Trusting Your Body’s Healing Power Builds Up Self-Confidence

A valuable lesson that gives a child a solid start in life.

Broken bones heal faster than broken confidence, says psychologist Lawrence Cohen in his Playful Parenting book. Going through the whys and hows of playing with your child, he comes to the common conundrum of letting children take risks on the playing court. His take is that we should let them do the things that make our hearts skip a beat.

Easier said than done, but I wonder what’s harder? Watching your kid dealing with the childhood’s common bruises? Or watching him grow into this shy, insecure teenager, and, later on, an adult that doesn’t trust himself enough? Our children get a picture of the world they live in, judging by what they see on our faces day in, and day out.

Every day we spend together, and, more importantly, every hurdle we overcome together, is an opportunity for them to learn a lesson. A lesson that helps them configure their long-term perspective on life. Life, and their selves in relation to life.

Your Child Sees Life the Way You Do

The way that a child looks at his own body, his states of pain and discomfort, greatly depends on how his parent modeled his reactions. You model your child’s reactions, whether consciously or not because in the process of teaching children, you teach yourself.

Children, at least the small ones, tend to copy their parents without discernment. It’s how they learn, by watching you, soaking every movement, and reproducing it as soon as they are ready. Therefore, your dominant energy is the one they will embrace.

Do you radiate ambition, a sense of competitiveness, and the desire to fight until your last breath? The child will take up on your attitude.

Do you act as if you’re the loser, always complaining, and victimizing yourself about the injustices of life? Your child will most likely play the victim card and attribute his failures to external causes, just like you do.

Neither of these two approaches is ideal. And while I can see you scoffing and rolling your eyes, I have to say: competitiveness is not necessarily a good thing and there is a third option.

Being less reactive gives you the opportunity to reflect on your experiences. A chance to see it through the lens of acceptance and humor. At the same time, the child watching you will become less reactive and less irritable. He’ll have a bit more self-control and become capable to select his reaction to certain challenges.

Baby Got a Boo Boo

Lots of physical experiences, especially the first-time ones, act as a borderstone in how the child calibrates his emotional and physical reactions to difficult situations.

The first knee scratch, the first head bump, the first falling off the bike are just a few of the experiences that teach the child about the hardships of being. The child’s reaction to these first-time experiences is mostly evaluated by the parent’s reaction.

A hypersensitive parent, who is always worried that the child will get hurt, will unknowingly push his child towards an anxious temperament. If you’re always thinking of the worst, making negative predictions (you’re going to fall!), showing excessive, unnecessary pity, and panicking unnecessary, what would you expect your little one to do? Go out there and explore the world? Or stay put next to you, where it’s comfy and secure and nothing bad (or good) ever happens?

By contrast, a parent who has grown the ability to react with calm and optimism when difficulties arise will model a child with a higher tolerance for frustration, higher work resilience, and better social competencies.

The truth is that being isn’t always rainbows and butterflies. Children get sick during the cold season, experience accidents while at play, become stressed when facing competitions, and feel overwhelmed when trying to build a social life. All these are small crisis situations that the child learns to cope with by replicating our coping mechanisms to the same crisis.

Pay Attention to Your Child’s Change of Attitude

A teacher can testify how a little boy will react differently when falling in her presence as opposed to falling in the presence of his granny.

When the grandmother is with him and the boy trips, he will most likely claim that he is in bigger pain, requiring excessive caressing and reassurance that everything will be OK.

If it happens while only the teacher is around, the child will most likely get up quickly, brush off the dust from his clothes, and keep playing without complaining.

The child instinctively knows that the granny will whine and feel pity for the poor boy when he falls, while the teacher will quickly evaluate the severity of the situation and support the boy’s courage and the power to overcome this simple obstacle.

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My child showed me pretty much the same lesson when I was taking him to the park. I’m a quiet, introverted adult who enjoys parties of one. When I tell you I’m busy and can’t come to a party, chances are I’m busy sitting under a blanket, possibly reading a book.

You can imagine I’m not the cheerleader type on the playground either, even though my son drags me from under the blanket each day and demands that I take him outside. He likes being in the presence of children, even though he’s not doing much 1-on-1 play at this age.

But because I’m the quiet type, I could see him being shy too when we were entering the park. I couldn’t, for the God’s sake, understand why my father (his grandparent) would praise him for being such a sociable and playful boy when he was the one taking him to the park.

I had to watch short films he took with his mobile phone to believe it. Sure enough, there was my shy, introverted (or so I thought) little boy, talking louder than anyone else, and bossing around the older children not to climb who knows where, or not to fall from who knows what construction because “it is dangerous” (all things that he obviously heard far too many times from his grandmother).

Turns out that when it’s just the two of us, he acts as I do. He stays put, in a corner, not being the one to initiate conversations, smiling rather than making his voice heard, and ready to run back when a child talks louder at him. All while when he is with his extroverted, annoyingly sociable grandfather, he’s acting like a different child!

Sooner or later, one of these attitudes will start crystallizing in his small, ever-growing head. And I think I’d rather him be the bossy one, but this is for another story.

How To Help Your Child Trust His Body and Build Self-Confidence

So you know the problem, but that doesn’t make the solution any easier. You’re the problem because the way you are reacting to these tiny setbacks dictates the way your child reacts to them. What should you do about it?

• First, become aware of your reaction mechanisms — how do you react when something happens to your child?
• Then, work to give yourself some emotional education (and regulation) — how would you want to react when something happens to your child?
• Next, focus on teaching the child some auto relaxation techniques — what can you teach your child to do by himself so he can feel better when he’s having a physical or emotional setback?
• Finally, make use of friendly medical solutions that are a part of your daily life and not the Boogeyman that scares the crap out of them (“you’ll fall and I’ll take you to the doctor to give you a shot!” NO THANK YOU!)

Once you become aware that your emotional reaction towards the child’s difficulties helps him feed his own self-defense mechanisms and confidence (in the world and in himself), you’ll know how you want to respond to his small accidents.

If you’re anything like me, I can only assume that you’ll want to teach your child that he can trust his body and that the world he lives in is not a monstrous place that he needs to hide from. Otherwise, he’ll grow to believe that his body is not good enough or not capable enough. And his world will become this monstrous place that he will want to hide from.

Say you really don’t know how to put it? Well, put it this way: you want to help your child so that when he falls, he quickly gets up, with a large smile on his face, just like he used to do when he was small. He came into this world with the desire and thirst to thrive. If he’s not showing it right now, we must have accidentally dragged him in the opposite direction somewhere down the road.

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