I often joke to my students that little children teach us a lot about fluid mechanics. Of course, parenting teaches many other useful things too, mostly, I find, in terms of communication skills. One particularly useful observation is neatly summarized by Gretchen Rubin in her inspiring book “The Happiness Project”. She makes a point that children are looking for acknowledgement of their frustrations and negative emotions more often than for actual help with the task or the situation that causes them. Following up the validation of the reality of the negative emotion and the subjective difficulty of the situation with a constructive suggestion is, of course, the best practice. For example, if a child is upset, because she cannot put on socks by herself, saying to her something like: “Putting on socks can certainly be tricky; why don’t you try pulling on the heal instead of the top” would be more helpful than dismissing the child’s frustration with “Come on, this is just putting on a sock! How hard can it be?”
What is even more interesting is that acknowledging the difficulty of a problem even makes adults more likely to persevere with it, rather than abandoning it in frustration. Probably, the prospective of feeling a certain pride for completing something challenging serves as a reward for sticking with the task. It’s another Jedi mind trick to play on the students (or on myself), I suppose.