Parents need to chill out, sit back, and let their kids make mistakes if they want them to grow up right, says a noted psychologist.
Toronto psychologist and author Alex Russell spoke to about 500 St. Albert residents at the Arden Theatre Monday night as part of a free talk on parenting.
The talk was similar to the one he gave to about 600 St. Albert-area public school educators at the Italian Cultural Centre of Edmonton earlier that afternoon.
Russell is a clinical psychologist and author of Drop the Worry Ball: How to Parent in the Age of Entitlement.
He was in town to give the keynote address at a professional development day for St. Albert Public Schools, said Muriel Martin assistant principal Katie Boyd, who helped organize the talk. The district’s parent councils thought other parents might want to hear him as well, so they, the SAIF Society, the SIGIS Child Care Society and St. Albert ATA Local 73 agreed to sponsor a free talk at the Arden.
Russell said he was seeing an “epidemic” of anxious kids and kids diagnosed with anxiety disorders – one he traced back to anxious parents.
“Our parental anxiety can very easily put our children at higher risk,” Russell said – we fear child abductions, which are actually super rare, so we drive our kids to school, despite the fact that car crashes are the most common cause of death in kids.
“Anxious about our kids, we kill them off.”
A big part of this anxiety stems from our investment in our kids as parents, Russell explained. That investment leads us to conflate our children’s lives with our own, so that any mistake they make reflects badly on us.
That leads us to start micromanaging, denying them the chance to learn how to run their own lives. Once at university, where their parents no longer have their backs, many either give up and turn to drugs or alcohol or work themselves into mental disorders from the pursuit of success.
Another part is praise. Praising kids was once seen as a way to build self-esteem in children, but that’s proven not to be the case, Russell said.
“When we praise a kid, we put things on a good-bad continuum,” he explained in an interview, and that builds anxiety in kids – now, instead of enjoying what they did, they start worrying about whether what they did was good enough.
Instead of praising our kids, Russell said parents needed to be mindful of them.
“Minding is all about being interested, curious, and enjoying the show,” Russell said.
He likens it to acknowledging your kid once he raises his arms in triumph atop the jungle gym. The knowledge that you are observing and taking an interest in him builds his sense of self and identity.
“Nothing can fortify children more than a strong sense of self.”
Conversely, if you steer the kid away from the gym to something safer or are constantly yelling at him to be careful, you’ll deny him this chance to express himself.
If your kid proudly presents the ink-and-macaroni painting they made in class, telling them that “it’s good” carries with it the message that “I expect more of this,” Russell said. If you instead get them talking about it, you’ll let them express themselves through it.
“It’s not about good or bad. It’s just about the kind of person they are.”
Successful minding means letting your kids succeed and fail in their own way, Russell explained. He used to think his son, Sam, should be an offensive forward and would always quiz him about on-ice tactics after games, but found that he clammed up whenever he did. When he let his son talk about all the big hits he made as a defenceman – which is what Sam actually liked doing – his son became open and talkative.
“I had to learn how to enjoy Sam’s hockey career through his eyes.”
Instead of worrying about everything our kids could do wrong, we need to “chill out,” step back and trust them to live their lives, Russell said.
“When our anxiety takes over our minds, we become our kids’ biggest problem.”
