Intelligent parenting- handle with care

Being raised by parents with low emotional intelligence can affect children adversely

Narmeen Khan’s childhood in Islamabad was about as normal as one could expect. Her parents worked hard to build a happy home for Narmeen and her siblings, offering the very best of everything. And yet, Narmeen suffered from an inability to control her emotions. “I was always extremely hard on myself, setting unrealistic goals in activities I didn’t want to do and feeling like I didn’t quite fit in,” she recalls. “My parents were workaholics and much of my childhood went by with the belief that my feelings weren’t worthy of their time or intelligence.”

Although she didn’t know this back then, Narmeen’s behaviour was a typical manifestation of Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) – a condition often overlooked in our part of the world. According to Dr Jonice Webb, the American psychologist who actually coined the term, CEN results as a lack of emotional intelligence in the parents. That is to say that the parent(s) is unable to respond to their child’s emotional needs adequately for they are preoccupied with work or simply, unaware. As a result, any changes in the child’s behaviour or their attempts to seek attention may go unnoticed, giving rise to CEN.



An important distinction to make here would be that CEN does not relate to emotional or physical abuse as it lacks noticeable action. The neglect on the part of the parents is actually a dearth of any action taken by them to accommodate their child’s needs. On the surface, patients like Narmeen seem happy and healthy human beings but delving deeper into their psyche reveals an inability to express feelings, connect with others, share experiences, love, be loved and be confident. Dr Webb explains that oftentimes, such individuals feel “a sense of being on the outside, less happy than they should be or feeling empty inside.” What adds fuel to the fire is that they cannot find an explanation as to their feelings and instead, develop guilt and self-pity. 

Getting to the roots

Emotional intelligence can most simply be defined as the ability to recognise, understand and control one’s own emotions as well as those of others around us. The umbrella terms includes handling relationships, identifying social cues, coping with life and self-motivation. According to a study published in Pakistan Journal of Psychology in 2011, there are several ways in which parents might be emotionally unintelligent. For Pakistani households in particular, the gender and birth order of children seems to be a key factor in that parents tend to give more attention to sons or their first-borns. Similarly, the socio-economic makeup of our country could render many parents from the lower to middle classes as emotionally unintelligent for child-rearing.

Online psychology portal PsychCentral and Dr Webb’s research have listed several different parenting styles that cause emotional neglect. Some of these include:

Parents do not speak the language of emotion in the house

They fail to identify emotions themselves or to teach their children how to do so. In such households, any positive occurrence is either ignored or not celebrated adequately. On the other hand, should something negative happen to the child, it is never discussed. Sometimes, the child may even be teased or taunted for it. Such an atmosphere makes their young, impressionable minds think that how they feel is unimportant and should not be expressed. 



Parents do not manage and control emotions

Parents who make no attempt to curtail their own emotional reactions in the company of children cannot instruct the latter on how to do so. They fail as mentors and the children are left confused as to how they should behave when they feel happy or sad, relate to another’s emotions and manage their own guilt and self-confidence. 

Parents do not understand their children’s emotions

When parents fail to provide much help, children turn to interpreting their own behaviour themselves. For example, any anxiety they feel could be deemed as weakness, low self-worth as laziness and so on. These children usually move through life feeling alone, misunderstood and worthless, disempowered and empty inside.

Eventually, all of the parenting styles mentioned above culminate in several pervasive and long-lasting psychological problems. According to a study by the Leiden University in Netherlands, children grow up to have problems like depression, pervasive sense of unhappiness and discontent. Many of them resort to substance abuse or delinquency to alleviate their feelings. Some might have suicidal thoughts as well.

All in all, Dr Webb has identified 12 different types of emotionally neglectful parents. The largest category of this it the WMBNT Group, i.e. well-meaning but neglected themselves. Parents belonging to this category love their children deeply and are able to give them everything but emotional atonement for they weren’t given it themselves. This gives rise to an emotional blind spot that is transferred from one generation to another.

Trapped in a spiral

Nazneen Kamal’s experience as a secondary school teacher in Karachi has taught her one thing: children who hail from emotionally secure households perform much better at school than those who do not. This includes not just academic success but social skills as well wherein children learn from their peers. “You see, the mother figure forms an integral part of a household from whom children learn to interact effectively,” explains Nazneen. “Fathers are just as important when it comes to emotional intelligence as they instil self-esteem, confidence and social management within a child.” Therefore, a father figure who is physically or emotionally (or both) absent or harsh, strict or unnecessarily critical will leave long-standing negative effects on his child’s mind. “I have seen that parents with high emotional intelligence tend to raise children with equal emotional intelligence and so on,” adds Nazneen.  In this way, the cycle continues from one generation to another.

At the other end of the spectrum lies the Boomerang Effect which psychologists describe as the over-indulgence of emotions. Herein, parents who grew up without emotional validation unintentionally give their children’s emotions too much power. Unfortunately, this too is considered as emotional neglect seeing as how the over-indulgence prevents children from learning how to express and manage their feelings properly. The parents are not to be blamed for this, however, as CEN can easily be avoided or reversed via sound emotional coaching and therapy.

Being a good parent

We must realise that the effects of CEN continue well into adulthood which is why, it should be nipped in the bud. According to John Gottman, author of Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child, good parenting combines both emotional support and intellect. First of all, parents must be aware of their child’s emotions and grant them the opportunity to share as they want. As parents, it is their responsibility to listen empathically to what their child says, explore and accept and finally, guide them through it. The positive effects of emotional coaching are legitimised by research from Johns Hopkins University which suggests that children who receive it are stronger physically, socially as well as academically.

An article entitled What is Childhood Emotional Neglect and How It Affects Your Child, published by online network The Daily Mind in July offers more specific advice for parents. It stresses three main changes parents should incorporate:

When a child is sad, angry or upset, parents should avoid a general assurance that everything will be alright. This indicates that they are not addressing the problem, nor understand it. Instead, they should ask the child what happened and identify what his feelings are specifically.

It is imperative for parents to show sympathy towards the child, no matter what their problem might be. They should support them and reassure them that whatever happens, they are not alone.

It is equally important to teach children how to let go. No human being can ever control everything and so, it should not be a source of frustration or anger. Training children to accept events and other’s behaviours will help them through life.

In addition to this, there are some self-help practices one can use to correct CEN within themselves. For instance, psychology student Amjad Hussein suggests self-monitoring emotions. For instance, when one is experiencing a specific emotion, they should pause, pay attention to it and ask themselves ‘What’ and ‘Why’ instead of running from it. Once the human mind learns to open up to its own self, opening up to others will become less of a hurdle. “At times, I advise people to record their thoughts in a journal. It is a great way to get in touch with your feelings and also allows you to go back and read what you have written before for self-analysis and motivation,” says Amjad.

Mehreen Ovais is an alumna of Manchester Business School and Lahore University of Management Sciences. She is passionate about writing and journalism. She tweets @mehreenovais

Published in The Express Tribune, Ms T, September 20^th, 2015.