1. Never Acknowledge Your Child’s Efforts
A child’s biggest desire is often to be acknowledged and affirmed by their parents. However, many parents may worry that praise can make a child arrogant, so they may ignore or deny their child’s efforts.
In reality, for children, recognition from parents can bring happiness and powerful motivation for growth. Even without external recognition, just being noticed and evaluated by parents can make a child feel happy and motivated to move forward.
However, not all children have this opportunity. Some children are often neglected by their parents, which causes sadness and makes them feel unsafe. They often feel insecure, thinking that they are not good enough, and even their loved ones are not satisfied.
Famous doctor and psychologist Alfred Adler once said, “A happy child will use childhood to heal wounds in life. An unhappy child will spend a lifetime healing wounds from childhood.”
If a child’s childhood is a memory of happiness and joy, they often become confident and warm individuals, facing life with a positive attitude and happiness. On the other hand, if parents deny or, at the very least, make the child feel happiness and joy in life, it will diminish.
2. Neglecting Emotional Needs
During the process of growing up, the attitude of parents can be seen as a mirror, a point where children perceive and feel about themselves. In the important stage of childhood, especially from 0 to 6 years old, positive attention from parents plays an important role in a child’s development. When receiving care, love, and understanding from parents, children will build self-confidence and feel important and deserving of good treatment.
On the contrary, if parents often neglect or show indifference, or refuse to pay attention to their children, especially by preventing them from expressing emotions, this can cause children to develop negative psychological conditions. Children may feel abandoned, fearful, anxious, and doubt their self-worth.
For example, if a child wants to share something with their mother but the mother is busy, her lack of attention or pretending not to listen can make the child feel overlooked. When a child cries for any reason, if the parents show frustration and yell, emphasizing that crying is meaningless, it can increase the child’s feelings of insecurity and lack of self-worth.
If such situations occur frequently, the child’s self-esteem can be damaged because the child does not receive enough care and respect from their parents.
3. Excessive Control Over Your Child’s Life
Maintaining control and coordination of every action of the child can create an unfavorable working environment, making the child become co-dependent, dependent, and lacking confidence when facing challenges without support from parents.
Therefore, instead of tightly controlling, parents should create space for children to develop, explore, and become self-reliant. They can change their approach by supporting, guiding, and encouraging children to engage in activities and explore new skills.
4. Setting Unrealistic Expectations and Demands for Your Child
Some parents often set unachievable expectations for their children, always being satisfied and criticizing every aspect of their children’s lives, from maintaining the bedroom to academic performance, even their college plans. They want their children to become exceptional individuals, constantly intervening to fix and compensate for their imperfections, in order to shape a better picture for their children.
However, excessively high expectations and impositions can make parents obsessed, demanding the impossible, making them unable to accurately assess their child’s capabilities and abilities. This can also lead to attaching conditions to parental love for their children.