It can easily be forgotten that a family is supposed to work together and provide support to all of its members. It is with that support and caring atmosphere that can help the children to grow up healthy and prepared for life. A family whose bonds are weak, however, will lack in support and the children can grow up with an unhealthy idea of how to make friends, of how to be confident in their selves and be relatively unprepared for the life they will have to live on their own. Children who grow up in homes where their parents are overly critical and hard on the children can often damage the individual’s self image and lower their level of confidence.
There are many parents out there who believe that being critical of their kid is the way to inspire them to try harder the next time; unfortunately, this is not the usual outcome of children who receive a lot of criticism on their marks, their talents or their difficulties. There might be a selective few who will take the criticism in stride and work to better their selves, but the majority of children will react in a negative way. They start to have doubts in their abilities, they feel they are too stupid to achieve the decent marks in school and just feel that they can’t do anything right. This is not how a child should feel. A child should feel that their parents are there to help and support them when they need it. A child, especially a younger one, is very impressionable and they depend on their parents to teach them how to go about things in life, such as asking for help when something is not understood. One spouse being overly critical of the other is also extremely unhealthy. It has about the same impact on the other person as it does on the children; the result of the heavy criticism is only to bring the other person down and make them feel incompetent.
Whether the family is only two married people or the marriage includes children, the criticism should not be necessary. Being supportive and helpful will often yield more positive results that will only make everyone happy in the end. If a child just can’t seem to understand that math, or they can’t seem to hit those notes, the parent should be encouraging the child to keep working on it and seek the help that they need. Each spouse in a relationship should also be supportive and helpful, because heavy criticism will only threaten to break down the person on the receiving end or permanently damage the relationship to the point where it just no longer exists. Criticism usually brings negative results and emotions including poor performance than before, low confidence and resentfulness toward the person who is dealing out the criticism.
A family therapist or counselor can help to change this kind of behavior, whether it is intentional or not, and teach the family to be more supportive instead. This can easily be done through online therapy, which is far more convenient because the family doesn’t have to take time out of their day to try and get down to the office; instead, the family can have online sessions with the online family therapist from the comfort of their own home.
If you or anyone that you know would like more information on this post, you can visit http://www.completecounselingsolutions.com or email [email protected]
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You are so right about the effect criticism has upon us and our children. It's funny how some of us learned to fear "the look" that a parent would get across his or her face. But the spoken criticism is what would influence how we would treat our siblings, friends, children - and even our parents.
There is a way to criticize without damaging a child's self esteem and confidence. I think too many parents live vicariously through their children, subconsciously making up for their own failures. You can see this especially on the ball fields, and it's not just the dads verbally abusing their kids.
At the same time, being overly encouraging can have the opposite effect than intended, leading the kid to grow up cocky and over-confident. I have seen this in people who were led to believe they can do no wrong and grow up to be the biggest jerks you'll ever meet.
What we "should" do is often not what we end up doing, largely because we never learned how. It's all well and good to say that both parents should be equally supportive of the child. I think that assumes both parents were raised equally well by equally supportive parents. Wishful thinking, these days, I think. Plus, it's hard enough when the child is hearing hurtful criticism from their own peers, or worse - their teachers.
So, I think there is a fine line between being critical and being supportive that may often be overlooked. It's finding that balance between the two that is a skill we have to learn and teach our children. The concept of a "kinder, gentler nation" comes to mind. Would that we could achieve that, eh?
June 27, 2008 - 6:22pmThis Comment