Another parenting principle: It's not just what you say that matters, but HOW you say it.

When providing parent coaching, I often find that many parents already know what to say when their children are upset or distressed. Many of them provide thoughtful emotion coaching (i.e., helping their child identify the emotion they feel or giving words to what their child is feeling), and many also express appropriate empathy (i.e., "You must be so upset about that - I’m so sorry you’re sad!”). Some praise when they see their children respond to difficult emotions in a positive and effective manner (this makes me especially happy to see!).

While I definitely focus on the content of a message, I also spend a lot of time helping parents evaluate how they talk to their children. When I say how, I mean specifically the tone, feel, and emotional delivery of what they are saying.

It’s important, especially for little ones, that the intensity of or emotion in your voice matches what they are feeling. Can you imagine if you were seriously upset about something and were talking to a friend about it who responded in a totally flat and blase voice “Oh, I’m so sorry. That’s so terrible.” The content would be totally spot on, but the emotional intensity and meaning behind it would leave you feeling totally unsatisfied, if not dismissed. It’s the same for children - when they are upset, it’s important that you match their intensity and tenor, as this helps them feel heard and validated.

It can be difficult doing this when your child is upset about something that feels unreasonable (some parents tell me they feel like their kids’ requests are outright insane). I’m not asking you to agree to their demands, I’m asking you to acknowledge and agree to how upset or distressed they are when they don’t get what they want. Validating their emotions doesn’t mean you have to agree to what they want. This can be hard for parents, as many have asked, “Well, if I say that it’s okay for her to feel upset, doesn’t that mean I need to give into what she wants?”

Not necessarily. As adults, we often encounter disappointments. The important thing isn’t that we can always change circumstances to be in our favor, it’s that we learn to deal with feelings of sadness, disappointment, anger, etc. that arise as a result of these trials and tribulations. By holding the line and validating our children’s emotions, we are starting to teach the early lessons of facing the realities of life while being able to manage difficult emotions.

I’ve run into the effects of incongruence between message and delivery with kids who tell me that their parents don’t “get” that they are sad, anxious, or upset despite the fact that the parents saying all the right things. Sometimes it’s just a matter of parents tweaking how they speak to their kids - lowering their pitch, softening their tone, slowing their speech, adding a bit of sadness - for kids to really feel heard and understood.

I recently came across a research study by Weinstein and colleagues (2019) in the journal Developmental Psychology, titled Listen to your mother: Motivating tones of voice predict adolescents’ reactions to mothers. As I discussed above, tone matters early in childhood when validating and emotion coaching, but it also continues to matter in adolescence, and in positive interactions. In this study, mothers of teens provided motivational instructions (e.g., “Do well in the play) in a variety of tones - supportive, neutral, and controlling. Unsurprisingly, the teens who had mothers provide the instructions in a supportive voice tended to report having more positive emotions, more closeness with their mothers, and were also more engaged than the teens whose mothers used a controlling voice.

Taken together, this study (and many before it) tells us that it’s not just how parents talk when dealing with difficult situations that matters, but also how they express provide encouragement and support that matters. Parents sometimes ask me how they will know they get it right - I ask them to practice with me in session (role playing helps A LOT!), and to practice with each other and give each other feedback. I’ve had parents come back to tell me that it not only helps how they relate to their kids, but how they relate to each other - that doesn’t surprise me. At the core, all people, children and adults alike, want to feel like our emotions are reasonable, acceptable, and understandable. Having that message delivered in a way that resonates goes a long way to help achieve that.

Why Child Therapy Often Involves Parent Therapy

Today, I’m writing about a question I get asked very often in my practice. I’ve invited my friend and colleague, Dr. Craig Springer, PhD, to join me in writing this article. Dr. Craig is a brilliant psychologist who worked for years in academia before establishing a flourishing child, adolescent, and adult practice, the Good Life Center for Mental Health (https://goodlifecenternj.com/), in Cranford, New Jersey. We met years ago through a good friend, and now here we are, both in private practice. I was talking to Dr. Craig the other day when I mentioned that parents often ask me why they need to be involved in their children’s therapy. In response, Dr. Craig shared that parents often expect to drop their children off and do not know why they need to be involved in treatment.

While I appreciate that parents want to give their children space and confidentiality, I think it’s important to discuss just why child therapy necessitates parent involvement.

First – Particularly with respect to younger children, it’s incredibly hard for children to change their thoughts and behaviors on their own. There are entire therapies that focus on changing how adults behave and think, and even those can take a while to implement. Young children have limited insight into their thoughts and feelings, and even more than that, their brains are still developing. How many of us have tried to ask children post-tantrum why they were angry, only to receive an incomprehensible answer. While parents find this frustrating to no end, many children truly don’t understand the cause and effect that lead them to be angry.

So, given how hard it is for adults to change unhelpful patterns and thoughts, one can imagine that it’s necessarily even harder for little kids to simply stop their behaviors and change. Teens might have more insight and talk like they know what they are doing, but countless studies have established that the teenage brain is still in a state of development (see Arain and colleagues, 2013, Casey and Caudle, 2013) across many domains – complex reasoning, self-control, and emotional maturity. Given the still maturing brain, it’s developmentally unreasonable for us to expect kids to just learn to change on their own.

Second – Without a question, parents have the most significant impact on their children. Parents are often the main attachment figure (because of this, most children are really motivated to please their parents), have had the most time with their children across different settings and environments, and know their children’s’ strengths and weaknesses the best. Therapists often only have 1 hour a week with a child. Although we can teach and practice skills and tools, parents must be the ones to help them generalize those behaviors and can also set up an environment filled with rewards and consequences for reinforcing effective behaviors. If, in my work with parents, I can teach them the skills and tools to set up a positive environment and model more adaptive behaviors, this change will inevitably trickle down to their children (research also supports the importance of parent involvement, beyond just facilitating how kids make it to/from therapy – Haine-Schlagel & Walsh, 2016).

Third – A supervisor of mine once said that I cannot change children’s behavior without changing the family system. What he meant by that is that every person in a family plays a specific role and that an individual’s role cannot change if the family doesn’t change how it operates. The troublemaker child, for example, has no room or impetus to change her devious ways if the family continues to treat her like a truant. If the parents change how they operate, however, the family dynamic will shift, thereby giving each individual space to behave differently and try new ways of interacting. This significant of a shit can only be achieved through working with the parents.

Finally, change requires safety, trust and understanding. Children use their behaviors to express their thoughts and feelings and to have their needs met. Over time, they establish patterns of behavior to navigate their world and protect themselves from vulnerabilities, insecurities, or to cope with challenges. Trying to utilize a different way of interacting requires incredible amounts of courage. Parents, through their understanding, support, and reassurance can provide children with the necessary characteristics for change to take place.