Are We Obsessing Over Our Children’s Feelings?

Back in the 1990s, when we were raising our kids, we already felt under siege from a world of information overload. In that decade, five times as many parenting books were published than parents had faced back in the 1970s, a far less anxious time when our parents let us drink from the garden hose, and none of us looked at pictures of kidnapped children as we poured milk from cartons. 

With four kids of my own, I hoped for parenting advice that was simple and straightforward, but each kid was so different, individual tailoring was required. Some advice books were so complicated with charts and tables that I thought I was reading actuarial tables, not parenting guides. Was parenting really that complicated? At one lecture given by a renowned educator who had raised eight children — seemingly successfully — an audience member asked him for a precious drop of wisdom on childrearing: What was the secret sauce? How had all his kids grown up so well adjusted? I perched on the edge of my seat waiting for the answer. 

The speaker looked at the woman who had asked the question, shrugged his shoulders and finally said, “Just don’t get personally involved.” We were all slack-jawed. Here we were, Jewish parents worrying excessively about our children’s well-being, using the homework and behavior charts and reflecting our children’s feelings back at them, hoping we weren’t messing anything up so badly that our kids would need decades of psychotherapy (which we, naturally, would pay for). How could the sum total of this expert’s parenting advice basically be, “hands off”? 

Of course, raising kids is never easy, with no one-size-fits-all recipe to get the job done. The Torah acknowledges this, advising that we raise each child “according to his/her own way,” challenging parents to find and follow the path that suits each child. The best thing we did for our kids was to raise them in a home where we honored traditional Jewish practice, did our best to demonstrate our faith and loyalty to God, and model a loving, respectful marriage. A life of rich Jewish engagement, practiced with love and enthusiasm, provides spiritual and psychological grounding for children. It provides a foundational sense of identity and purpose. This deserves its own column or two, but today I wanted to share another idea about parenting that strikes me as timely, and goes against the current zeitgeist to boot. 

All good parents want their children to grow up to be responsible, ethical, well-adjusted, and happy. But what if something we’re doing works against two of these goals? In an essay from March 9 in The Wall Street Journal titled “Stop Constantly Asking Your Kids How They Feel,” excerpted from her new book “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up,” Abigail Shrier argues that parents spend too much time taking their adolescent children’s emotional temperatures. 

Studies reveal that the more people focus on their own feelings, especially their happiness, the less happy they are. “Instead of constantly asking kids to describe how they feel in the moment, adults should be telling kids how imperfect and unreliable their emotions can be,” Shrier writes. “This means helping them to recognize not only that their feelings of envy or indignation or infatuation rarely reflect a full and accurate picture of the world, but also that these feelings sometimes deserve to be ignored.” 

Studies reveal that the more people focus on their own feelings, especially their happiness, the less happy they are. 

Equally destructive, fixating on feelings also places kids in a “state orientation” rather than a “task orientation,” according to psychologist Michael Linden: “State-orientation keeps you from being successful in anything. No winning head coach asks his players to dwell on their feelings at halftime.”

Feelings matter. Children do need to feel heard and understood. But encouraging kids in adolescence to marinate in their feelings hurts them, making it harder for them to achieve the emotional peace and even happiness we hope they can achieve. Listen and reflect your children’s feelings to gain trust, but then encourage your children to move forward, setting goals and taking risks. As Shrier concludes the article, “The world outside of their own heads turns out to be a worthy distraction from the turbulent gloom of adolescence. It may also contain the cure.”

Judy Gruen is the author of “Bylines and Blessings,” “The Skeptic and the Rabbi,” and several other books. She is also a book editor and writing coach.