THE PARENT WHISPERER

Parenting doesn’t come with a step-by-step manual, but Kirsty Ross has spent a career helping children and adults navigate some of the tougher times. Warwick Rasmussen reports.

When she was a child Dr Kirsty Ross’ mum used to have a saying that the household was not a democracy.

‘‘She’d say ‘I’m interested in hearing your point of view, but you’re not going to have equal say’, and neither should children."

Ross is a softly spoken clinical psychologist with almost 19 years’ experience and is the director of the Massey University Psychology Clinic in Palmerston North.

She’s found that parents are as hungry as ever for information, and she is eager to share her vast knowledge, relishing any opportunity to offer help.

‘‘Psychology is not something that should just be practised behind closed doors.’’

Earlier this year Ross held a popular public lecture on parenting in Palmerston North called A Recipe for Parenting: Fostering Resilience and Enhancing Connections, which aimed to give parents a bunch of tools for modern parenting.

Part of that recipe is returning to parenting based on values and connection, while creating a mix of empathy, communication with boundaries and oversight.

And in Ross’ experience there is more need for help than ever. More children are presenting with signs that they need help. Greater awareness of mental health issues has also contributed to a spike in demand.

Kids are better at recognising issues and seeking help for them, giving a more accurate idea of how widespread the problem is.

‘‘Young people now are fantastic at being able to identify, name their own emotions and are able to talk about those. So I think that there’s a balancing act there.’’

Parents are seeking psychological help for children for all manner of reasons, including anxiety, anger, trauma, and behavioural issues.

For Ross, a foundational part of parenting is helping children learn how to regulate their emotions from an early age.

There’s plenty of research that backs this up, including the Dunedin longitudinal study, (which has been tracking the same group of people since the 1970s), about the benefits that regulation can have for many aspects of life – emotional wellbeing, physical health, even relationship statuses, and job security.

It’s pretty hard to maintain a healthy relationship if you can’t regulate your emotions, she says.

‘‘It’s a really pivotal skill and what I increasingly see is that when children are distressed, parents feel very anxious about what that might end up looking like. They worry about self-harm, suicidality. All of those are very legitimate, understandable concerns. But there are ways to not be afraid of emotions. All of our emotions are there for a reason, they are all valid.’’

Parents should not be afraid of their child’s emotions, she says, in fact they should do what they can to validate all feelings – even if they think the reason why a child is upset is ridiculous

Dealing with anxiety in children can be complex because many parents feel the urge to try and ‘fix’ something, but it is crucial that adults manage their own emotions well, too.

Not only does that mean you can ‘‘sit with your child’s distress’’, but you can model how to do that in a functional way, says Ross.

‘‘We don’t want people to get so immersed in an emotion that it overwhelms them.

‘‘Anxiety in its most simple form is something that might happen, but physically it’s the same as fear, so your brain doesn’t know the difference. It still sends off the same physical response.’’

Fear is functional, designed to deal with real threats. With anxiety our brain will send off the same danger signals, but about something that’s purely imagined, Ross says.

Part of helping a child who has anxiety is getting them to understand the science behind it, that it’s their brain trying to protect them, that the brain is simply trying to figure out things that might go wrong.

‘‘Often, it’s really intelligent kids who get anxious because they can imagine lots of things that other kids might not have even dreamt of happening, and that’s OK, but they can be told this is why your brain is doing this. This is why you feel this way in your body. This is what you can do. This is how you can remind yourself and feel that you can cope with that.’’

Parents have to show that they’ll walk alongside the child while acknowledging that anxiety is part of the human experience.

The same goes for dealing with anger.

Unfortunately a common response to a child showing anger is parents quickly switching to punishment mode. The child then gets a sense from other people that they’re an angry person, that they’ve got conduct problems, that they’re dangerous, says Ross.

‘‘That’s not helpful because then it makes people feel that they, as a person, are somehow flawed and wrong, rather than dialling that emotion down and thinking about behaving in a way which isn’t going to cause any extra problems.

‘‘When I talk to kids about anger, there’s only three rules: you don’t hurt yourself, you don’t hurt anyone else and you don’t break anything. That’s it. Your anger is actually OK. It’s not a bad emotion. It might my not feel very pleasant, other people might not like it very much, but it doesn’t have to be bad if you have some limits around it, know how to dial it down and then talk about why you were angry.’’

While explaining emotions is helpful for children’s development, showing emotion as an adult can be a helpful teaching tool as well.

Ross says many parents think they have to hide how they are feeling to protect their children.

‘‘When my mum died, I cried in front of my children. I made it really clear I was upset, but I also made it really clear that I was in control of that. You don’t have to fix it for me. They got to see that emotion is a normal part of loving someone and loss, and that is a valid thing to feel.’’

Ross appreciates that, for many people, seeking professional help can be overwhelming. Normalising psychological help, making it more accessible, and democratising what it all entails were motivations behind the public lecture.

‘‘I really wanted to demystify psychology and actually put science into a way that could be used by parents. I know that parents are increasingly aware of the need to support their children’s emotional wellbeing, but there’s so much information out there that it’s really hard to wade through it.’’

She thinks too often that people wait until their personal situation is dire before they reach out for help.

‘‘So the fear often to go and see a psychologist is that you’re going to tell me I’m crazy and lock me up. And that’s always something I dispel immediately, or people say ‘I’m broken, that there’s something really wrong with me’.

Ross says making sense of someone’s personal situation and understanding that what they’re experiencing makes sense given what they’ve been through is a natural starting point.

‘‘My job is to make myself redundant in your life. It’s to give you the skills that you can then go on and do this, so you don’t need me for years of therapy.’’

‘Psychology is not something that should just be practised behind closed doors.’ DR KIRSTY ROSS