help4yourfamily

The Importance of Delight

Latino Children Play Swing (Photo credit: epSos.de)

Written by, Kate Oliver, MSW, LCSW-C

Do you have a child that wants you to watch them play video games or swing on the swing?  Do they want you to watch them do their 100th cartwheel for the day, or watch them spin until they are too dizzy to stand?  Do you find it exhausting sometimes?

Part of what they are doing is trying to recreate a moment when they did something particularly cute, or said something a certain way or made a certain face that brought you a moment of pure happiness and they basked in the glow of your joyful feeling over what they did.  When my children were younger, whenever they added an adult word to their vocabulary and used it correctly, I always found it so endearing.  Having a three-year old say, “Actually Mommy, I would prefer to wear a different dress today.” with their little wide, innocent eyes, it just made me giggle.  We call that moment delight.  In this post, I am going to talk about delight for most children and parents.  In Friday’s post, I am going to continue the conversation by writing about the role and importance of delight for children with attachment issues.

The Importance of Delight for All Children

While you may think that delight is just a nice thing that happens every once in a while between parents and children, it is actually quite important in the scheme of things for parents to delight in children and for children to be delighted in.  What we think of as a passing, silly, or endearing moment, (and this is especially true for younger children) actually helps to fire off thousands of neural transmissions per second in your child’s brain!  Delight enhances healthy brain development.  By delighting in young children, we help them to build neural passageways that encourage them to continue experiencing genuine joy (not the false kind that people think they get when doing drugs, for example).

Some parents worry that delighting in children too much will spoil them.  Let’s be honest…children are not always delightful.  I did not glow with excitement when my daughter went through the short period of time where she let me know she needed her diaper to be changed by showing me the poop on her finger that she got there by fishing it out of her diaper.  I am not in any way encouraging you to force delight nor do I intend to imply that you must live in a constant state of delighting in your children.  What I am encouraging is that you take the genuine moments of delight that you do actually have and really feel them.  Beyond giving your child validation and all the mapping of their neural transmissions, you are also giving yourself a gift.  When your child is being delighted in, genuinely, they know it, you can increase the positive feelings by laughing and looking them in the eye to tell them how delightful they are.  When you do this, you are creating an endorphin rush (like the one that comes with exercise or new love) for you and your child.  These are the feel good chemicals- the only ones, the natural ones- we want our children to get high from.  Allowing these special moments of time to happen naturally enhances our parent-child relationships, builds our likelihood of connecting to the idea that being together equates to feeling happy, and, well, to break it down to it’s simplest parts, it just feels really good.

As parents, we can sometimes feel like our children don’t need us to do anything with or for them if they are doing fine on their own.  In fact, they do need us to periodically delight in them.  Finding times when we feel genuinely delighted in our children is important.  When we do this, even though they may still ask you to watch them do the same thing over and over again, they become much more likely to accept this response: “I love watching you do things, but you deserve to have me watch you when I can give you my full attention.  Let me (fill in the blank) and then I can give you three minutes to watch you do that.”  When you set limits with your child in this loving way, we can also avoid the hassled, harried feeling of always putting them off.  Additionally, as they grow, they learn that they do not have to demand moments of delight, they are built into this loving family you have created.

By building moments of delight with our children from a young age, we have more good thoughts to call on when they are being difficult- giving us more patience for their behaviors.  We aren’t the only ones that get good memories to look back on.  When we set a limit with our children that they do not like, they are also able to weigh it against all the shared memories of delightful encounters we had together and are less likely to engage in all that teen and pre-teen angst we hear so much about or to try to find their delight in unhealthy ways outside of the family.

What delightful thing has your child done recently?  Please feel free to share your delight!

Related Posts:

• What is Attachment Disorder? (help4yourfamily.com)
• End the Hassle! Tell Children What They Deserve (help4yourfamily.com)
• Laugh and Your Family Laughs With You (help4yourfamily.com)

June 13, 2012 - Posted by help4yourfamily | attachment, help for parents, Parenting