Children want happy parents

Nothing is more beautiful than a smile on loved ones’ faces.

By toddlerhood, the child has started to use his mother’s and father’s faces as an immediate guide to the behaviour in his particular environment. In infancy, these looks and smiles have an even more powerful role to play: they trigger off pleasurable biochemicals that actually help the social brain to grow. These biochemical responses, in turn, trigger an enormous increase in glucose metabolism during the first two years of life. This glucose metabolism, in turn, facilitates the expression of genes.

The exact sequence is as follows:

• When the baby looks at the mother (or father), he/she reads their dilated pupils as indicating that their sympathetic nervous system is pleasurably aroused

• In response, the baby’s own nervous system gets pleasurably aroused and his/her heart rate goes up

• These processes trigger off a biochemical response: a pleasure neuropeptide (called beta-endorphin) is released into circulation, specifically into the orbitofrontal region of the brain

• Natural opioids like beta-endorphin help neurons grow, by regulating glucose and insulin, as well as making you feel good

• At the same time, another neurotransmitter called dopamine is released from the brainstem and also makes its way to the prefrontal cortex.

Children develop in the context of interpersonal relationships. Young children develop through their relationships with the important people in their lives: these relationships are the ‘active ingredients’ of the environment’s influence on human development.

Children who have healthy relationships with their mothers are more likely to develop insights into other people’s feelings, needs, and thoughts, which form a foundation for cooperative interactions with others and an emerging conscience. Our minds emerge and our emotions become organised through engagement with other minds, not in isolation. This means that the unseen forces that shape our emotional responses through life are not primarily our biological urges, but the patterns of emotional experience with other people, most powerfully set up in infancy. These patterns are like all habits, once established, they are hard to break.

Early development is determined by the quality of their attachment experiences. Later development continues to be shaped through relationships – the brain can be reprogrammed through positive relationships (although it becomes increasingly difficult to do so).

Importance of emotional development

'People may choose to eat too much or too little, drink too much alcohol, react to other people without thinking, fail to have empathy for others, fall ill, make unreasonable emotional demands, become depressed, attack others physically, and so on, largely because their capacity to manage their own feelings has been impaired by their poorly developed emotional systems.’ (Gerhardt, 2004)

The development of emotional intelligence and empathy have long-term developmental implications:

• A growing body of scientific evidence tells us that emotional development begins early in life, that it is a critical aspect of the development of overall brain architecture and that it has enormous consequences over the course of a lifetime

• The foundations of social competence that are developed in the first five years are linked to emotional well-being and affect a child's later ability to functionally adapt in school and to form successful relationships throughout life

The core features of emotional development (or ‘emotional intelligence’) are the ability

• to identify and understand one's own feelings,

• to accurately read and comprehend emotional states in others,

• to manage strong emotions and their expression in a constructive manner,

• to regulate one's own behaviour,

• to develop empathy for others, and

• to establish and sustain relationships.

Our children are like mirrors they reflect our attitudes in life. After all, life isn’t the same without someone who loves you.