News
Never Lie To Your Child
They’ll find you out, no matter how hard you try to protect them from your negative feelings. Especially if you are a mother.
As new research suggests, even when parents try to hide their stress, they can still pass on those feelings to their children anyway.
To examine how stress is passed on from parent to child, Sara Waters from Washington State University Vancouver and colleagues looked at the physiological responses that occur when parents suppressed their anxiety.
Their tests, carried out on a total of 107 parents and their children aged between 7 and 11, showed clearly that there is a significant link between a mother’s physiological stress and that of her child. Interestingly enough, stress wasn’t transmitted from fathers to their children, which the team believes is down to how men deal with stress. Because men are more likely to say they’re fine when they’re not, while women are more likely to show how they’re feeling, the team argues that children were more used to emotional suppression in their male caretakers and were therefore less affected. However, fathers in the suppression condition did become linked to their children’s physiology in the opposite direction: they picked up stress from their children, not the other way around.
Hiding stress from your children is entirely understandable — you may wish to protect them from negative feelings and see emotional suppression as the best way to do that. But, as Waters says, it may be more comforting for children “to have their feelings honoured” — listening to them honestly, rather than brushing over them altogether.
The research was published in the Journal of Family Psychology.
As new research suggests, even when parents try to hide their stress, they can still pass on those feelings to their children anyway.
To examine how stress is passed on from parent to child, Sara Waters from Washington State University Vancouver and colleagues looked at the physiological responses that occur when parents suppressed their anxiety.
Their tests, carried out on a total of 107 parents and their children aged between 7 and 11, showed clearly that there is a significant link between a mother’s physiological stress and that of her child. Interestingly enough, stress wasn’t transmitted from fathers to their children, which the team believes is down to how men deal with stress. Because men are more likely to say they’re fine when they’re not, while women are more likely to show how they’re feeling, the team argues that children were more used to emotional suppression in their male caretakers and were therefore less affected. However, fathers in the suppression condition did become linked to their children’s physiology in the opposite direction: they picked up stress from their children, not the other way around.
Hiding stress from your children is entirely understandable — you may wish to protect them from negative feelings and see emotional suppression as the best way to do that. But, as Waters says, it may be more comforting for children “to have their feelings honoured” — listening to them honestly, rather than brushing over them altogether.
The research was published in the Journal of Family Psychology.