But the child could experience a much bigger punishment, Brill points out, if the dog reacted by biting, with potential consequences for both child and dog. While other positive parenting groups would have reacted differently, this particular one saw this as a punishment – a taboo – and ejected her.

So, you step in as a parent and you separate the two, and you sit with your child until they have calmed down,” she explains. This is a three-year-old with not enough impulse control to make good decisions. “In the moment, saying ‘Don’t hit the dog, don’t hit the dog’ is not fair to the dog, to the child or the parent. Ariadne Brill, a psychologist and positive parenting advocate based in Switzerland, got thrown out of a positive parenting group on Facebook for suggesting that a child who was hitting his dog should be temporarily separated from the animal, rather than simply being told to stop or letting the child figure it out for himself. Voicing off-trend views can have unexpected consequences, however. “Openly talking about that fear and their anxiety – that validates the kids’ experience.” “Because sometimes we’re upset, it’s important for kids to see their parents express their own concerns,” says Coifman. One possible risk of this parenting approach is that children won’t learn how to interpret and react to negative emotions if parents don’t let them see any. And this is normal and human, and they are normal for parents too,” explains Coifman. Sometimes we take things out on people that we shouldn’t take things out on. When people – including parents – feel they’re not allowed to share any negative emotions, that can be detrimental to their mental health. “Positive emotions are essential for building connections, but negative emotions are helpful in planning and higher-order-thinking kind of processes, and they have been essential in human survival,” she says. American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, in a book examining the phenomenon, called it an ideological force that “encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate”.Ĭoifman argues that all emotions serve important functions. Yet some argue that constant positivity – or failing to achieve it – can take a toll. “We were so focused on disease that we were not looking at the factors that contribute to flourishing and happiness,” says Karin Coifman, a psychologist at Kent State University who studies the importance of emotions, both negative and positive, for our mental health. Instead of analysing the things that made humans sick, positive psychology looked at what made us happy. But it really took off in the 1990s when influential American psychologist Martin Seligman made the field of positive psychology the focus of international interest. The positive parenting framework has been around since the 1920s (then called ‘ positive discipline’), brought to the US by Austrian psychiatrists Alfred Adler and Rudolph Dreikurs.

Yet experts suggest positive parenting can take a toll on parents, while potentially shielding children from negative emotions they will need to understand in later life. If a boy is hitting his sister, for example, the positive parenting approach would be to remove him from the situation, then take a moment to talk about what both children are feeling and look for solutions together.Įmily Edlynn, an Illinois-based psychologist who writes a blog called The Art and Science of Mom, describes it as a “an empathy-based approach with firm compassion, focusing on responding to a child's emotions underlying challenging behaviours, within the framework of how our interactions now are part of forming a lifelong relationship with our child”. It’s an approach known as positive parenting, a method praised for hitting the sweet spot between a strict upbringing and allowing children to do whatever they want. Today’s parents are encouraged to build a good relationship with their children by using explanations and offering choices instead of shouting, shaming or leveraging rewards and punishments. Research on attachment, for example, shows that the way parents connect to their children has wide-ranging consequences for their mental health, self-control and ability to create meaningful relationships with others.

Having a good relationship with our children is important.

O positive and o negative parents