Show your child true love. Say “no” with confidence
“There was a doll that almost everyone in my class had, but my parents couldn’t afford to buy it for me. I remember crying and crying. I felt like I was the only girl in the world who didn’t have that doll. I’m in my fifties now and I still remember the disappointment and embarrassment that I suffered.”
We all remember the pain of not getting what we wanted in childhood. We’re like that. Bitter disappointments bore deeply into our neural pathways, lodging in our brains for decades or lifetimes. Why is it that we fail to remember that we got almost everything else we wanted?
Our childhoods were filled with good things — toys, foods, experiences — and yet, we don’t hear ourselves thinking or relating, “I really wanted an ice cream and my parents bought one for me! I really wanted to ride on the pony at the petting zoo and my parents let me! I really wanted to sleep over at my friend’s house and my parents allowed me to go!” No. What we recall, vividly and with deep pain, are the few things we wanted and didn’t get. Why is that?
Negativity has a stronger impact on us than positivity. One hurtful parental criticism has much more effect on a child than does one parental smile or compliment. This means that parents have to work hard to reduce the impact of correction and other bad-feeling communications by loading on the positivity in both quantity and quality. Giving four good-feeling communications for every bad-feeling one (the 80-20 rule) ensures that a child will remember parental positivity.
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