4 Attitudes That Weaken Emotional Bond With Your Children

Being a father, mother, grandfather, grandmother and, in addition, an effective educator, is not easy. Each child comes into this world with their own needs that we must know how to meet, with virtues to be strengthened and emotions that must be encouraged, guided and developed.

Educating is not just teaching children to read or showing how they can carry out their research work for school with the computer. Being a parent is not about giving kids a cell phone on their birthday, or making sure we buckle up each time they get into the car. It’s much more than all that.

Educating is also knowing how to say “No” and, at the same time, say “Yes” with your eyes, because educating is not just forbidding, but opening our hearts to our children and strengthening each day the emotional bond we have with them, giving to understand that we are together in every moment to give them maturity as happy and capable people.

However, in some situations, even if we know the theory, we do not apply it in practice.  In addition to fathers and mothers, we are also couples, employees, entrepreneurs or people who want to change jobs and possibly still want to achieve new professional goals. All of this occurs concomitantly in our daily lives and, without knowing how, we start to make mistakes in the education of our children.

If you’re a parent, you’ll remember when you were a child and you’ll know without a doubt what you valued most – and still do! – or what he missed most in his childhood days. If your childhood was not especially happy, you will understand which aspects broke this emotional bond with your parents, these mistakes that should not be repeated under any circumstances with your children.

Let’s talk about it.

1. Don’t listen to them

Children talk and also ask a lot. They take you by surprise with a thousand questions, countless doubts and hundreds of comments at the most inopportune moments. They want to know, experience, want to share and want to understand everything that happens in front of them.

Be very clear that if you tell them to be quiet, if you force them to be silent, or if you don’t heed their words by responding harshly or rudely, it will, in the short term, stop the child from being direct to you. And it will do so by privileging its own spaces of solitude, behind a closed door that it will not want you to cross.

2. Punish them by giving them a lack of confidence

There are many parents who associate the word education with punishment, with prohibition, with a firm and rigid authoritarianism in which everything is imposed and any error is punished. This type of educational behavior results in a very clear lack of self-esteem in the child, insecurity and, at the same time, a rupture in the emotional bond with them.

If we punish, we don’t teach. If I just tell the child everything he does wrong, he will never know how to do something right. I don’t give her measures or strategies, I just humiliate her. And all of this will generate in her anger, resentment and insecurity. Always avoid this attitude. 

3. Compare and label them

Few things can be more destructive than comparing one sibling to another or one child to another to ridicule her, to make sense of her meager skills, her failings, her lack of initiative. On occasion, a mistake many parents make is speaking out loud in front of children as if they weren’t listening.

“ It’s just that my son is not as smart as yours, he’s slower, which can be done”. Expressions like these are painful and generate in them a negative feeling that will cause not only hatred towards their parents, but an inner feeling of inferiority.

4. Yelling at them and relying more on orders than arguments

We will not deal with physical abuse here , as we believe that there is no worse way to break the emotional bond with a child than to commit this unforgivable act.

But we have to be aware that there are other types of maltreatment implied, almost equally destructive.  This is the case with psychological abuse, in which the child’s personality, self-image and self-confidence are completely ruined.

There are fathers and mothers who do not know how to address their children in any other way, and it is always through shouting. Raising your voice without justifiable reason causes a state of euphoria and continuous stress in children;  they don’t know what to lean on, they don’t know if they’ve done something good or bad. The continuous screams infuriate and hurt, as there is no dialogue, only orders and criticism.

One must be very careful with these basic aspects. Not listening, not talking and not showing openness, understanding or superimposing the sanction on the dialogue are ways of gradually pushing children away from us. They will see us as enemies to defend against and we will break the emotional bond with them.

Educating is a lifelong adventure where no one is a true expert. However, it is enough to rely on the pillars of understanding, affection and a healthy attachment that provides maturity and security in this person who is also part of you.

Image courtesy: Gabriela Silva, Nicolás Gouny, Whimsical