A few days ago we saw how the lack of relationship and time between parents and children can cause children to grow in lack, lack of a reference and lack, in a way, of all the love and attention they deserve at the entrance "Why some children today end up being troubled teenagers."
Children are people and in the face of adversities, like everyone else, they look for adaptive measures, solutions that help them live with problems or ideas that help them overcome them. Some resign themselves and get used to the lack of time with their parents looking for alternatives that fill that time (television, begin to overvalue material goods, etc.), others more insistent take longer to adapt (or never do) and in the absence of attention they devise strategies to achieve it. One of them is to try, however, cause illness to get them to listen.
They do not do this because they can think of it as a good idea, but as a response to learning. Children, because of their immature immune system, get sicker than adults and, because they are children, they need more care than we do (we already know how to take care of ourselves). This makes us in a sick situation pamper them more, attend them, let them sleep with us and be, in short, more attentive to their needs than when they are healthy. In other words: the children (who feel that their parents are little for them) they learn that when they are bad, dad and mom pay more attention to them than when they are not.
Causing the disease
When a child is bad, mom and dad let him stay at home and sometimes even stay with him (and they had their own obligations!). In that situation he becomes in a certain special way, he goes from being a healthy child that nobody pays too much attention and that everyone expects him to be autonomous, independent and does not bother too much to be the center of attention. Dad plays with him, mom hugs him and fills him with kisses, he sleeps at night with them, they prepare his favorite food and if he has "luck" and is very ill until they buy him a gift. And if someone said "hey, don't you think you are spoiling him too much?", There will always be someone to defend him because "poor thing, that is bad."
Then the child realizes that your life as a healthy child has nothing to do with your life as a sick child and he struggles to somatize, to make his everyday problems turn into headaches, belly pains and even fevers and diarrhea. Or maybe they just somatize without knowing it?
Ignore him
“My son cries, almost bellowing, he tells me that his belly hurts and that it is bad to get attention, because he has nothing,” the mothers say when the technique of “getting sick” begins to become chronic and when pediatricians have discarded a disease that produces those discomforts.
At this point it is observed that a child is performing inappropriate behaviors (becoming sick, crying, complaining about pain that he does not have, or perhaps, but that he himself causes, through his psychological discomfort) just to get your parents attention, who no longer know what to do with him.
Then comes a pediatrician, or a psychologist, or a nurse, or the grandmother, or the mother-in-law, or the neighbor of the fifth and, full of wisdom, they tell you: “when he is sick, take care of him, but do not give him too much attention” , because of course, if the mother pays attention, if he pays attention, he is reinforcing the child's behaviors and the child will always do the same. Then, if the mother stops paying attention to him, by not getting an answer, the child will stop getting sick for that purpose and everything is solved.
The tip of the iceberg
And they are right, in the absence of a response, the child will stop acting that way. The problem is that that way you eliminate the tip of the iceberg and that only serves as a temporary solution, because the iceberg is still there. The interesting thing is to put your head under water, even when you get wet, to see how big an iceberg is and what can be done to undo it.
The iceberg is a need of the child that is not satisfied, it is the time, affection, dialogue, understanding and games of his parents who do not arrive. It is the values and norms that the child expects to receive and does not receive, it is the not feeling at all loved and it is the dissatisfaction that causes the love of some parents to be transmitted through gifts (“look how much Dad loves you, that he buys you ... ”).
That is the root, the problem that causes strange behaviors whose objective is to attract the attention that it does not receive. The solution, therefore, is not "to ignore so that you do not do those behaviors", but give children the attention they deserve so they don't have to call her (attention).
Photos | Tempophage, Leonid Mamchenkov on Flickr
In Babies and more | What does it mean to “behave well”? Respond to inappropriate behaviors in a balanced way, Jealousy between siblings, quality time or quantity of time?
