Should parents hide their stress from their children?

Q:

My husband is very critical of my parenting style. Basically, he thinks I should be some sort of perfect parenting “robot” who is always patient, smiling, and positive — even when the kids are fighting with each other, destroying the house, or refusing to listen! I personally think it’s a good thing for kids to see that their parents are human and have normal feelings. I do get irritated when they’re misbehaving — why do I have to pretend that I’m not? Shouldn’t they learn that their actions affect people? Also, there are days, regardless of the kids’ behavior, that I just wake up in a bad mood. I’m not a good faker. Is it really so harmful if my kids see that I’m sometimes down, stressed-out, or overwhelmed? Won’t that help them accept that their own “off” feelings are normal and okay?

A: 

You’ve raised some really important questions. Parents are people and people have feelings — plenty of them! Trying to hide one’s stress day after day, year after year, would involve so much suppression on the adult’s part that she could become at risk for physical diseases or emotional disorders. At the same time, acting as if one has only one emotion — happy — would give one’s children a distorted emotional education. There are five main categories of feelings: happy, sad, mad, scared, and confused. Giving children the impression that we’re “stuck” in the “happy” category would certainly, as you yourself suggest, create confusion in the child who finds him or herself in another category, if even temporarily.

However, parental emotional expressiveness is only part of the picture. Emotional and behavioral regulation are equally important. Chronic exposure to a parent’s bad mood or personal stress can become overwhelming for a child. This overwhelm can occur when the parent is experiencing stress too often or too intensely.

Overwhelm is also produced when a child is too young to understand much about the parent’s stress. For instance, all children are too young to understand what marital stress is all about. Most children cannot grasp the full impact and nature of extended-family-induced stress, financial stress, the stress brought on by loss or illness, or even the stress triggered by heavy or unremitting responsibility.

The younger the child, the more confusing adult stress will be, but even teenagers should not be privy to the details of parental stress. Older kids, teens, and young adult children need to be busy with the appropriate stresses of their own lives, free of needing to worry about adult stress that they can neither relieve nor fully process.

Moreover, we don’t want kids to become “parentified,” meaning that they take on the burden of trying to soothe their parents. This role reversal has consistently been shown to be harmful for children of every age.

So while it is beneficial for parents to share some minimal information about their personal stress (e.g., “I’ve got so much to do today, I don’t know how I’ll get through it all”), it’s important not to share heavy stress with vulnerable children. It’s also essential not to share chronic (endless) stress with kids, as doing so has been shown to cause all sorts of behavioral and emotional problems. Yes, you can fake being happier than you feel! (Of course, it’s probably a good idea to get personal help for any ongoing intense stress.)

Finally, it matters how stress is communicated and resolved. There’s no benefit to showing a child that life is too overwhelming or too painful to cope with. However, there is great benefit to showing a child how to manage stressful feelings in a healthy way. Identifying one’s stress (e.g., “I’m worrying about Uncle Dovid’s operation...”) and then modeling how one helps herself through stress (“I’m going to sit down and say Tehillim for him. That will make me feel better and also help Uncle Dovid!”) actually teaches extremely valuable emotional regulation skills and helps build resilience in children. There are myriad resources for stress management that can help parents feel better and simultaneously provide a better model for their kids.

In summary, it’s fine to show kids the full range of human emotions. However, spare them the details of your adult problems. Show them healthy ways of helping yourself through daily stress as well as times of more intense stress (it doesn’t help them to watch you “fall apart” — it frightens and overwhelms them). Similarly, be careful not to frighten children with your own unregulated expression of emotion; show them how stress can always be respectfully, safely, and appropriately expressed. Remember that your goal is to teach them to cope well with the challenges of life, but if you yourself are still struggling in that regard, then go ahead and minimize the display of your true feelings while you access the support and guidance that you need.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 965)