Posted by Sue Landsman on Feb.01, 2009

I know that the nine-year-old can be difficult and moody, but when mine wrote “2008—another year to live through” in his journal, it got me to thinking: those teenage years are going to be bad, bad, bad. Sure, there’s no way to guarantee your kid isn’t going to be miserable or get into trouble, but there’s got to be some way to help inoculate them against the troubles of life.

What I really wanted to know was how to tell whether my child is depressed, or just has a really bad attitude. If you’ve got a phlegmatic child who by nature complains a lot and will always comment that the glass is half-empty, what can you do to help that child survive his middle-school and teenage years, never mind the trials of adulthood? How would you even know when this kind of child is actually depressed as opposed to just constantly negative?

And so I went to the library and found The Optimistic Child: A Proven Program to Safeguard Children Against Depression and Build Lifelong Resilience, by Martine E. P. Seligman, Ph.D. It gives tools for teaching kids how to develop self-awareness and think critically about their emotions. The gist of the book is that while you can’t control what happens to you, you can recognize and control your thoughts and understand how your feelings arise from these thoughts. Its your own thoughts, not the events that befall you, that give rise to the feelings that can sometimes threaten to overwhelm you.

For example, if your friends are whispering to each other at your birthday party, you could respond in several ways. First, you might think “They’re making fun of me and I hate them, I should never have had a party!” Feeling bad yet? Or, you could think “Oh, I’ll bet they’re telling each other about what they got me for presents!” Why feel miserable if the feeling is unfounded? I know which one my son would pick.

Many kids don’t have the emotional intelligence to stand back from what befalls them and use their rational minds to think about how they should respond. A child who doesn’t even understand that there are different ways to respond to a situation will always respond in a knee-jerk fashion and likely always assume the worst. A child who can’t stop and say “Hey, I’m not so bad, so they probably don’t really hate me” is likely to reinforce his own low-self esteem.

As wonderful as all the ideas sounded, the rub was that in order to teach them to your kids, you have to practice them yourself first (and catch yourself if you’re thinking “Oh darn, I’m awful at this. I’ll never be able to do it!”). So after attempting to get enough sleep, meditate in the morning, and have several cups of coffee before my kids woke up, I shut the Mommy Monster in the closet and rolled up my sleeves.

Mid-morning, my son was trying to copy over a story he’d written, and kept forgetting to skip lines. “I’m lousy at writing!” he said, almost in tears. “I can’t do anything right.”

“Aha!” I said (probably a little over-enthusiastically, and I’ll blame the coffee). What a perfect problem to approach using the new skills I’d learned from the book. “Give yourself a break,” I said. “Is that really true?” I pointed out that he’d written a really good story, and that his handwriting was even fairly decent, which was unusual for him. It seemed to me, I told him, that the only real problem he was having was remembering to skip lines. “What do you think we could do to help you remember?” I asked. We made little dashes down the page to remind him to skip lines, and he got back to work without any further trauma. This was pretty much unprecedented in my experience–usually the rest of the morning would disappear in tears and frustration.

Now that he’s ten and prepubescent (meaning thoroughly insane), I’m incredibly happy that we’ve started working with the material in this book. My eight-year-old seems to be getting a lot out of it, and even the five-year old can understand when I talk to him about what he’s thinking and feeling.

It remains to be seen whether either of us is more emotionally intelligent yet, but I’d argue that averting just that one meltdown was worth the price of the book. If I’m lucky, my kids will be able to provide me the same service the next time I lose my keys.

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Posted under About Mom, GDM Kids, Tweens, Teens, GDM Lifestyle, Recommended Reading.