Helping Kids Work with Tough Emotions
One of the best ways to set your children up for resilience and good mental health is by helping them learn how to feel and experience a full range of emotions. Humans are hardwired from birth to experience a wide spectrum of feelings such as sadness, joy, anger, and fear. Some of those feelings are easier to experience than others, but it is important that children be taught—yes, taught—how to experience them all.
What do I mean when I say they must be taught how to feel and experience their emotions? As kids grow, they experience new emotions almost daily. All feelings are brand new for them, so they often have no idea what to do with them! The more difficult emotions such as sadness and fear can feel overwhelming for kids precisely because they have never experienced these “big” feelings, so the way parents describe and explain these big feelings has a long-lasting impact on children’s authentic experience of their emotional lives as well as their coping skills. Unfortunately, those of us in the US are living through a time when even normal, healthy emotions are labeled as pathological. Sadness is called “depression.” Normal anxiety is called “social anxiety,” and so on. This is particularly devastating for growing children and has an enormous impact on their relationships with themselves.
For example, if a child is sad and hears an adult say, “He seems depressed,” the child learns to identify sadness as wrong or pathological rather than as a normal human emotion that is a part of life to be experienced and worked through. This results in children distancing themselves from their “bad” emotions rather than integrating them, often leading to later mental health problems that result from an avoidance of one’s emotions. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy!
To help children really integrate a full and healthy spectrum of emotions and develop healthy coping skills and the ability to tolerate more difficult feelings, it is important to avoid using psychological language such as “depression” and “anxiety” to describe your child’s burgeoning emotional life. You want your child to be able to spontaneously feel, integrate, and learn to work through difficult emotions, not avoid them or hide from them! Avoidance of emotions is the primary cause of many mental health conditions.
When your child is sad or experiencing a difficult emotion, try instead to help him/her put words on it as verbalizing feelings is what helps us experience them and move through them. Finding words for tough feelings offers tremendous relief (and is why psychotherapy works). Nex time, try saying, “You seem tearful and sad today. What has you feeling so blue?” In this way, children learn what sadness is (remember, they do not yet know what these big feelings are), and they learn how to describe and talk through them rather than stuff feelings down. This ability to put words on tough feelings and be present to hard experiences is key to teaching them how to make it through the inevitable difficult moments in life. It helps build a solid foundation for them where big feelings do not have to be so overwhelming and hidden away only later to emerge in negative mental health symptoms because you have taught them how to cope. This ability to persevere during difficult times will create resilience and an ability to face life through the ups and the downs.
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Dr. J