2021 has started with uncertainty about school closures due to COVID-19. The tier system is causing us as parents to adapt to more change and whilst hope is on the horizon with vaccines coming online, we still need to manage how we as parents cope with now, whilst supporting our children. In this article, I explore the concept of psychological projection, and how we can avoid hampering our children’s emotional development during these circumstances by keeping our own ability to ‘project’ in check.

2021 has started with uncertainty about school closures due to COVID-19. The tier system is causing us as parents to adapt to more change and whilst hope is on the horizon with vaccines coming online, we still need to manage how we as parents cope with now, whilst supporting our children.

On the 4th January, the UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson announced that England was moving back into a national lock down as well as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

These changes and the uncertainty that comes with managing change will produce a range of emotional responses for all the members of the family, but the intensity of these emotional responses will undoubtedly be exacerbated by experiencing dyslexia or other special educational needs.

As parents, we will address these emotional responses in our own way, but we could run the risk of inappropriately addressing the emotional responses (and behaviour) of our children because of something that everyone does subconsciously, psychological projection.

In this article I want to explore the concept of psychological projection, and how we can avoid hampering our children’s emotional development by keeping our own ability to ‘project’ in check.

What is psychological projection?

The definition of psychological projection is basically that it is the act of denying how we feel and then attributing those feelings to others.

For example, our children might want to do something that we feel quite anxious about and rather than acknowledge that we feel anxious about what they are doing, we might somehow pretend that our children are feeling anxious about it too.  So, our behaviour demonstrated in supporting our kids is then skewed by an assumption of how they feel which is not accurate.  This can then result in a whole range of unfortunate outcomes.

Psychological projection is an emotional defence mechanism.  Internally we feel uncomfortable about something, but for whatever reason we don’t accept it or ‘own’ that feeling (often because this is a subconscious experience) and so we look to offload the emotion to someone else.

So as parents we need to be careful that we do not do this to our kids. Do we really want our kids taking on board our emotional hang ups? We need to help them to be able to deal with their own emotions in a healthy way.

The challenge, at the moment, is that there is a lot of change taking place and it seems to be changing on a daily basis.  It is difficult to keep up sometimes as we worry about whether our kids are going to school or whether we have a job and if we do have a job, will we be furloughed and for how long.   It would be of no surprise that parental cares and anxieties related to the wellbeing of our children, will also be projected onto those same children to a greater or lesser degree.

Check out the Parenting Dyslexia Podcast with Parenting and Neurodiversity Coach, John Hicks. You can listen to episode 7 related to this article, below:

An example of this may be in over-compensating in supporting the emotional needs of our children.  Afterall our children are not us and as such will not have the same perspective as us, their parents, but it is easy to make assumptions thus risking not supporting the actual emotional needs of our children.  We perhaps then miss out on valuable listening time with our children.

If our children are not feeling listened to then they are unlikely to want to tell us how they feel about the challenges they are facing.  By ‘going to ground’ they in turn fail to develop the skill of self-advocacy that is so useful for dyslexic learning in getting what they need to be at their best.

Strategies for reducing projection and building closer relationships with our children.

Here are some tips that will help you to reduce psychological projection:

·       Be open about how you feel with your close family members.

o   It is OK to be able to say how you are feeling to your kids about whatever's going on for you. If you can, then your kids will see that it's safe for them to be able to open up and say how they feel. So often we feel like we are being stronger emotionally by not saying how we feel but all we are doing is teaching our kids how to ‘clam up’. Pent up emotions, stress and anxiety is not helpful for children, it is not helpful for us and so it's important to provide some kind of ‘psychological safety’ within the family.

·       Invest time in yourself in understanding how you feel.

o   It is important for us to understand how we are feeling but this self-awareness is not always automatic.  It is a skill that takes time to develop. I have personally found that it has been useful for me to be able to spend some time everyday writing down how I feel. This is a process known as ‘journaling’ and it enables me to reflect upon what is coming up in the day and how I feel about it.  It is in being more self-aware that we have the emotional ‘wiggle room’ to make better choices in the heat of the moment when that anxiety is really setting in.

·       The next thing that would help would be to allow ourselves time between observing our children’s behaviour and when we react to that behaviour.

o    Try not to react straight away.  Give yourself a chance to really see what's going on before the emotions kick in so that you do not run the risk of making assumptions about what's going on for your child.  A subjective response can derail us when we should be listening for the emotional root of problems and challenges for our children.