When you are emotionally “tuned in” to your children you are able to read their emotional and behavioural cues and respond to them most appropriately. This is an essential part of parenting because children are learning to be social beings and learn most from the early intimate experiences in the family. Babies do not control their emotions but gradually learning to do so is a big part of growing up.
Unfortunately, we often handle emotions poorly in our culture. It has been felt in the past that people should keep emotions under control so we might say things that dismiss emotions e.g. “Don’t make a fuss”, “Be brave”, “Get over it!” or “What did you do?”. For parents, this may be partly because we do not have the time to really investigate or that we worry that the child will become too reliant on us. In fact, when emotions are recognised and the child given support to express them appropriately, they can usually start to think better about ways to deal with the issues themselves.
A young child needs to learn how to name their emotions. It helps if a parent can reflect how they might feel in the same situation – “that would make me feel angry/sad/happy/scared too”. You can first ask how they are feeling, then find out more about the situation.
Certainly, parents need to firmly limit destructive actions but they also need to acknowledge the emotion. For example: “I can see you are cross but hitting is not OK....” If the parent also handles their own emotions this way it provides an essential role model. It helps the child to learn to express themselves without hurting someone. Once they calm down they are more likely to work out a way to handle things productively.
Books as resources:
There are many books suitable for children of all ages about handling different emotions. They are often about difficult life events, like friendships, starting school, family separation, death or handling a fear. They usually follow a story about how the main character reacts to some kind of change – how they feel worried or upset, maybe react dramatically in a negative way, then the situation is resolved happily. Reading a story like this will gave the parent a chance to share their own feelings and enable a child to understand the options for action in the situations that may face them in real life.
The same thing can be done by telling stories about familiar people, like Mum or Dad or Grandma, and how they had to cope with a problem.
For more information about these ideas, see www.kidscount.com.au and look at other Parenting Articles on the Council website (see address at the bottom of this page).
There are also excellent parenting books -
A. Faber and E. Mazlish called “How to talk so kids will listen and listen so Kids will Talk” and “Siblings Without Rivalry”(1987).
John Gottman’s books “The Heart of Parenting” (1997) and “What am I feeling” (2004) are classic texts about emotional intelligence.
For a complete list of Regional Parenting Service articles go to the City of Greater Geelong website www.geelongaustralia.com.au/community/family/services/article/8cbc84b53070368.aspx