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How Criticism Too Early May Alter How Your Child Interprets Emotional Information

The continued development of psychology has illuminated interesting ways in which the brain reacts to its own hormonal changes, especially in children. It’s totally fascinating to find out how your child’s brain processes information and how they adjust based on environmental factors and what little details they pick up. As the parent, you have the incredible privilege of helping to raise the generation of tomorrow that will carry our world on to bigger, and better things. Certainly, some of the solid bases you should offer to your child does include private school opportunities but includes so many other things. From a recent study, scientists concluded that highly critical parents might have children that have more trouble reading emotional facial expressions in adulthood.

They Can Read, They Don’t Care

Actually, the study — conducted by Bingham and New York State — states that the children can read emotional facial expressions, they’re just more likely to ignore them. Not just in regard to critical facial expressions, but any sort of emotional twist of the features. The study hypothesizes that the future of this behavior will result in the child having trouble with depression and anxiety in their adulthood. When the researchers began, they merely wanted to assess how children would react to, potentially, overly critical parents. The basis formed from the idea is Late Positive Potential which is one of the many ways that people look at attention. The LLP is actually a neural marker that allows you to measure how much someone is paying attention to emotional information, such as a comparison of a face that is happy or sad.

The Study

To begin, the researchers interviewed parents of 7 to 11-year-old children. They asked them to talk about their child for five minutes. Afterward, the statements were decoded to detect levels of criticism. Then, the children were measured with an LLP as they were shown faces of varying emotions. Thus, the researchers concluded that children with more critical parents displayed less attention to the emotions on their faces than children with less critical parents.

The Conclusion

Based on previous researches and studies, it’s a widely known fact that the human mind is more likely to merely avoid anything that makes it uncomfortable. Think of a shy child’s aversion to social interaction as an example. Anything that is associated with a varying level of discomfort of plenty of different types is met with the response of merely looking the other way like the causes of anxious or sad feelings. The researchers actually started a hypothesis that children who have critical parents are much more likely to use an avoidance strategy when dealing with problems stemming from discomfort in the future than children with less critical parents are. The following conclusion that the researchers drew was that children with critical parents most likely avoid all emotions. The problem with this development is that it could mean the child will be incapable of having fulfilling interactions with others as well as being incapable of dealing with their own emotions. Habits like these are known to produce symptoms of anxiety because they don’t fully understand their surroundings and depression because they don’t understand themselves. In fact, the researchers believe that some children if exposed to critical behavior from the parent long enough might find that they associate critical judgment with every emotional response and reaction they experience throughout their entire lives. That will, most likely, include positive expressions as well as negative expressions.

The Future Of Emotional Development

Based on their findings, the researchers are hoping to do a follow-up study by examining the chemical releases in the brain and the different brain activity that is causing these results. Hopefully, in their findings, they’ll gain insight into the nuance of child emotional development and aid parents and private academy officials alike in determining how a child’s environmental factors can help to create more stable individuals of the future.

Enrolling Your Student In Private School

With so many odd factors coming into play during your child’s early developmental years it can be hard to predict what will create a good basis for your child to become the best person they can be. However, it’s universally understood that private schooling provides for a better starting point for most children and allows them to grow emotionally and academically so that they can succeed throughout their academic careers and beyond. Contact us to find out more about the curriculum and enrollment opportunities for this coming school year.