Are You Fighting With Your Children More Than You Used To?

If you seem to be getting frustrated with your children more than usual, Dr. Claudia Gold, a behavorial pediatrician and author of "Keeping Your Child In Mind" has some great tips on how to better understand your child and get your own needs met too!

Dr. Claudia Gold, author of "Keeping Your Child In Mind: Overcoming Defiance, Tantrums, and Other Everyday Behavior Problems By Seeing the World Through Your Child's Eyes" talks with Commitmentnow.com about the challenges facing parents today and how they can meet their child's deepest need through empathy and understanding.

Commitmentnow.com: What is a child's deepest need?

Dr. Claudia Gold: Being understood by those we love is a basic human need, for both child and adult. For a child, being understood helps him to develop a healthy sense of self, and to think about and manage strong feelings.

Commitmentnow.com: What happens when this need is not met by parents?

Dr. Gold: When parents misinterpret the meaning of a child's behavior, for example saying a child is acting out to make their life difficult rather than understanding that a child is tired or stressed in some way, the child doesn't learn to make sense of his own feelings. Often this results in worsening of behavior.

Commitmentnow.com: The title of your book is 'Keeping Your Child In Mind'. What does this mean?

Dr. Gold: It means to recognize your child as a person with thoughts and feelings, and to respond to the motivation and intention of behavior, not simply the behavior itself.

It has four essential components:

•    To wonder about the meaning of behavior: to understand behavior from the perspective of a child’s experience and stage of development.

•    To show empathy, which involves not cognitive understanding but actually feeling what another person is feeling.

•    To contain and regulate difficult feelings, as in the form of setting limits on behavior.

•    To do all of this while staying regulated yourself and not being overwhelmed by your own feelings.

Commitmentnow.com: What advice do you have for parents who try to empathize with their child, but find their child's behavior difficult, frustrating and sometimes exhausting to handle?

Dr. Gold: Parents need to recognize when they need help. This may mean recognizing when you are at the end of your rope and getting another adult to help you—spouse, friend or family member—with your child. A  more serious situation is a mother who is struggling with depression who may have to advocate to get the kind of help and support she needs.

Commitmentnow.com: What goal did you have in mind when you wrote this book?

Dr. Gold: My aim was to, in a sense, join two separate worlds. On the front lines in pediatrics, behavior problems are treated with "behavior management, and increasingly with medication. Contemporary research in child development offers a different way to address these problems which I found to be very effective in my practice, and I wanted to bring this knowledge to a broad audience.

Commitmentnow.com: What are some ways parents can get the support and help they need in order to meet the needs of their children?

Dr. Gold: Parents need to be sure to take care of themselves. They need to be able to regulate their own emotions in order to be present with their child in a way that keeps them in mind. This may be by having a spouse, friend, or family member to rely on, taking yoga classes, seeing a therapist, or any combination of these and other similar things.

Commitmentnow.com: What can a parent do to help a child who has a hard time regulating their feelings and tends to 'explode' often?

Dr. Gold: Many children who have these difficulties have a number of sensory processing problems. They may be overwhelmed in a stimulating environment with a lot of lights and sound.

Children also respond to stress in the environment and may have more explosive behavior in the setting of a new sibling, marital conflict, a move, or any number of stressors.

It is important to take the child's perspective into account in understanding where the behavior is coming from.  

Commitmentnow.com: How can a parent support their teenager's search for identity and the turmoils that often come with adolescence?

Dr. Gold: Teenagers need limits set in much the same way as a toddler. While the may fight curfews or other forms of limit setting, and will certainly not thank you, it is important that they have a sense that parents will keep them safe.

So a combination of understanding the anxiety that goes along with separating and finding your own identity, along with clear limits on behavior, is important.

Commitmentnow.com: As a behavorial pediatrician, what do you feel are the biggest problems facing parents and children today?

Dr. Gold: Parents are under enormous stress to be "perfect." even in the setting of such things as financial stress, single parenthood, caring for aging parents. It is important to recognize that imperfections, or disruptions, as long as they are recognized and repaired, actually propel development forward in a healthy direction.

To buy Keeping Your Child In Mind click here.

About the Author: Claudia M. Gold, M.D., is a pediatrician with a longstanding interest in addressing children's mental health needs in a preventive model. She practices behavioral pediatrics at Community Health Programs of the Berkshires and has over 20 years experience practicing both general and behavioral pediatrics.

She is a graduate of the Scholar's program of the Berkshire Psychoanalytic Institute and is currently a fellow in the University of Massachusetts Boston Infant-Parent Mental Health Post-Graduate Certificate Program.