Just Go to Your Room; Think What You Have Done

This parental command is a puzzler to children. If you have already said you don’t know what someone is talking about, what good can that do for a little kid who has only a millisecond long focus once alone in a bedroom with toys. Frustration and isolation, as a punishment, is experienced but not understood. . The child has, for reasons unknown to him/her, made the parents angry. Children learn to understand anger very early because it is usually both visual and audible from the parents. It has happened before though they may not understand how to avoid it in the future. They are ill-equipped to figure out all those hard to understand reasons from the parents like: why things that are fun are so wrong sometimes, but not all the time. Until a child learns to think empirically, the world is full of unexpected responses. Small children do not know monetary value of things or how difficult it is for some parents to provide necessities, let alone luxuries. They assume that parents can replace any destroyed thing because parents seem so omnipotent to them. Toys break all the time and they don’t usually get angry at the parents. Indeed, it is usually the other way around, the parents get angry at them. Therefore, they are often conditioned to believe they will be held responsible for anything that breaks or other things they don’t anticipate. This only fosters the need to hide from the parents, to be less than truthful for fear of the response. If parents want to encourage openness and honesty from children, they have to guide them to that safe place where they can discuss accidents and infractions in their behaviors with their parents.

Focus is put on the disastrous result rather than the process. The need is to explain to a child, in full detail, what has been upsetting in the child’s behavior (defying a request, keeping hands off a specific object that has then been destroyed, violating boundaries which were never really made clear to the child, or similar deficiencies) This process might be explained by: ‘We are disappointed that you disobeyed, which caused the accident or loss of an item much cherished by Mom, Dad, or whoever’; ‘We are sorry that we no longer can trust you to do what will protect the property of others or even your own’; ‘You cannot control your behavior, therefore you need some quiet time to regain control of yourself’; and the list can go on and on.

Parents have a great responsibility to help a child understand emotions and put words to them. The earlier the child can do that, the easier it will be for them to communicate with family and world. That understanding does not magically come to them, it is taught to a child.

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