Let Your Kids Know How Stressed You Are
Whether you’re anxious about Covid-19 or something else, it’s best to fess up
Stressed-out parents may think it’s perfectly logical to hide their stress from the kids, but a new study published in the Journal of Family Psychology suggests children see right through the deception, and it just stresses them out, too. The advice: Let it out, within reason.
“It is important that we are honest with our children about our feelings, including negative emotions like stress or upset,” says study leader Sara Waters, PhD, an assistant professor in Washington State University’s Department of Human Development. “This does not mean that we should share all the details of our upset with our children or that we should take our stress out on them.” But pretending everything is fine when it’s not can backfire, the research suggests.
Waters and her colleagues brought 107 volunteering parents into a lab setting, along with their children ages seven to 11, and split them apart. Parents were forced to do something stressful — giving a speech about themselves to a small audience of arm-crossed, head-shaking critics — and then each had a conversation with their child about a topic both had ranked as high in potential for conflict. Half the parents were asked to suppress their emotions, the other…
