EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE

Teaching your child to recognise his or her emotions and accepting your child’s emotions will lead to fewer tantrums and help your child to learn valuable emotional regulation skills.

Parenting practices that do not help foster emotional regulation are:

1. Dismissive - this happens when parents trivialize or ignore the child’s negative emotions. This might be because parents don’t know what to do or are concerned that paying attention to the child’s negative emotions might reinforce the emotion.
2. Disapproving - this happens when parents criticize or punish children for showing negative emotions. This might be because parents want their children to only feel positive feelings, or to learn “good values”.
3. Unstructured - this happens when parents accept and empathize their child’s emotions but don’t offer guidance on how to regular or set limits on the child’s behaviour.

So what can you do instead?

1. Learn to be aware of your child’s emotions

Use your own intuition and sensitivities to be attune to your child’s emotions. Take note when your child is not behaving as normal, or something just feels “off”. Sometimes children express their feelings physically too such as having having headaches, stomach aches, or complaining of nightmares.

2. Listen empathically

Children are not born with the capacity to articulate what they feel and why. Listen patient and put yourself in your child’s shoes. This does not mean putting your adult self in the situation and telling your child what your child should feel if they were you. Imagine you were your child facing the situation - how would you feel?

Don’t rush in with answers or advice but empathize with the situation by trying to understand more. Try to minimize questioning because questions can be scary for your child or make your child feel like they have done something wrong. You can reflect what you notice or what you hear. You might have to repeat your reflection several times before your child responds, or you can just sit with your child after reflecting and give them the space and time to respond when they are ready. Don’t force them to tell you more than they want, or are ready to.

Your main goal here is to create a safe space for your child to tell you their story and for you to understand without judgement.

3. Help your child understand the emotion

As you listen, reflect what you hear and link the situation or thought up with the emotion. For instance, “You feel angry because Jon took your pencil”. “You feel sad that you don’t have a pencil now”.

Help your child to understand what the emotion is (explicitly labeling) and what the emotion is about. You can check with your child whether the label fits such as “Do you feel sad?”. If they say no, accept their response and encourage them to tell you what it feels like instead. You can use imagery, or toys, or drawings to help you and your child identify the emotion.

Remember not to minimize or dismiss the emotion like “It’s silly to be sad over that. I’ll just buy you another pencil!”

Your main goal here is to help your child understand what they are feeling by labeling, and then normalize bad feelings as something that everyone experiences.

4. Problem-solving and limit settings

Sometimes we jump to this stage without going through stages 1 to 3. We want to solve problems quickly! And this makes sense because seeing a child in distress is not easy for the parents, or taking time to sooth a child is not easy for the busy parent.

Feeling and accepting an emotion does not mean acting it out. There are appropriate limits to how an emotion is to be expressed.

For instance:

“No wonder you feel mad that your sister took your toy. It is OK to feel angry but it is not OK to hit her. What can you do instead to show that you are upset at her?”

Or

“Can you think of a different way to deal with your anger?”

Your main goal here is to accept all feelings, but set limits on behaviours.

What are acceptable behaviours?

Dr. Ginott talked about a system of rules based on “zones of behaviour”. You can also use the traffic light analogy to think about which behaviours are acceptable and which behaviours are not.

"Go straight" Green zone:

These are behaviours that are desirable and encouraged. Remember to give positive feedback and encouragement to reinforce the positive behaviours.

Yellow zone:

These are misbehaviours that are tolerated but you are giving your child some leeway because your child is a “beginner” or because your child is going through a tough time.

"Beginner's" yellow zone: For instance, a 10 year old has the capacity to sit still or to occupy themselves for 2 hours, but a 4 year old may have difficulties doing so.

"Tough time" yellow zone: Your child is feeling down because her best friend changed schools. She ends up snapping at you or making a rude comment. You can let your child know that this is not acceptable behaviour but you overlook it this time because of exceptional circumstances.

"No way" Red zone:

These are behaviours that are not tolerated no matter what because they are dangerous to your child or others, or the behaviours are illegal, socially unacceptable, or immoral. Make sure you set the consequences for breaking the rules.

Consequences is not the same as punishment. Effective consequences have to be fair, consistent and given closely to the misbehaviour. For instance, an ineffective consequence to not eating dinner would be: “You won’t go to your cousin’s house next week”. It is too far in time from the actual misbehavior and it is disproportionate to the misbehaviour. 

Example of consequences would be time-outs, ignoring behaviours (not emotions), or delay or removal of a privilege.

Setting limits and consequences is part of teaching your child to problem solve.

1. Identify the goals. What are you trying to problem solve? What should a good solution resolve?
2. Brainstorm and think of possible solutions together with your child. Encourage your child to come up with a list without ruling out anything until the list is done.
3. Decide together which suggestions you like, which ones are practical and come up with a mutually agreeable solution. Talk through each suggestion without putting down any of them.
4. Follow-through on what you both have decided upon. You might find out that the solution you decided on together does not work after trying it out. Continue the brainstorming process by testing and trying out different solutions until you find out what works for you and your child.
   

A quick note on gender stereotypes!

“Boys don’t cry” does not mean boys do not or should not have feelings. This saying actually encourages emotional suppression and makes normal healthy human emotions seem weird or wrong. Stigmatizing emotions for men thwarts their emotional growth and also makes it more difficult for them to seek help when they need help. While boys and men may take different approaches to dealing with their emotions compared to women, it is helpful for everyone to be able to identify their emotions, respond to them and seek the help and support they need.

A useful book to read to learn more about positive parenting practices is “How to talk so kids will listen” by Faber & Mazlish. This book is based on the work of Dr. Haim Ginott, a child psychologist who pioneered positive emotional parenting practices.