Freeing Your Child from Negative Thinking

Instead of the clamor of what-ifs, I heard the silence of finality sealing shut a thick vault, all the treasures locked inside, as these children not only expected the worst but accepted the worst. Parents would stand around that vault trying to gain access. “But you’re good at so many things; this is no big deal,” they’d plead. But guarded by the insidious partners of hopelessness and impossibility, the treasures of these children remained locked up, shut down, unreachable, and the children remained convinced there was no use in trying to make it different.

When I would say to these parents, “Your child has depressive thinking,” they would quickly counter, and rightly so, “But he’s not depressed.” I would explain how their child was demonstrating what Dr. Aaron Beck, the father of cognitive therapy, called in the 1970s the depressive triad: negative views of the self, the world, and the future. Dr. Beck codified this triad as a three-part punch: I struck out at baseball; I hate myself (one blow); baseball is stupid (and the next); I stink at everything (and down they fall).¹ An hour later this child will have moved on and is asking with a cheerful smile, “What’s for dinner?” as if nothing has happened. Meanwhile, the parents, completely wrung out from a lifesaving mission to wrestle their child out of the hole he had seemingly dug himself into, are mystified. They scratch their heads and sigh, but they don’t feel completely relieved because they have a hunch that they won’t be in the clear for long: The depressive triad will be waiting around the corner for the next disappointment, and kaboom—another attack of the negative brain will knock their child down again.

So, although as their parents told me, these children were not depressed per se, it was clear that they were depressives-in-training .

All of us want our children to be hardy and happy, and we can all identify with these parents—alternating between concern and disbelief—as we watch our children crumble, shut down, or melt down in the face of even small disappointments or hints of criticism. We ask ourselves how something so seemingly small could become so big and, more important, how we can stop this from ruining our children’s lives. If we could look behind the scenes in the brain, we would see that the mind is laying down tracks, neural shortcuts connecting point A to point Z, and that when something goes wrong for these children, it is permanently and unchangeably wrong, it impacts everything, and it is usually seen as all their fault: Nothing bad can be temporary or occasional or specific and manageable. In the 1980s, Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania identified this pattern of understanding experience as a pessimistic explanatory style: negative events are explained as permanent (not temporary), pervasive (relating not just to that specific domain, but spilling over into everything), and personal (all my fault), what we will refer to as the 3 Ps. He found that children don’t outgrow this style but actually grow into it, using it to explain an ever-widening circle of events and aspects of their life. Eventually with all these rehearsals and practices of the 3 Ps, this thinking habit becomes automatic, impenetrable, and so convincing to children that it is the gateway to true depression.

Over time this high-speed brain connection becomes so efficient—like any habit—that even if a child doesn’t want to think that way and doesn’t believe these ideas in his heart, he is still convinced of them, just because they are the answer that has got there first over and over again. The alternative ways of looking at circumstances—that these children could use to take them on a much more inviting, realistic, and promising track—remain hidden; the children are either too discouraged to look for these transfer stations or don’t even know they are an option. Seligman and his colleagues found two things: (a) You can protect vulnerable children from developing depression by teaching them the skills to find that other track; and (b) the protection from this training holds even years after the training is finished; children who learned these skills had half the rate of depression of the children who hadn’t learned the skills.²

How can we change a pattern that has become so automatic? The brain gets good at whatever it does the most. This is what Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley describe in their book The Mind and the Brain³ as “the survival of the busiest.” Whichever neural circuits are tapped into most often have more brain resources devoted to them. So, if our kids are running daily laps around the pessimism track, they will become sprinters—effortlessly reaching conclusions that are at once airtight and totally undermining. But by the same token, if we begin to create some new hubs in their explanatory landscape—hubs that say, “Some things are temporary,” or “It’s one thing; it’s not everything”—they will get very good at heading toward those new circuits in their thinking. Over time they will become able to manage the ups and downs without falling flat, and eventually those new, healthy, realistic thoughts will meet them halfway and may even beat out the negative ones. So: new answers, new tracks, happier kids.

The problem is that parents may feel daunted by learning how to help their child create these new tracks. Their responses to this point—frustratingly ineffectual—have been either to rush in with reassurance or, after reassurance exhausts everyone and gets nowhere, to get fed up and say, “Enough!” which leaves them feeling like horrible, insensitive parents. Parents’ uneasiness and uncertainty about how to approach their child is not lost on the child and only rocks an already wayward, unbalanced vessel. On the one hand, the parents see their child suffering and want to make it better; on the other hand, talking about what is bothering their child feels like a process that could spiral into a complaining fest on a good day or, worse, a bottomless pit in which the child—holding onto his negativity like a heavy anchor—is not only not ready to let go but is going to take his parents down with him.

Parents are always the first responders to their children’s distress. In my own practice I have repeatedly seen how parents, armed with the right tools, train their scared and anxious children to think differently and learn to recognize and outsmart the worry traps in their mind. Similarly, parents of children and teens who are either negative by nature or otherwise vulnerable to depressive thinking can learn how to recognize and respond powerfully to their child’s slipping into that locked vault and can teach them how to learn the combination, open the vault, and stay in touch with their treasures—even in the face of the occasional, but inevitable, disappointments or failures. Rather than keeping their fingers crossed that their kids won’t get tripped up by the vicissitudes of life, parents and children alike can tackle the tangles head on, as they set their navigation system to the way out.

To buffer our children from getting stuck in negative thinking, the key is to specific-size, what we’ll refer to as specificize, or narrow down, the overwhelming, global problem to one specific trigger. Children don’t know that they are feeling so overwhelmed because they are seeing their situation magnified one hundred times. Even something as familiar as a strand of hair can look unrecognizable (and even creepy or daunting) under a microscope. By learning to adjust the microscope’s controls, children can eliminate the distortion and shrink the problem back to its actual size and see a different picture. So we teach kids to cultivate the two-track mind, to put down the negative glasses and pick up the “competent glasses.” Then after they have looked at different perspectives on the situation, we can help them “mobilize” and choose to be an agent of change on their own behalf. (Names like Disaster Man or The Exaggerator help children reduce the tyranny and authority of their negative thoughts to their proper place,—and to see them as just one among many possible interpretations of the situation.)

There has never been a more urgent time in our history for these lessons. As the statistics below suggest, the number of children who develop depression is staggering:

The very good news is that parents of children who are negative by nature can nurture their children to learn another way of thinking. By implementing the strategies in this book, parents will learn not only how to turn their depressives-in-training into experts in depression prevention, but also how to enable their children to hold their own—in their minds and in the world. Their children will develop the flexible mind-set that obstacles do not signal “time to quit” but are surmountable and can be approached from many different angles. This is the formula for resilience, resourcefulness, and happiness in life.

We could keep trying to make life work for our children, make them feel better, bend over backward, walk on eggshells, and do a daily minesweep to keep all systems go. As all parents of a child with a negative bent know, there’s always that one more thing that we didn’t think of. Some children’s nose for the negative is like a bad allergy to adversity or discontent so that they notice it in the most minute detail and are thrown into a tailspin. Trying to “just be positive and hopeful” doesn’t work either. (It’s like applying paint to a poorly prepared surface: No matter how beautiful the paint, it simply won’t stick.) And when your friends and relatives chide you to just be more firm and use “tough love” with your child’s “crankiness” or “spoiled” behavior, they are completely missing the point: These kids would love things to be different; they don’t want to think, feel, or act this way; they just don’t know what else to do.

The goal is not to airlift your child off the unhappy track to the happy track. Rather, it’s to work smarter, not harder—to learn the nuts and bolts of how your child’s thinking got her there in the first place, and to teach her how to be analytical and critical of that negative track so that she will choose to airlift herself to a different track, one that will lead to contentment and satisfaction. But you also need to be a tour guide, directing your child out of unhappy or challenging times: Just because your child (or you at times yourself) can’t see a way out of a problem doesn’t mean there aren’t several directions waiting to be discovered. And you need to be in the know about the path to happiness, which researchers are finding over and over again is not paved with the GPAs, SAT scores, salaries, or big houses that we might expect. Instead, research tells us (and we will look at this research closely later in the book) that it is paved with engaging in meaningful and satisfying activities, staying connected to others, and feeling gratitude for what one has.

As you read this book, you will have your ear tuned to such negative buzz words as always, never, no one, and everyone. You will come to know with an engineer’s precision how your child’s faulty conclusions were constructed, and you will have the tools to help your child dismantle them and rebuild a more accurate (realistic) perspective. You will also learn to highlight the positive moments to help your kids methodically reconstruct how they contributed to things going well, so that they can do it again. You will learn a new language and create a communication system with your child to unpack disappointments, unhappiness, or blues. Rather than saying things like “That’s not so bad,” or, “Why are you always thinking the worst?” you will find yourself “relabeling” negativity in a way that helps your child get distance rather than getting defensive. For instance, you will be saying to your young child, “I’ll bet your negative brain is saying that striking out today at the plate is a forever thing.” Maybe you’ll even have your child sing his negative thoughts like Elvis, to get some levity and distance from the tyranny of negative thinking.

If, as you work through this book, you notice that you are using these strategies on yourself, good! This is what I call interactional optimism, and it is central to this book, which is about the upward spiral of optimistic thinking. You can’t really make someone change, but you can change yourself. So don’t be surprised if you start seeing unexpected possibilities in your own life popping up in the corner of your mind’s eye, or if you start hearing your own negative thinking as less than the final word. Who knows? You may even start singing those self-critical thoughts like Elvis. You will start to feel lighter, your communication with others will improve, and you will be more authentic when you work on these issues with your child—you are, after all, fellow travelers on the road of life.