We continue today with our Paternity and Maternity Course. Let's talk about learned helplessness and, of course, how we can avoid the behaviors that produce it in our children.
In the video with which I present the post I think the scheme is quite clear. A teacher divides her class into two groups without them knowing. It gives everyone a simple exercise, but one group gives some simple questions and the other, first, some complicated ones. Everyone thinks they have the same questions.
As you request the answers it is clear that some are right and others are not. In the end, when the questions would be simple and they are, now yes, all the same, the group that had had an easier test keeps answering. The other hesitates and does not find the solution. They have lost confidence in themselves.
As quickly as that, the teacher has succeeded in ensuring that those who repeatedly failed at the beginning continue to fail later, and explain that they felt silly, invalid and perceived, even if it was something subjective, that others perceived them as different or inferior.
Let us apply, if possible, this experiment to us and we will surely obtain similar results. However, there is something that without doing this exercise, we surely know: our behaviors and the way we see each other or face the challenges will be influenced by our experiences in the past. The same happens to children and they are logically much more vulnerable to learned helplessness.
Trying things and getting them, by trial and error, is the natural way in which we learn. It is not very common that something goes well at first. Children, since they begin to interact with the environment, will have to overcome challenges, although at the beginning they fail.
Rather we will be a defensive factor against learned helplessness, supporting efforts, valuing them and never labeling the child in a negative way.
The helplessness learned
The theory of learned helplessness It was nominated by psychologist Martin Seligman. He performed an experiment with dogs. He divided them into two groups and all made them suffer electric shocks. But some could get rid of them by operating a lever and the other could do nothing to get rid of them.
Then he gathered all the dogs. He locked them again and gave them downloads, but this time the way to get rid was simple: jump a fence. The dogs of the first group left, the others stayed, it had been marked in their brain that they could not do anything to escape the suffering. They had learned that they were helpless and that nothing they did would save them.
Helplessness learned in humans
The learned helplessness is also suffered by human beings. People subjected to torture is a very obvious example, many stop believing that they can escape and that it is not up to them to get out of that situation. It is also evident in the case of children or adults who suffer repeated abuse.
When a person faces a distressing situation and, despite trying, nothing leads him to overcome the problem, he ends up without looking for a solution. He has learned that it is not up to him to get out and stop fighting. That leads to in human beings, in exhaustion, slowing, sadness, passivity and even depression.
Negative thinking is always hidden, ready to hinder any action.
If we see this experience from the opposite point of view, as Seligman and his collaborators later developed, we can also point out that we can avoid learned helplessness by offering the subjects technical control over events. In that case, the lever of the first dogs. In the case of our children, Positive parenting and optimistic messages that reinforce your control concept About the events.
Children facing challenges
Young children, in their early years, face great challenges. They will learn to walk and talk. They need to work hard and fail to achieve them, and precisely, while maintaining safety standards, parents can help them a lot, allowing them to face failure and the new attempt until they face the challenge and overcome it. That is, we have to give them that lever, to know that they can get control of their surroundings.
Let's control the baby
Regarding the upbringing there is one more point to comment, and that links with the topics in which we have talked about the methods or ideas that promote the one that does not care for a baby that demands attention from its parents, pampering, accompanied sleep or arms . The disturbing and dangerous idea that babies manipulate us, or want to control us, entails a response style in parents that naturally translates into the basic mechanism of learned helplessness.
Children, since they are born, relate their actions to the desired result. A baby who wants to be taken in arms, something, which, on the other hand, needs for his emotional well-being, will cry. It will be day or night. He will do it whether or not he wants the adult to assist him by ceasing his other activities. Crying is their way of communicating and obtaining the desired result, adult attention.
They need to know that they have control over what happens to them, and that they can link their actions with the result. If we deny them control, we deny them the ability to conceive themselves as capable of controlling the environment.
But yes there is no control or link between action and result, or if these are not consistent, the result is the feeling of lack of control, of helplessness. It is not worth crying, they will not come. I can't do anything to get cradled in the middle of the night. Passivity makes its entrance and the child stops expressing his needs, because we have described these as non-existent or without true importance.
But if we decide that we will not be manipulated by him, so, in the end, he won't ask us what he needs. He will even stop crying after a few nights alone in the crib if we don't attend to him. Do you stop doing it if it is of no use, if you do not control the environment to achieve your goal and your need?
Once we have explained what learned helplessness is and how we can instill it in our babies if we do not allow them to perceive that they are able to have control over the environment with their crying, we will see in the next topic of the Maternity and Paternity Course, other aspects in that learned helplessness can affect our children.
