Are you oversharing?
Are you oversharing?
What is oversharing?
Oversharing means telling too much information to your child that it is not supposed to know and deal with at his age and development level. Concrete examples might be: speaking about the money problems, telling about the fights you have with other people, talking bad about the other parent, grandparents, friends or other valuable people in the child’s life, your worries, negative thoughts,your trauma’s, about your love life, intimate life and so on. Even if you are not directly talking to the child, but you are talking about this with someone else and the child can hear or see it. Yes, this is also oversharing.
What are the effects of oversharing on my children?
When a child will get too much information, that is not appropriate for his age and development level, this will have negative effect on the child. The child does see and feel your stress, your worries, anger, sadness. Through empathy, the child will start also feel those emotions and starts also worrying about those issues your spoke about and will also worry about YOU. Because the child does see that you are not okay and that will give the child also stress. Even if it cognitively does not fully understand the load of what you are saying. Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline will also get higher and the child’s body gets affected by this.
What do you notice in your child?
For example: You are having a family dinner, with your children and partner. You are telling your partner about the fight with your boss. Talking about how you want to change a job now, but you cannot, because you need the money. After dinner your children will calmly move to the sofa to wtach TV and will go to bed as normal. Quietly, happy, calm, like nothing does bother them.
Yes maybe nothing really bothered them at all and this was a short one time conversation they will forget. On the other hand, the fact is, that children are masters at hiding emotions and reading people. Children want to see their parents happy. Because the one thing that you do not know is, what are they thinking about while calmly playing, watching TV or when they trying to fall asleep. The distress does not need to be seen directly in behaviour, it can add up and when oversharing is happening more often this starts to show in symptoms.
In the long run this will lead to worse sleeping, worse eating, mood swings, somatic complaints (like stomach or headaches often), more crying, anger outburst, social isolation, being more quiet, trying to spare the parents, growing up too fast, worse bond with the parents and so on.
Yes, you cannot protect your children fully, but what you can control is what you say in front of them and how you say it.
Markéta
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