Parents, Leave Your Bad Mood at Work
Published: Apr. 10, 2003
April 10, 2003
URBANA--Parents who bring a bad day at the office home with them should realize it affects their children, said Angela Wiley, an expert in family relations at the University of Illinois. All too often, a bad day at work can turn into a bad evening at home.
Wiley pointed to the work of researcher Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute in New York. Galinsky found that almost half the parents she studied sometimes felt too tired to interact with their children or allowed something that had happened at work to affect the way they behaved with their child.
Children are very sensitive to their parents' moods, and they routinely play detective to figure out what kind of mood their parents are in when families are reunited at the end of the day, Wiley said.
In Galinsky's book Ask the Children, the author mentioned one child who actually called her parents at work to see what kind of mood they were in so she could decide whether to clean up the house before they came home.
UCLA researcher Rena Repetti says that children are quick to understand when their parents are stressed and to adapt to the situation. She found that children tried to be on their best behavior, whined and cried less, and even tried to cheer their mothers up. "But children shouldn't regularly have to tiptoe around a parent's bad humor or feel that they have to make things better for the parent all the time," Wiley said.
Wiley said that parents should be able to show children how to cope with having a bad day. She recommends building a toolbox of strategies to help parents buffer the impact of a bad day at work on themselves and their children.
Many parents use a commute to distance themselves emotionally from work even as they distance themselves physically. Some people find that listening to relaxing music or inspirational tapes on the way home helps, while others find that choosing less traveled, scenic roads helps them to relax.
She also recommends cognitive reframing, trying to find the positive aspects of a situation and focusing on them. Here's an example: "When my boss said those things, it hurt, but I know that she's a fair person and I'll have a chance to improve my performance."
Or "There are definitely things about my job I don't like, but even the bad points have a flip side. I'm going to concentrate on those now."
Visualization is another tool that parents can use to leave stress where it belongs. One parent Wiley talked to visualizes hanging a bag of work issues on a tree that she passes on the way home. She picks them up again as she goes to work the next morning.
Wiley likes to visualize constructing a firewall between the "fires at work" and family time at home. "But there needs to be some degree of permeability in the firewall," she said.
"It isn't necessary for your kids to see you happy all the time, and it isn't necessarily bad for kids to know you've had a rough day. In some ways, that knowledge protects them because they know what's wrong and they don't automatically assume your mood is their fault," she said.
"If you can go home and say my boss yelled at me and I need to take 15 minutes for myself to unwind, that's positive. If you don't take the time to make the transition, the danger is that your mood will stay with you into the evening and unconsciously influence you to be distant from your family. Then you're not there to listen to them about what's happening in their world," Wiley said.
Parents shouldn't hide all negative emotions, but they should avoid flooding their children with out-of-control emotions. "Our job as parents is not to be infallible but for them to see us constructively dealing with our emotions," she said.
"It's appropriate to be hurt and angry if your boss yelled at you, and it's certainly appropriate to be sad sometimes if there are other stressors in your life. But children need to know that you're handling your emotions, that you're not going to careen out of control. The message should be: Yes, you're sad, but you're going to be okay. You're their stability, and when you lose your equilibrium, it's a scary thing for them."
"It's important that we be able to talk to our spouses, our friends, or maybe even a clergyperson about our problems at work. But avoid using your child as a confidante and making her responsible for comforting you," Wiley said.
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