Help Kids Manage Frustrations

When we’re young we have no patience; we are governed by our impulses. How, then, do we learn to tame our impulses and develop self control? When a small child reaches his hand toward fire, an adult yells and prevents it. When he wants to poke a stick into an electric socket, someone stops him. A toddler sees his friend’s shinny red truck and grabs it. It’s appealing and he wants it. His friend yells no or an adult stops him, but his natural exploring instinct pushes him. He doesn’t like being denied. Yet, it is these small incidents of being stopped by external forces that help us learn to stop ourselves.  

We slowly learn ways to tolerate this disruption of our desire.  In his book Emotional Intelligence, Dan Goleman, says, “There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental, than resisting impulse.  It is the root of all emotional self control, since all emotions, by their very nature lead to one or another impulse to act.  The root meaning of the word emotion, remember is “to move …” Goleman then talks about a study done at Stanford University in the 60’s: the marshmallow challenge. In the challenge, a group of four year olds are given two choices.  If they can wait while the experimenter runs an errand they can have two marshmallows; if they can’t wait they can only have one, which they can have immediately. Some four year olds were able to wait the 15 to 20 minutes the experimenter was out of the room.  They chose a variety of strategies to calm and distract themselves.  They turned their chairs around or covered their eyes to avoid seeing the tempting marshmallow; they sang, played games with their hands and feet and even tried to sleep.  The other more impulsive four year olds grabbed the marshmallow within seconds of the experimenter’s departure.   

The amount of impulse control a child exhibited during this marshmallow challenge turned out to predict how well these kids were doing 14 years later. The kids who exercised strategies to successfully distract themselves were more popular with their peers, had less trouble delaying gratification and scored far higher on achievement tests than the “grabbers.” Since there are so many benefits to learning to not be “grabbers” how do we help our children learn this skill? 

Name the Emotion

Sometimes when children are stressed, they won’t know what emotion they’re feeling. Often children have vague categories of good, bad, or so-so.  You can help them to be more discriminating and able to name what they’re feeling. You can say: “I see you’re angry about having to share some of your toys,” or “ I see you’re sad because you don’t think I’ve understood you.  Can we try again?   I’d really like to know what you’re feeling right now.”  Expressing feelings is one way to dissipate stress.  Research has shown that just naming a feeling helps us feel calmer.  

Offer Encouragement

It is helpful for parents to notice their children’s attempts at managing frustrations and offer encouraging words. When a child is about to give up on something, you can say: “It’s hard, but you can do it.”   Or, when you know an unpleasant chore is being done without a lot of fuss you can say, “You really didn’t want to do that, but you did it anyway.  Way to go!” It helps children to believe in themselves and in their ability to persevere when we see their effort.  

  

Allow Manageable Experiences of Frustration

Don’t try to protect your children from all frustration. It is the experience of small doses of frustration that build character and inner strength. The old rule of  “not too much and not too little” applies here.  When we protect children from all frustration we rob them of the challenge to become more competent in managing their own stress. We also don’t want them to manage frustrations that are truly beyond their developmental ability. This leads not only to frustrations, but to an internal belief system that they are not competent. 

Life is full of frustrations like the marshmallow test. We need to help our children face these ordinary life disappointments and help them develop emotional flexibility. This fundamental ability to tolerate frustration once learned will help them move from upset to calm with increased ease, self control and self awareness. 

New Moon Girls Magazine Guest Article

Life Lessons from the Cornish, NH Fair

I spent a week in Lyme, NH. In the Lyme General Store I spied a brochure for the Cornish Fair.  Cornish, NH wasn’t that far away, and a small rural fair seemed like fun, so I was intrigued. 

When we got there I learned that the Cornish Fair celebrates the farming traditions of the community. We saw the oxen pulling contest and the woodsman sawing competition, but we missed the antique tractor pull and the sheep blocking and trimming. There were lots of 4-H exhibits, where the kids were showing off the animals they had raised and trained.  When they weren’t showing they were lounging all over these animals.  Their attachment and comfort with them was so evident, it was touching.  They were clearly learning important life lessons about being caring, committed and reliable. 

In a totally surprising way, I found another example of how these kids were learning life lessons. Up the hill from the fair grounds, in the local school, were all the exhibits for produce, and prepared food--think jams, pickles, dilly beans, cakes and pies--as well as beautiful hand-sewn quilts.  Walking through the hall of the school, I came across an essay on a classroom door.  Unlike all the farm focus, this was an essay on art. It’s how a student, Shawn Costello, learned important life lessons through art.  It’s exceptionally thoughtful and I had to share it.

Go On Vacation, It’s Good For your Health

As I’m getting ready to go on vacation, I’m thinking about all the positive things that accompany this time off.  I find it exciting to just have a break in my routine.  Routines can be comforting and predictable, but they can also become rigid and boring.   One of my friends has a simple definition of vacation: No Chores.  I think it is this absence of chores that frees up energy and opens us up to adventure and new experiences.   It allows me to be more in the moment.   I become more attentive and curious about my surroundings. I day dream and find a better balance between activity and rest.  

Often we don’t even know how much we’ve been pushing ourselves, how much we’ve ignored our body’s messages to slow down.   Or how much we’ve denied ourselves downtime and find instead some project that has to be finished.  I’m often surprised at how tired I feel the first few days of vacation.   My body seems to be telling me that it has needed rest for some time and it now intends to take it.

Vacations provide me with an excuse to unplug. I loosen the obsessive pull to check messages and return phone calls.   I take a holiday from the news.  I reengage in things I love, like photography.   I sharpen my sense of perception and see the beauty around me.

One year when I lived in Italy I was introduced to the European tradition of taking the month of August off.   I was shocked.   Taking an entire month off for vacation seemed extravagant. Then as I considered this more, it seemed not strange, but the epitome of sanity. Americans not only don’t take this much time off, our work ethic seems to push us in the opposite direction.  Sociologist say we work longer hours, take fewer vacation days and retire later than workers in other industrialized countries. 

 Can this propensity to shoulder on, to skip vacations or take work with us while on vacation, be healthy?   Some recent studies are showing the dangers of ignoring the need for downtime. 

A study by the time share company RCI found that "Women who took a vacation at least twice a year had a 50 percent lower chance of developing coronary heart disease than women who took a vacation once every six years or less. For men, taking more frequent annual vacations reduced the relative risk of dying of heart disease by almost 30 percent.”

Certainly this information tells us something important about finding balance between work and play.   We sleep at night so our bodies have time to rest, rebuild, and repair.  Our psyche needs the same.   Vacations offer us that opportunity.  They allow us to reduce stress and engage in experiences we find pleasurable.   They elicit playfulness and provide the leisure to dream and imagine.   If this all seems frivolous just remember that Albert Einstein was almost kicked out of college for daydreaming.  He maintained that he discovered the theory of relativity by gazing at sunbeams and fantasizing about what it would be like to ride on them into the universe.

“When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the flight of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”

Albert Einstein