The alchemist
VIP
This is an excellent article. It's in Norwegian, so use Google Translate in-page feature if on Chrome or apply other available translate options on a different web browser.
Feelings in Friction With Environment/Reality For Growth or Maladaptation
- Thread starter The alchemist
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In summary, you cannot always get the external world to conform to your
wishes and must learn to deal with the frustration of not always getting what you want. It is incumbent upon parents to help children regulate their emotions. Where I differ is that you can help children to learn to deal with disappointment and still have their feelings validated. With rules set in place. I understand that parents should set appropriate limits, that is, parent.
wishes and must learn to deal with the frustration of not always getting what you want. It is incumbent upon parents to help children regulate their emotions. Where I differ is that you can help children to learn to deal with disappointment and still have their feelings validated. With rules set in place. I understand that parents should set appropriate limits, that is, parent.
The alchemist
VIP
It's also about how, in this day and age, children's feelings are increasingly validated as a source of truth when faced with a conflicting reality. The point is that frustration, the friction between the children's emotions and how things are in the environment, is crucial for growth. Otherwise, you will have, as we see much today with young adults that believe their emotions are truth and that the world has to conform to them or that the world is wrong for making them feel bad, instead of having an inward regulation to what occurs in reality.
When children have fewer authority figures to set boundaries, invoke discipline, and assert conditions that challenge children early on, they grow up to think that the world is unsafe, thus also become tyrannical, a psychological profile that is born out of parents catering to children's emotions, instead of challenging the children so they have to feel uncomfortable and know that their emotions are not always valid.
As the article pointed out, validation and frustration are important. Sometimes, the environment is wrong. Other times, the issue is a child lacks the psychological and regulatory robustness to meet worldly expectations. Often, a lack of validation of certain emotions is healthy parenting. You have to have the correct validation, where often, the child has to be presented with conflicts that challenge them to reach new psychological growth. Parents that validate every emotion are fundamentally stunting the growth of their children. A consequence of which will play out badly later on at the cost of themselves and many others they deal with.
I have lately seen the newer generation become more and more entitled to their emotions. And it truly comes from how society gave less regulation and discipline upon kids, now thinking because you made them feel bad by saying something true, they think you have to be a bad person. Placing emotions at the center of reasoning without checks and balances is dangerous. Emotions are crucial for the human but without reason and correct maturity is deceptive. That's Shaytan's playground.
We can go even further. We have plenty of scenarios where children with divorced parents, where one parent, although giving enough rightly discerned emotional validation and presence, sets correct boundaries on the kid. The other parent wrongly validates every emotion and is lax about everything. What happens is the parent who demands conditions that require the child to grow through immature reactionary impulse is viewed as "bad," resulting in the kid spending more time with the lax parent who irresponsibly doesn't challenge the child on the matter. The child will favor the parent that demands less from them, forming a worse relationship with the responsible one. In the objective sense, this situation ends at the cost of the child's growth and devolving the bond of a healthy parent so another could gain favor. That scenario could have been solved by the other lax parent telling the child that the stricter parent was right. The child would have had healthy frustration and then learned to grow up with a better mindset. Such a phenomenon can also happen with parents who are not divorced, under the same household.
A lot of the time, what the child wants is not what it needs.
