How often do you look into the eyes of your loved ones, especially children, in a conversation? What is the child reading in your gaze at this moment? What message is he receiving, and how will it affect his future life? Opinion of child psychologist Ross Campbell.
“When you first think about eye contact, you may not think it is very important for your child – says psychotherapist and psychiatrist Ross Campbell (Ross Campbell). “However, an open, natural, friendly look directly into the eyes of a child is essential not only to establish a good communication interaction, but also to meet his emotional needs. Although we do not realize it, we use eye contact as the main means of conveying our feelings, including love, especially for children. The child uses eye contact with parents (and other people) for emotional nourishment. The more often parents look at the child, trying to express their love to him, the more he is saturated with this love and the fuller his emotional reservoir.
What is eye contact? It simply means that you are looking into the eyes of the other person. Most people don’t realize how crucial this is. Have you ever tried to talk to a person who stubbornly turns away, avoiding looking you in the face? It is difficult, imagine, and very dramatically affects our attitude towards him. We prefer people with an open and friendly look, a sincere smile, a friendly and friendly attitude towards the interlocutor.
Unfortunately, parents may unknowingly use eye contact to send very different signals to their children. For example, parents can look with tenderness and love at their child only when he is especially well-behaved and disciplined or studies well, so that parents can be proud of him. Then the child perceives their love as conditional. Sincerely loving a child, we must not forget that we must always look at him with love. Otherwise, he will receive a false negative signal and will not feel that he is loved unconditionally and unconditionally.
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It turned out that the child listens to us most attentively when we look him straight in the eye. But, unfortunately, we “expressively” look into his eyes only in those moments when we criticize, teach, reproach, scold. This is a catastrophic mistake. The use of eye contact in a negative sense, alas, is especially effective when the child is very young.
But remember that a loving look is one of the main sources of emotional nourishment for children. When a parent uses this powerful means of control primarily in a negative way, then the child cannot help but see his parent in a primarily negative way. While the child is small, fear makes him submissive and obedient, and outwardly this suits us quite well. But the child grows, and fear is replaced by anger, resentment, depression.
Even worse is the habit of avoiding looking directly into the eyes of the interlocutor as a punishment. Alas, how often do we hide behind such a harsh measure in our married life! Hand on heart, let’s face it! It is much more painful for a child when parents deliberately and consciously avoid looking at him than when he is physically punished. This affects him depressingly and devastatingly, and it may turn out that he will never forget such difficult moments in his life.
How we show our love for a child should not depend on our pleasure and displeasure at his behavior. We can deal with a child’s misbehavior in other ways that do not interfere with the ongoing flow of our love for him. We can talk about discipline, demand it, without breaking the binding thread of love.
1. R. Campell “How to really love children” (Knowledge, 1992).