While little kids are constantly learning, they still are a bit clueless when it comes to how the world really works. This naturally creates a lot of problems and troubles for the child—as well as for the parent!
Though kids are born essentially ignorant, they are born with all their feelings intact, though they aren’t able to deal with their feelings very well. You might say they also need to learn about feelings, too, because they naturally have a very limited ability to process and understand emotions, whether their own or someone else’s.
This is all to say that the younger a kid is, the more they’re going to misunderstand or misperceive things, whether intellectually or emotionally. This sets them up to create narratives that aren’t accurate or true, and which could be quite harmful.
Here's two examples where kids run into trouble
Take three-year-old Amina and her five-year-old brother, Armani, whose parents are splitting up. I’ve picked this example because parents splitting up is a fairly common thing, as is the young child’s reaction: many kids think the breakup is their fault. Of course this isn’t true, but why do kids so often believe it?
Because Amina is only three, she can’t intellectually understand the complex relationship issues her parents are having. While her brother, Armani, might understand a little bit more—at five, he’s working hard to figure out how to make and keep friends—he, too, will not understand the complexities of his parents’ relationship. He, too, won’t get why they need to be apart. While their parents might explain how they love each other but can’t remain together, this won’t make sense to the kids—how can you love someone and also want to be apart from them?
This is their misperception based on their limited understanding of relationships, and it’s going to create troubles for these kids.
Because their parents’ explanation doesn’t add up, they’ll look for other explanations, and here’s where their emotional needs—and misperceptions—come in.
There’s a universal need that little kids have which parents are often unaware of: young kids desperately need to maintain their parents as all good. This emotional need is at the center of a kid’s reaction to the parents’ breaking up. It means that instead of seeing the parents as having flaws—because they are unable to work out their relationship—the kid thinks he’s the problem. Clearly this is a misperception because rather than throw the parent under the bus, the kid throws himself under to preserve the good image of the parent. (This mindset is a huge piece of childhood, and is examined in greater detail in the post, “Why Young Child (Have To) Think We’re the Best.”)
Now, when we combine Amina and Armani’s limited understanding with their emotional need to preserve their parents’ good image, a new narrative forms. Using the Venn diagram from the earlier post, “Childhood Narratives: How They Impact Kids for a Lifetime.” we might show their narrative like this.
The original diagram:
Now becomes:
In this next example, we see a child developing a harmful narrative due not to her intellectual limitations but her difficulty processing and dealing with big feelings.
Leah is seven and her parents are both in the military. In her first seven years, her family has had to move four times. Leah’s learned to stoically deal with the moves, and her parents are proud of her ability to manage the moves without complaining. Leah doesn’t express her sadness when leaving her friends. Her parents call her a “real trooper,” imagining that she’s managing her feelings well enough.
But she is going to have troubles, as you might guess.
They also imagine that talking about her sadness might make her even more sad. If her parents don’t mention the sadness, Leah’s learned to push it away herself. But each time she leaves, she has to push it away even harder because each leaving reminds her of the past times she’s lost friends. In this way, each move compounds her sadness.
Her sadness is also mixed with a fear that she’ll have to move again. After all, this has been her experience.
Because she keeps leaving her friends and being sad all over again, she now, at seven, wants to protect herself from feeling such a loss. Not only does she try to distance herself from her sad feelings, she starts to tell herself that it’s dangerous to make friends because she’ll only have to lose them. It’s better to stay distant and keep her peers at arm’s length. This is how she takes care of herself and avoids her grief.
In this way, Leah’s developed a new narrative around friendship and closeness based not only on the logic of a seven-year-old, but her seven-year-old’s limited ability to deal with these big feelings. The losses have compounded year after year, and become too much for her to handle. If this narrative isn’t addressed, an adult Leah will view relationships through her very limited seven-year-old’s perspective even though she now has an adult’s ability to understand and manage loss.
Leah’s narrative could be diagrammed like this:
The parents themselves have their own misconception: they think that talking about sadness creates more sadness when in reality, talking about feelings actually helps relieve these feelings. Are you getting the sense that their belief might itself be an unhealthy narrative? It sure has the flavor of one!
In this way, unhealthy narratives usually are beliefs that don’t make much sense when closely examined. It’s as if one misconception leads to another misconception which then becomes accepted as a truth. This seems to be the case with the parents’ not wanting to talk about emotions.
Whether the misperceptions are based on a child’s intellectual or emotional limitations, in the end, they are based on the child’s best attempt to explain what they can’t fully grasp.
There’s a lot parents can do to help their child start to understand her complex world. It starts with understanding how your child might be (mis)perceiving things. For this, check out the general section, “Tools for Understanding,” to find specific tools that will help you figure out what’s going on inside your child. The section, “Tools for Talking,” will then help you begin to work with your child to create healthy narratives.
You can read one more example of how kids misperceive things in the following short-short story, “Serious Consequences,” in which we see the world through the eyes of a small child.
Related Posts
Childhood Narratives: How They Impact Kids for a Lifetime
Narratives are one of the most important things parents need to know about a child’s psychology. This post will tell you what they are and how they work.
Why Young Children (Have To) Think We’re the Best
Kids need to believe parents are near-perfect. It’s awesome for parents, but it can create some serious dilemmas (and issues) for children.
Serious Consequences
What goes on in a young child’s mind when a new baby arrives.
The Most Common Harmful Narratives in Children
A list of common harmful narratives children develop, why they develop these narratives, and how you can keep the narratives from forming.
How To Prevent Harmful Narratives in Your Child
It’s not hard to undo harmful narratives in children. Here are specific strategies to help kids form lasting, healthy narratives.
2 thoughts on “(mis)Perceptions: The Reason Young Kids Have So Much Trouble”
This post reminds me of the movie “Inside Out” – the first of the two. It seemed to reflect a powerful understanding of children’s emotions and the danger of burying them rather than naming them. I wonder if Evan saw that movie and agrees? I also think that very young children experience emotions as so strong that they believe the feelings change the course of events – hence, they feel responsible for events in fact outside of their control.
Sarah, thanks for your comments and insight!
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I think you’re right that there’s a real danger in kids burying their emotions rather than letting them out. I think they hope the feelings will just go away if they don’t look at them, but this is a fantasy.
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And that’s your second point about young children’s fantasy that their intense feelings can alter events. Note that here we’re really talking about kids under 5 years old. Kids under five are still trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not. For example, if they imagine a monster in their closet, they truly believe a monster exists simply because they can imagine one. Imagination, fantasy, and emotions for young children are very, very intense, and I think you’re right, Sarah, that young children run the risk of imagining they have created events simply because they may have imagined them.
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Knowing this can help parents head off harmful narratives as they form in young children.
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Thanks again for your thoughts, and happy reading!