By MARGARET ALTMAN Special to the Daily Press
Parents must play many roles. They are protectors and teachers for their children, as well as members of extended families, communities and society. They are far more powerful than this. This is an election year and as always, parents have an eye and an ear open for the political promises that permeate the air. Parents are voters and their votes can change the course of history. These votes depend upon placing their trust in someone who promises to make things better.
Trust is a big issue this year and every year. Each candidate wants to be the one you trust to fulfill needs and dreams on an individual and societal basis.
As adults we put our lives in the candidates’ hands.
Parents can benefit from a developmental view of trust: How it grows and what makes it healthy. With this information, parents can help their youngsters develop the ability to trust, which is a key ability in the growth of emotional intelligence.
As a parent, you want your child to develop specific, strong skills which directly underlie a healthy ability to trust. Infants have little if any ability to sort through information and pick out trustworthy characteristics in people and situations. From birth, infants rely upon parents and caretakers to sort through massive information and select the things that will help them and not harm them. From food to music to baby-sitters, parents use their own mental skills to surround the baby with a trustworthy environment.
A trustworthy environment is one that is consistent, usually in a positive way. This is a key to understanding the early development of healthy trust. Consistency does not mean that the infant has absolutely no exposure to negative things. But that negative exposure is limited and often quickly corrected by the parent.
Healthy trust, at its basic roots, develops from consistency, predictability and positivity.
Children learn to trust adults who consistently provide positive experiences and they depend upon a track record of behavior from the adult.
As the child grows, he or she develops more skills in processing and evaluating information so that they can make accurate decisions about trusting or not trusting. These developing skills are emotional, as well as intellectual. A youngster who can, for example, regulate his emotions and get into a comfort zone will be able to use his mind effectively in sorting through lots of data and coming to a conclusion about who to trust.
Healthy trust develops from consistent parenting, and grows as the child learns to regulate emotions and use reasoning and logic for decision making.
Adults tend to trust based upon far less information than they really need in order to make good decisions. We are rushed, we are anxious, we are insecure and we often put ourselves into unsafe situations with people who are not at all interested in our well-being.
What have we lost and what should we know in order to ensure that our youngsters develop healthy skills in the trust domain?
Tips for parents: What interferes with developing healthy trust? ■Parental inconsistency, as in not responding to the baby’s needs some times and then responding at other times. This leads children to put their trust into people who are basically inconsistent because this is what they have learned from their parents. ■Abuse is a strong obstacle to developing the ability to trust. Children who are physically and mentally abused tend not to trust for fear of being harmed. ■Impulsivity. Children with self-control problems may be too impulsive to use their minds ■Trauma, such as a sudden loss of a loved one or illness may shake a child’s world to the core and disrupt the development of trust. ■Parents who have poor decision making in the domain of trust are poor role models for this ability.
Children who have low self-esteem may trust the wrong people and become dependent on them.
What helps to build healthy trust? ■Repair breaches quickly. When the child has been hurt physically or emotionally, it is important for the parent to take time to soothe the child and whenever possible, provide more consistency and protection until the trust is re-established. ■Model for the child how to sort through information and evaluate the behavior of others. ■Provide as much consistency as possible. ■Teach emotion regulation skills so that the child can self-soothe and use his intelligent mind to make decisions on who to put their trust in. ■Build the child’s self-esteem by recognizing her strengths in all domains.
Trust can be a basic, life-enhancing ability. The natural and wonderful ability to trust that we see in babies must be strengthened and directed by caring and supportive parents who know which underlying skills should be reinforced. (Maragret Altman L.C.S.W., author of “Developing Your Child’s Emotional Intelligence,” is child development specialist in practice with Dr. A Korchmarev in Sherman Oaks. She welcomes comments and questions.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 24, 2004. Read the original PDF.