21 Mar 2010

Children Emotional Problems


Like adults children have many different ways to react to their emotional problems. Nevertheless, unlike adults they are unable to tell us they have an emotional problem and need help.

It is our work as responsible and loving adults to be alert to their signals and help them understand their needs providing, if necessary, the specialized and technical help available in the society.

Many times we tend to rapidly criticize and think that this or that child has no manners, knows no rules and respects no one when so many times those are the only ways that small person has learned to express her or his difficulties and or emotional problems.

8 comments:

  1. I read what you wrote Alexandra, and clearly children don't came with instruction books has we usually say... but we have to find a way to understand them...

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  2. It's quite difficult to be a parent. Freud used to say that it was one of the "impossible" missions.
    Anyway, I tend to think that children need understanding but also rules. Without them they feel lost and we are certainly not doing our job, which is to help them to grow up.

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  3. Rules are certainly important when raising a child!

    But thinking that many manifestations that sometimes children show are due to lack of rules, manners or other such things is a dangerous and terrible simplification that can have consequences on the development of that child. He or she can end up on develop serious psychopathology and cognitive and social problems that could have been avoided if parents and educators had been more sensitive to that child way of telling "I need help! I am not doing well by myself!"...

    That was what I meant to say anyway...

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  4. Children are an amazing amount of ingenuity, sincerity and need... Your last sentence in your comment "child way of telling -I need help! I am not doing well by myself", is exactly why rules are essential for children.
    Showing children that there are rules is showing them how far they can go, from when they are supposed to ask for help, and also, rules are a perfect basic ground for them to climb from. Rules are covered with love from attention that the parent/caregiver gives them. In every relationship there are rules, and it shows proximity, security, and gives children and people in general a sense of how far they can go.
    Rules are made for us to survive, and that is why they are so important for children. Children with no rules, with facilitating parents tend to be unstable, unruly, unhappy, restless.
    Rules are a form of affection and love.
    Children with "no manners, no rules and no respect" are usually unhappy children because they feel very lost.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. I will repeat myself:

    Rules are certainly important when raising a child!

    The post wasn't about rules and wasn't CERTAINLY trying to say that we shouldn't give rules to our children....

    On the contrary it was trying to alert people of the importance to understand that SOMETIMES when a child is more agitated, aggressive or ignoring some rule it is not because that child doesn't knows the rules on that particular situation but because that's the only way that that child can express to the surrounding adults that he/she is not feeling well and that he/she need help...

    The BIG difference is that us (adults) SOMETIMES are able to understand that we are not doing well and that we are not being able to handle with that situation by ourselves. So we go and reach out for help and meet a psychologist, psychiatrist and so on.... Children in their condition of children: one small human being still developing and learning many many things even about theirselves, are unable to do the same. So they will go and express their dispair, suffering and need in the different ways they know or can...

    Like adults who express their emotional problems in different pathologies, children show different manifestations....

    And it is our jobs as loving adults to be ATTENTIVE ALERT and SENSITIVE to those signs of our children in order to be able to give them the help they so desperatley are asking for....

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  7. Thank you for your reply, I am afraid I was commenting not so much about your post and your comment, but it was much more a reflexion of my own meditation about how and why it is important to explain the existence of rules to parents.

    I'm sorry that I didn´t take the time to explain this before.

    It is a problem I have to deal with regularly, and your post led me to think about this again. I am currently with a problem in hands concerning a badly behaved boy, who at the same time is very shy when called to speak out loud or to show others his work.

    You are right of course, children express their dispairs and suffering in the different ways they know, and it important for us to be attentive and alert.

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  8. What a lively discussion! Good.
    It seems children and their education raise more enthousiasm and comments than bleak topics like depression and the like. One can guess why. Maybe it's not a bad thing at all. Greetings, you all!

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