Freeing Your Child from Negative Thinking
Freeing Your Child from Negative Thinking
Help to Redirect Your Child's Negativity
In this newsletter, we provide you with notes on Dr. Tamar Chansky on How to Free Our Children From Negative Thinking, an episode of TILT Parenting: Raising Differently Wired Kids.
Hosted by Debbie Reber, a parenting activist, New York Times bestselling author, podcast host, and speaker. She is joined by Dr. Tamar Chansky, a psychologist and the author of the popular, Freeing Your Child series, including Freeing Your Child from OCD, Freeing Your Child from Anxiety, and Freeing Your Child from Negative Thinking.
Read our notes below.
Topics covered in this Summary
Discussing Negative Thinking
Four Steps to Combat Negative Thinking
Setting the Foundation
Discussing Negative Thinking
All children can fall into negative thinking, seeing the worst in a situation, underestimating their strengths, and being hard on themselves.
The tricky thing about it is that where this comes from is so automatic, and what we need to do about it has to be intentional. But again, that's something to understand.
Children vent, and it is important for us to understand that the goal is to help them honour what they're feeling, and then, help them to think about it differently or do something differently where needed.
If you feel that your child may be struggling with negativing thinking, you can work that into a conversation. It will help you to be more empathetic and them less scared about what is going on.
As parents, we're no different. We have automatic negative thoughts, and we can have negative thoughts about our capacity to help our children change, to teach them, or to help them understand. It is important to recognise this, honour this and amend your thinking patterns or actions where needed.
Four Steps to Combat Negative Thinking
If you are raising a child whose default mode tends to be negative thinking, it can be very challenging. These are kids who are tend to be more rigid, concrete thinkers. Supporting them and helping them to see things through a more optimistic lens can be difficult.
Here are some important steps to start with:
Empathize
Resist the urge to just “fix” or “downplay” your child’s distress. Instead, empathize with your child’s unhappiness—this doesn’t mean you agree with the reasons they are feeling the way they do, it means that you are trying to see things from their perspective so they will feel heard, and so they will be clear about what is bothering them, as opposed to what might be bothering you.
Get Specific
Negative thinking supersizes small problems which makes them seem monumental, permanent, and unchangeable. Help your child narrow the focus and identify the one thing that’s bothering them. You may say, "This feels really bad. Can we try to figure out the one thing that started the bad feeling?’’.
Switch Perspectives
Let your kids know that while negative thinking gets there first, it exaggerates and magnifies the problem. Ask your child to take the same situation and tell you how their best friend would see it, or how their favorite rock star, their hero, or their favorite movie character would see it.
Mobilize
Once kids have cooled down and seen things in better perspective, help them act on it—are there steps they need to take to make things happen differently next time, or even to improve the situation at hand?
Along with nurturing attachment and validating emotions, talking with our kids about their thoughts can help them develop self-awareness and connect thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to manage them in a more regulated way.
Setting the Foundation
Whether it's small disappointments that happen with friendships or grades, or bigger life events that occur, the best place for kids to work on these thinking patterns is at home.
It’s never too late for them to understand that the feeling of discomfort is not wrong. It's part of a process that we all go through when we encounter disappointment or frustration.
Anytime that you talk about these with your child, you're planting little seeds. Over time, they blossom. As you're working on things, you are also improving the dynamic that you have with your child.
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Listen to the original episode