Many parents think so. And wanting to provide the child with a happy future, they are trying at all costs to protect him from stress and raise him exclusively in the comfort zone. But is it possible to protect the child from all troubles? And most importantly, is it necessary?
Don’t let the baby cry, he will become neurotic. You can not force and punish the child — it hurts him. For many modern parents, the idea of the dangers of early trauma has become an axiom. They are well acquainted with the popular psychological literature, in which the concept of childhood trauma, its causes and consequences, introduced by Sigmund Freud, has received a broader interpretation.
“Of course, there are traumatic events that affect the child so strongly that he loses the ability to build his behavior in accordance with internal needs and external circumstances, and this eventually deforms his personality,” explains psychotherapist, specialist in working with trauma Varvara Sidorova. — But many injuries are not so fatal and do not become a sentence.
If adults are attentive and take care to create conditions in which the child feels securely attached, the wound will heal. The effects of many injuries can be mitigated already in adulthood. Even the worst thing that can happen to a child — the loss of parents — will not necessarily lead to a halt in development.
Parents often (and mistakenly) mistake any child’s grief or dissatisfaction for trauma. and they try to build a whole life with a child so that he does not get upset and does not cry.
Some are ready to entertain their daughter for hours, if only she ate dinner without whims. Others, depriving a child of a tablet for some kind of offense, immediately cancel the punishment and reproach themselves for heartlessness, hearing his sobs.
Still others refuse to take their son to kindergarten and keep him at home with a nanny, instead of finding a suitable peer group and letting him get used to communicating with other people.
Parents should not specifically “prepare children for a difficult life” — behave emphatically tough, ignore all their requests, provoke quarrels: the child should feel safe at home
“If a child does not face grief and restrictions, lives in a family that takes care of satisfying all his needs and desires, then, getting into the outside world, he suddenly realizes that not everyone is ready to meet him,” explains Varvara Sidorova. “This discovery can cause great frustration in him, which distorts his development.”
Of course, parents should not specifically “prepare children for a difficult life” — behave emphatically tough, ignore all their requests, provoke quarrels: the child should feel safe at home. But sensitive adults will always notice when a child has the resources to cope with stress, when it is possible and necessary to be strict.
Frustration needed in small doses — it, like a vaccine, helps to form immunity to difficulties and weaken their negative impact in the future.
Z. Freud «Studies in hysteria» in Sobr. op. in 26 volumes, v. 1 (Eastern European Institute of Psychoanalysis, 2005).