Ãlvaro Bilbao is a good example of how highly valuable content can be found on the networks. Bilbao is a doctor in psychology, neuropsychologist, writer and father of three children; he has trained at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Kennedy Krieger Institute, he has collaborated with the World Health Organization and the European Union, and his research has earned him several awards. In addition, he has a network community of almost one and a half million followers.
Based on his knowledge of the brain, he disseminates about positive education to improve the bond between parents and children. He has published the books The Child’s Brain Explained to Parents (2015), translated into 24 languages, Take Care of Your Brain (2013), Everyone to Bed (2017), and the latest, Hello Family (2022).
Educating positively is educating without yelling or punishment?
It is educating with firmness and affection, replacing shouting and threats with other tools that seek cooperation, understanding, always understanding what is happening to the child. I see fathers and mothers who say harsh things to their children: “you have no idea”, “you can’t give an opinion”… There are times when firmness is very important, but understanding and bonding are more so.
There will be readers who will think that this comprehension methodology leads us to have spoiled children…
Many people think that educating positively is educating without rules or without limits, and it is rather the opposite. If you ask my daughters they will tell you that their parents are stricter than their friends’. Maybe their parents yell at their school friends, but they end up doing whatever they want. With the rules and limits you have to be strict, firm, with love and common sense. Of course, sometimes the cry escapes me, but you have to handle many educational tools and that is complicated.
As parents, should we learn those tools?
We have some primitive instincts that are to scream, to hit… But we are not animals, we are human beings and in the same way that we are capable of creating a work of art or appreciating a melody, we are cultural beings. It is important that in this generation there is a change in culture and that fathers and mothers handle more tools.
And if a scream escapes, he recommends asking for forgiveness. What help?
Of course, the cry can come out to all of us. Acknowledging “I didn’t do it right, forgive me” is very important for the child and for the situation. We’re repairing the link and that’s important, because that link is only one, I can’t change it next year, I can’t make a buddy link. In the bond of father or mother, as in the home, it is better to make small repairs than to leave the house abandoned for sixteen years and when adolescence arrives to think “let’s see where I start.”
To educate positively, it is better to put punishments aside and bet on the consequences. What is the difference between them?
It must be made clear that I am not addressing parents of adolescents with situations of domestic violence or addiction issues; I address early childhood, up to six or eight years. The difference between punishments and consequences is that the consequence is always going to be explicit, the child knows it in advance. If the creature is not warned and there is no rule, that is a punishment. And they can be natural consequences (since you’re going with the cord untied, you can trip), or logical consequences (we have one hour to go to sleep, nine at night, and if you spend fifty minutes brushing your teeth, there’s no more time to tell a story). After setting the norm -at nine o’clock the light goes out- the consequences are logical.
A slap in time…?
There are two classic phrases. One is “one slap in time, solves many problems.” It has a certain basis, since a time limit solves much more than twenty-five corrections. But we cannot identify borderline with aggression. The other phrase of the million is “they gave me cakes when I was little and nothing has happened to me”. That “nothing has happened to you” thing should be seen. You have not done badly, except for the part in which you justify assaulting a child to try to educate him. In adult consultations I see many people who feel belittled, who have to justify things a lot because their parents have always judged them.
He makes a very clarifying reflection on cheeks, putting older people as protagonists…
If we go into gerontology, if an older person doesn’t want to eat and is losing weight, would you slap them so they eat or so they don’t poop in their diaper? Nobody conceives it because they are full-fledged people, and from my point of view the child is the same.
Based on your experience in consultation, is cheek smacking still considered normal?
We all want to live in a society that is better for everyone, where there is more respect, where we all feel safer. Part of the journey from the animal world to the cultural world are laws, norms, art… And part of evolution is understanding that children are fully-fledged human beings. A norm of our culture is not to attack others and one way to teach it is not to do it.
A slap or a smack is an assault…
Without a doubt, a slap or a spanking is an assault. We must make a comparison with our boss: if you make a mistake at work and your boss smacks you, you could sue him. If he smacks you, you could complain to human resources. 70% of the population understands that a slap is an assault, but a spanking, many people believe that it is nonsense. What if your boss gave it to you for making a mistake? We do not authorize that abrupt physical contact to set rules and limits.
What consequences can supposedly educational slaps have?
There are studies that show that children who are slapped or spanked are more likely to develop aggressive behavior as adults, and others say that the more frequent the aggressions and punishments, the more likely they are to suffer expulsions from school, arrests, fights, school failure. and unwanted pregnancies.
Co-sleeping, attachment, carrying, breastfeeding… What do you think of natural parenting?
In my professional experience, the parents I see most lost are the ones who are most involved in all this. I have two parent profiles in consultation. One is the old-fashioned parents, the child ignores them and hits them, and behind that you discover that there is a lot of screaming and spanking by the parents, with very little understanding, very little affection. The second profile is the parents who have spent the first years co-sleeping and carrying, without setting limits to the child, letting him do what he wants, following the entire father’s manual of new trends. The child has not learned the rules and believes that attachment is carrying him in his arms. Good attachment is responding calmly and not anxiously when the little one demands us.
Are we obsessed with doing everything right?
A mother told me that she strives every day for her children to eat well, they go to the supermarket together, buy chard, bring natural products, they cook, they don’t eat anything ultra-processed… But she doesn’t play with them because it takes her a long time to cook and that her house is clean. Well, there is nothing more valuable than spending some time playing with your children, even if you give them a hot dog for dinner. There are parents who do not have a second child because they do not want to traumatize the second and come for a consultation to find out what is the best age for their child to have a sibling.
Is overprotection the main error in education today?
Gunma University, in Japan, has a line of research very focused on overprotection and has very conclusive results: we tend to protect too much, to be helicopter parents. There are parents that when the child has a problem, before he asks for help, they have already gone to help him, and this is a cognitive association that causes anxiety in the children. Children who get more unsolicited attention from their parents tend to have anxiety about difficulties.
Talk about the three jobs of fathers. Which are?
The first job of parents is to give the child security: that they have food on the table, a roof over their heads, that if they fall we can give them a hug, that if they get hit at school we can solve it… The second is to validate emotions: if he falls and if he starts crying, we tell him “you’re scared” or if he’s jealous we say “what a roll with the little brother, right?”. The third job is to set limits and rules. This is the foundation.
And the obligations of children?
First play. Second, experience emotions: if you have a tantrum, great, that’s your job, because that’s how you’ll learn frustration and how to manage it. And the third job is to learn what they can do and what they can’t do, and this is very much related to limits.
Have you seen very lost families with those limits?
I have seen very surprising things: a family has come from Ciudad Real to Madrid with the child climbing on his mother’s legs in the car, because he did not want to go in the car seat. The parents did not set rules or limits so that the little one would not get frustrated; so that he did not learn that there are things that he cannot decide or control, because it is the adults who mark them. Children have to understand that there are things in which they do not have a say.
Let him decide too much, what are the consequences?
In the cases in which the child is in charge of deciding what to have for dinner, what we do at the weekend, or how we go in the car, that child is not playing, he is not having a good time, he has some responsibilities as an adult, because he is a bossy There are very serious cases of these that reach the age of eight with a very high level of anxiety because they have not downloaded, they have not played. They are children who send their parents and also their peers, who reject them…
The best thing is to spend time with your children and play with them, but we can’t always or feel like it…
There are moments for everything. It is one thing that it is important to play with them and enjoy it, and another thing is to turn yourself into an amusement park. I would not see well parents who never play with their children -there are-, but neither are they entertaining them all the time out of obligation and put the game before making dinner or other necessary things. The brain is very complex, and the most difficult thing is trying to keep your balance. Our job is to be normal mothers and fathers, which we balance, now we play with them for a while, now “play by yourself and if I get bored, then buy a donkeyâ€.
You have to be normal parents, he says…
That a child has normal parents is worth gold, that they are not obsessed with Baby Led Weaning, doing everything well… That is the best.
We are at the time of school enrollment. Is the center we choose decisive in the education of our children?
They ask me if I take my children to a Montessori center… Well, no. We take them to a normal public school next to our house, where there are children with disabilities, others who have arrived by boat… There is no better school than real life and the best subject is to treat everyone with respect. I don’t care if they learn Chinese or play the violin, because this can be learned, but they have to learn respect and diversity when they are little.
