Has it ever happened to you not to know how to respond to a child’s behaviour? Because they are having a huge tantrum to get something, or because they tell you that you don’t love them since you have just refused them something else. Or because the school year has started again, you are back at work, and your child announces that you are abandoning them just as you leave them at the school gate. How do you react?

One thing is certain: our little ones throw us all off balance, and we do our best with the people we are and the knowledge we have — or rather, the knowledge we believe we have. If there is one domain in which we are regularly led to revise our judgements, it is the raising of our children.

Some concepts help us precisely because they are simple and functional. This is the case with an elementary distinction: in communicating with a child, two very different registers can be identified.

Two registers of communication

The affective register is the first one a child needs. It forms their foundations, their base, the ground from which they will later be able to rise. It shows in every demonstration of affection and in caring, and it takes its full substance in the unconditional love a parent is able to give their child. It sounds obvious; it is not so simple, since the unconditional runs up against tiredness, irritation and whatever we ourselves received.

If the affective register represents the foundations, the educational register can be pictured as the construction of the building itself: the building of the person and of identity. What dominates in this register is the importance of the frame and of limits. They are what makes a child feel secure, and what later allows them to take their place in society at large — and that is where the whole difference between punishing and sanctioning is played out.

You cannot build on shaky foundations

Thanks to this metaphor, it is easy to understand that a house cannot be built if the foundations are shaky or unstructured. In other words: without the affective base, educational demands have nothing to rest on.

This opens onto fascinating debates about the support offered to young people in affective distress, particularly in the field of child protection, where an adolescent is sometimes expected to submit to a frame although their affective base has never been consolidated.

Four broad types of families

By crossing the two registers, this conceptualisation also makes it possible to distinguish four broad family profiles, depending on whether each register is strongly or weakly invested.

No family fits entirely into one box, and the cursor moves with the seasons of life. But asking which of the two registers is missing, here and now, remains one of the simplest and most useful questions we can ask ourselves when a child’s behaviour leaves us without an answer.