Therapist warns
You should never use this word in relation to your child
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We can't always do everything right, not even when it comes to raising children. However, we should refrain from saying a word when it comes to our children, because according to a therapist it can lead to lasting personality disorders.
The noodles are boiling over here, the phone rings while an email arrives at the same time, we are driving the project ahead for work in our heads and in the middle of it all, Junior thinks only to himself: "Maaaamaaa, can you play with me ?? ? " Pretty selfish and not exactly compassionate of him. But we shouldn't blame him or tell him. Because according to the therapist Tina Gilbertson this could lead to deep emotional wounds.
"A good number of the patients who were in therapy with me were called selfish as children," she writes in "Psychologytoday". According to her, accusing a child of selfishness is not only "inappropriate", but in the worst case "deeply traumatizing". For the following three reasons.
This is why you should never call your child selfish
1. Children are now times selfish – so the law of nature wants it
As children, according to the therapist, we do not yet have the intellectual capacities to take on different perspectives or to integrate the feelings of others into our overall picture. Only with increasing age and increasing spiritual maturity do we learn that our view of the world is not the truth and that our needs and emotions are not the only or most important that exists. If we were accused of this when we were little – or if we were to accuse our children – it would be a kind of accusation that we were not born fully developed adults. You might as well accuse a toddler who is just starting to crawl for not walking.
2. The label gets stuck
Most people never forget if they were accused of selfishness as a child, especially if the accusation came from their own parents, writes Tina Gilbertson. We are particularly receptive to negative attributions – especially as unfinished personalities who are still looking for their place in the world, aka children -, which is why they are so strongly imprinted (you will find out how the phenomenon is also noticeable in our adult life in our article on Bing Theory). The label "egoism" in particular can lead to a child becoming deeply insecure and having problems with the development of his or her self-esteem – e.g. For example, questions like "When is it okay to say no?", "May I even think about myself?" etc..
3. Role models bring more than reproaches
As children, we don't know what concepts like consideration, caution, and compassion are. We only get to know them by growing up in a social structure, through observation and experience. It is therefore clear that a child can only develop healthy, considerate behavior if we exemplify it, but not by telling it that it is Not behaves considerately. The best way to teach our child not to be overly selfish is by paying attention to our child, listening to them, trying to understand them, being responsive to their needs. And in the end we have nothing to reproach our child or ourselves with …