Emotional literacy: the greatest gift you can give
V AS THE family conflicts in the Bible illustrate only too well, even the patriarchs and matriarchs found parenting tough at times.
Over the past few months, PaJeS (Partnerships for Jewish Schools) has been running sessions for parents as part of its investment in improving wellbeing and mental health for children. A recent online talk about social media use was so popular that 400 families tuned in.
While parenting may come naturally to some, says clinical psychologist Anna Colton, “it’s always good to have some input and tools and strategies that aren’t necessarily your natural ones”.
A TV regular, she is one of the specialists that have helped to run sessions for PaJeS. She is, she says, “quite biologically minded”: when you understand what might be going on in your child’s brain, you might have a better idea of how to react.
Take the five-year-old who comes home after school in a strop. “Neurologically, they are quite tired because their brain has been so busy. So while they have been behaving nicely at school, when they come home, they run out of steam.
“It may not be that they are being naughty. I profoundly believe that when you understand what is going on, then it opens the door for all sorts of different ways of responding.”
She puts a premium on developing emotional literacy and emotional vocabulary — “they are the greatest gifts you can give your child”.
Emotions come in many different shades. “We have many different shades of anger from ‘I’m frustrated, I’m irritated, incandescent, furious, enraged’ — there are so many words.
“If your child has only one or two, they don’t really know what they are feeling and so those feelings become overwhelming and then they have to get rid of them because they don’t know what to do with them.
“So giving your children lots and lots of vocabulary is a massive tool and helping them understand what they are feeling and why they are feeling — and helping them to express it — that’s a huge task and a life skill, it’s not a luxury.”
As they grow older, so their ability to articulate their feelings should advance accordingly. But parents should recognise that behaviour is a form of communication and they need to grasp what lies behind it. “Maybe it sounds completely obvious but when your child slams a door and yells at you, there is a communication that ‘I’m not feeling OK here’.
“Now that communication might be: ‘because you told me, I couldn’t watch telly, I’ m angry,’ or that communication might be: ‘I’m sad and I want to shut everybody out’, but there’s a communcation and if all you do is discipline the behaviour and you don’t try to be a detective to try and work out what’s going underneath, you are missing a massive opportunity to help your child navigate something that’s obviously very difficult.”
Lockdowns may be a thing of the past but the longer-term effects of the pandemic may still be playing out. Children continued to develop physiologically but their social development may have been delayed through long periods of isolation at home.
“If you think about the reception children, normally they learn through play,” Dr Colton points out. “Play happens in the playground, in school, in play groups or nurseries — all that was taken away so the opportunities for social interaction were significantly reduced through the lockdown so that experiential learning was massively reduced.”
Also reduced was the normal early years experience of “realising there were other places that felt happy and other care-givers who could provide care other than parents”.
Meanwhile, among older age groups, “we saw an eruption of eating disorders like I’ve never seen in my career — and I’ve been in eating disorders more than 20 years. It was a perfect storm of being stuck at home, lots of social media around [that asked] ‘Are you going to come out lockdown fit or fat?’”
There was a little else to do by way of relief — “no other coping strategies” such as going out with friends. That left “a focus on exercise, working out, food”. At the same many were having to grapple with bereavement over the loss of family or friends or the anxiety of worrying about sick relatives or the financial strain on parents who lost income. “All those things that happened through Covid, lots of difficult life events whether they were financial or social or emotional…
“And so the eating disorders just ballooned — and that is going to have a massive long-term effect, a bit like the backlog in the physical health world. We don’t have that many services so getting treatment is really hard.”
There were young people who may have bottled up their stress in a difficult family environment while stuck at home. “It’s very hard to be seen by CAMHS [Children and Mental Health Services] these days, which is heartbreaking really… The demand is far outstripping the resources available and we are going to see the impact of that long term.”
While schools today may be paying more attention to wellbeing and good mental health, teachers are not psychologists or social workers and they shouldn’t be expected to fulfil those roles, she says.
But teachers may spot a problem before a parent that manifests itself in the playground or in class. “It’s great if they are able to spot difficulties early and if they have resources they can recommend to parents, if they have got links with a particular service, or links with an in-house psychologist.” If pastoral teams are psychologically trained, as they are in some schools, so much the better.
The fact that previous generations may not have talked about problems such as depression, anorexia or anxiety did not mean they did not exist. “They absolutely did. It didn’t mean there weren’t difficulties with parenting, there absolutely were… people struggled with parenting,” she says.
“I think it’s a process of talking that’s changed rather than a process of experience.”
We have many shades of anger from ‘frustrated’ to ‘enraged’
We saw an eruption of eating disorders like I’ve never seen