see everybody else doing things competently, and it is very frustrating to them. Their body just does not respond, yet, to the commands they are trying to give it, so it is natural that they are that way. But you know, you never want to quash expressions of emotion. Even children, when they get angry over something, have to have some acceptable way of being able to express their anger, and you have to find a way which is acceptable. They are not supposed to be picking on you or on another sibling or pounding holes in the wall with a hammer or something. But they have to be allowed to feel that, “Yes, these are genuine emotions.” None of us can turn off an emotion. We can stop ourselves from expressing it in outward ways, but we can not stop the emotion; and I guess that is what you are trying to help them learn how to do is to sublimate it somehow or other. But particularly when they are not in the emotion, is a good time to discuss it calmly about how this is a problem for everybody and it hurts to go through all these kind of stresses. To turn a child off from emotions, which is somewhat the patriarchal ambition, is to have people go through life without troubling anybody about how they feel about anything. You have got to make good soldiers out of them, and that means you have got to teach the women the same way. It is hard, otherwise, to get people to shoot their brothers and sisters on command, if they have emotions. I do not think that is what we are looking for. I did not help you at all, did I? Q: No, that is helpful. I have not thought about that in a long time. I guess, as adults, we are always thinking of, “We have got to do this at this certain time, and that at that certain time,” and we get peeved if the kid is not ready when it is time to do this or that or whatever. That probably is expecting too much, particularly at that age, to get ready and enthusiastic about doing something when they have been playing at something that they really enjoy and they do not want to quit it. RK: Yes, the one thing that used to really irk me is that I could just turn off my mother hollering at me to do something if I was really interested in something because I was really into it. But the thing that so frustrated me was to have someone come along and literally pick you up and take you off to another place. You can flail all around, but you are still going someplace else, and that is very nerve-wracking to a youngster, and it does happen to them. Another problem too, in helping understand children is that, when you say, “I do not want you to eat now because we are going to eat in an hour.” Or, “calm down, get yourself ready, because we are going to go to some nice picnic in three hours.” That could be forever, so far as a child is concerned. It is very hard for them at that age. At five and six they are starting to get the idea, but it is still difficult for them. If you say, “In three hours we are going to go on a picnic,” the child is thinking, “How long is that? Is that like tomorrow or several days from now?” That is the feeling they have about it. It is one other source of frustration. Q: You really can not make a deal with them until they get about seven years old. RK: Another thing that is interesting is, they can come up with some really good arguments that you do not have answers for, as to, “Why?” “‘I should not be doing that!” or “I should be doing such and so.” That is where the last resort one comes in: “We are going to do it because I am bigger than you are,” or, “I am the daddy.” It is always a poor argument. Q: You really should not use that one very much, should you? RK: No, that is the last resort. Then the kid knows you really do not have an answer. You have lost the argument in imposing that. Q: One thing I have found the Philosophy to be helpful in, is certain concepts like karma or interfering with your environment, and you can point out to a child, you know, “This is interfering with your environment.” Then you can get into a discussion of what a person’s environment is; where are the boundaries, and so forth. That is a little bit more difficult. It is helpful; it kind of throws an extra step in there before you get to the point where you say, “Well, this is the way it is going to be.” You are hoping, maybe, the philosophical stuff will seem valid enough so that says, or he is confused enough by it! RK: Yes, “snowing” them helps. They think about that for a couple days; then they ask you the kicker that you do not know the answer for, later on, after they have thought it all through. It always helps to remember that these are Egos who are as old as we are and have had as much experience as we have had, in many, many incarnations. If you talk with them in a reasonable way, it helps a lot. They hate to be “talked down to” and they know immediately when they are being talked down to. When you are dealing with them on their level, it seems like you have a little better chance of an acceptable interchange between you two. I have had and have seen other people have good success with that. A sense of mutual respect comes out of that. When I was being brought up, children were thought of as somewhat equivalent to pets. You would speak to them like you would to a dog or a cat or something like that: give commands, like that, rather than to a friend you are talking to somebody who needs to be hollered at. And that is pretty disturbing to the little ones because there is a whole background of thousands and thousands of years of adult perception trying to come through this new brain. It is a “tough deal” for them. Q: Would it be helpful to explain to the child that you really had its best interest at heart? Would that make sense to them? Q: Yeah, how many times have you heard, “I am doing this for your own good?” RK: I think it is a fairly weak argument, in comparison to being empathetic as much as possible to them. If it was for your own good, their immediate internal response, and sometimes verbally, is, “Well, I do not want to do that. I think this is for my greatest good.” Then it comes to a philosophical argument. Children are not stupid. What we have normally done is train them that it is so futile to come back with a reasonable argument or discussion that they have given up, and then we have got them where we want them. But that is not the way you really retain a close relationship with your child. To beat them into submission or to terrify them into submission or to keep being so intellectually superior that they have no recourse, that is not good. That is a dividing type of activity. Q: Maybe if they understood that your motivation as a parent was really for their best good. If they understood your motivation more than anything, not that you were just doing it because you wanted to, but you felt like— RK: “I am trying to do what I think is the best, the best that I know how for you.” That’s a valid statement. But as I say, when you say, “This is for your greatest good,” they have an argument that comes back and says, “Well, I don’t want to do that.” It is tough rearing children that way, because it makes you think. In the old way when you raise a kid like a cub bear, when it gets a little out of hand just whack them in the face or knock them down or spank them or something, or just say, “Get out of the house for awhile.” Those are not really good ways to rear a child. But it does take a lot of work: to try to keep up with them, let alone a little ahead of them. That is a lot of work. We tend to rear children in accordance with the ways we were reared because that is our experience, and what we have seen done with our neighborhood kids by their parents. When things get tough, and you are trying to figure out how to discipline a child, you usually go “on automatic” and react as to what was in your experience. That is when you need to stop and say, “That is not the right way.” That is when you need to read psychology books. However, being totally permissive to a child is as disturbing to a child as being totally repressive. Children find the world kind of big and kind of scary, just on general principles, and they like to know where their safe boundaries are. So, when you set boundaries and say, “This is a safe way for you to go. You can not play in the freeway, you can not play with guns,” and that sort of thing. That sounds reasonable to them and they will live up to those rules. You always have to leave room for the tests. If judges in juvenile courts had not been children themselves, they would probably be pretty terrible to deal with. But knowing the kind of pranks and silly things that they did and which all the kids that they knew did, it keeps judges more or less tolerant of children. Say, instead of putting them in reform school, they give them some kind of task that they have to do to make them understand about being responsible; and I think that is good. It is bad if you run into a judge who has forgotten what it was being a child, and then everything is likely to come down just the way the law is written. That is not so keen.
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