Understanding Dysfunctional Behavioral and Emotional Patterns in Children
In the pursuit of the perfectly behaved child, we have created conditional environments of reward and punishment which lack empathy, unconditional acceptance, and connection. We tell our children, “If you want my love and acceptance, you will behave this way.” The conditioned circumstances of “someone’s got to be right and someone’s got to be wrong” is like a force which shapes emotional and social disconnection, impulsivity, aggression, rebelliousness, and a lack of developed empathy which leads to a deeper understanding of the world and potential solutions for healthy conflict resolution. Children are highly intelligent and it is precisely because of their innate intelligence that we have a disconnection and rebellion crisis on the rise.
Emotionally connected
When I was three years old, I was able to save my mother from suicide simply because my body was able to alert me to the suffering of my mother from the other room and led me to her. When I arrived at her bedside, I connected to her pain and felt a flood of information about her emotions run through my body and my mind. Would I have been able to intellectualize the distinctive emotions I felt? No, children are not aware that other people may not be able to feel what they are feeling. Therefore a need never occurs to articulate emotions consciously.
Children are not aware that other people may not be able to feel what they are feeling.
In that experience, when my mother handed me a stack of money and told me to keep it for what me and my sister might need, I intuitively knew that whatever my mother had had to do to get that money, was what was hurting her. In a defiant act of unconditional love and protection, I took the money, walked down the hall calmly and flushed it straight down the toilet. How would a three year old be so clear on what right action to take? Had anyone taught me about the complexity of emotions, the difficulty of survival, or the reality of suicide? No. As you can see, all that I need to know was already available to me.
The common perception is that unless we are taught the differences between right and wrong, we will not know it. To a certain extent this is true, we need to be taught what the expectations are for us in societal situations. But beyond that, the emotional bodies of children are highly aware and are able to differentiate between experiences which feel good and experiences which feel bad, intuitively. We are born connected to the intelligence of our hearts which is meant to be integrated with the development of our intellect.
Children absorb information through the physical sensory body and the energetic body.
In the case of my story, we are able to see how perfectly in-tune our emotional intelligence already is and that our ability to know what feels right does not come from an intellectual place.
Behavior Control
So how do we deal with an upset child in our culture? Behavior control and systems of reward and punishment. Many children are being categorized, labeled, and drugged in order to control their behaviors. It is no wonder why they rebel! Labels like ADD, ADHD, Oppositional Behavior, Aspergers, Autism, etc.. are just ways of identifying patterns of behavior, they do not help us to understand why the behaviors exist. Research is verifying that these issues are caused by a lack of emotional availability and connection during the brain’s neural development. Further, research is showing that these issues could not be caused genetically in such a short time span. In order for genes to evolve it would take over a thousand years before we would see the evolutionary impact.
The dysfunctional behavioral and emotional patterns surfacing in children are being caused because we have failed to see the child’s inherent emotional capability and are not creating social environments which can help them integrate the intelligence of their emotions with the intelligence of their conditioned minds.
Reward and punishment
Behaviors are conditioned by emotional experiences. Reward and punishment systems make a child feel vulnerable, insults the child’s inherent intelligence, while forcing them to focus on artificial rules and consequences that may not make sense yet. This form of control is also a form of abuse which frighten them from feeling safe enough to trust and explore their feelings too deeply. Therefore, we circumnavigate the natural evolutionary process of how to mature emotionally, intellectually, socially, and spiritually. We literally narrow the natural learning field for children and that is why their only available option for independence left is inner rebellion. We come to this world to explore and to learn, to make mistakes and to be able to choose differently. We do not wish to be emotionally manipulated by methods of punishment and rewards.
As an emotionally intelligent person I can tell you that the healthy reaction to emotional manipulation is rebellion. Intelligence wants to be engaged and rebels against it’s own deception.
Methods of control force us to suppress our feelings which literally cut off the conduit to our interconnected self, which is where all wise action will arise.
Recognizing potential
We all want an integrated, loving family.
If we are not engaging children about what and why they feel, then we are not teaching them how to understand themselves and meet their needs in a conscious way. We all want an integrated, loving family. We all want our kids to feel whole, to feel loved and accepted unconditionally. These are the desires that we all share. What we do not share is our approach to dealing with the emotional needs of our children. Some of us have been too conditioned by the systems of reward and punishment that we fail to see it’s limiting impacts and it’s false assumptions.
But when we recognize that our children are born in an intelligently receptive state emotionally and just need calm, non-stressed, emotionally connected parent caregivers, children will be able to tap into the love within and extend it out towards others. Children have as much to teach us about emotional intelligence as we have to teach them about the world at large. When we approach them in a heart space of equality and friendship – rather than force, threats, and punishments, we will find that children carry the potential for great and deep beauty; if only we might have the courage to see.
WORDS BY DAWN AGNOS
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