Don't Ignore Your Whining Kid at Check-Out, Experts Now Say
I don't know about you but when my son was little and carrying on about something, the advice was to ignore him. Now we're learning that just may not be the way to do it. According to a new study , parents who intentionally ignore children’s negative emotions may actually increase their children’s expressions of anger, aggression, and disproportionate emotional behaviors, newswise.com reports. Oh boy. Ignoring children’s emotional outbursts is a strategy commonly employed by parents with a wide range of psychological know-how, drawing on their intuition, family tradition, modeling, or simple desperation. "For whatever reason, the folks who are developing questionnaires to assess these kinds of behaviors didn’t focus on ignoring responses,” notes Scott P. Mirabile, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland at the web site. Here's what researchers found: If a child is begging for candy in the checkout aisle and starts...