Helping parents manage small children’s big feelings
Often toddlers or young children can’t express how they’re feeling because they don’t have the words yet, which can lead to a meltdown. Parents are sometimes at a loss as to how to help ward those off feelings. Just how do you help your children deal with these big feelings?
Lisa Pinhorn of Empowered Parents in St. John’s, N.L., offers some sage advice.
Empowered Parents is designed to help cultivate calm, connected environments for children and families. They use neuro-informed developmental science and attachment-aligned practices to help families learn to thrive together.
When it comes to answering questions about big feelings, Pinhorn says it requires some understanding of brain development and the collective human experience connected to emotions.
“It’s important for parents first to understand that the very last thing we want to do is stop children from having emotional experiences,” said Pinhorn.
It’s an old-school approach to see a struggling or emotional child and simply want them to stop showing us their emotions, she says. Any strategy that expects children to stuff down or simply halt the way they are feeling should be avoided.
The same is true for any strategy that tells you to ignore or send children into time-outs, says Pinhorn. It might feel good at the moment, so parents get a false sense of success.
“But here is the real thing that happens: these strategies teach children that there is something wrong with how
they feel, plus they can feel alone and invisible,” said Pinhorn.
Research tells us the absence of emotional exploration can lead to a complicated relationship with basic emotions, she notes. This can then stay with us as baggage into adult relationships.
Through Empowered Parents, Pinhorn says they teach parents that we often expect children to be able to do things, like say how they are feeling, before they are developmentally able to do so. They also remind parents that often adults do not have the ability to put words to their emotions, and we should not expect children to be able to do this very complicated skill if we cannot do it ourselves.
BRAIN DEVELOPMENT
Another part of emotional regulation is brain development,
explains Pinhorn. Children’s brains are not fully developed until their late teens and early 20s. Therefore, she says, it is vital that we do not expect them to do something as complicated as authentic emotional regulation before they have the development to do so. Expecting a toddler to do so would be an unrealistic expectation, she says.
CREATING EMOTIONAL AWARENESS
Our culture needs to change how we label emotions, says Pinhorn, noting it is time to stop saying there are good emotions and bad emotions. These labels have done nothing to help us allow children to explore uncomfortable emotions along with joyous ones.
Pinhorn helps remind parents all emotions are part of
nd
the human experience, and we can’t just allow the ones that make us feel good to be present in our homes. The more time we spend in a relationship with all emotions, the more emotional awareness we create, she says.
RIDE AND GLIDE
Empowered Parents help parents learn a skill they call ride and glide. This is where we understand our children can struggle, and we assist them through the wave of challenging feelings.
Empowered Parents likes to teach families about the normality of emotions and the need to move away from classing them as negative or positive, Pinhorn says, adding they also want people to feel the full range of emotions: the beginning, middle and end of each wave.
It’s important to note, she says, that in spaces where kids feel safe, one tends to see a full rainbow of emotions, and these emotionally rich spaces are the goal in all relationships.
“Our culture has made some mental health mistakes," said Pinhorn, "and the biggest is confusing quiet as calm.”
Parents also falsely believe being happy all the time is a mental health goal, she says. When adults help children label emotions and feel the sensations connected to emotions, they support emotional regulation and emotional awareness.
This adult-led guidance will ultimately support wholebody mental health, she said.
DON’T WARD OFF EMOTIONS
Don’t ward off these emotional floods, as this goal will only lead to frustration, says Pinhorn. Instead, people have to see big emotions as opportunities for deeper learning and awareness for their children and themselves.
It can be very triggering for adults to see their children having emotional floods. But is a parent's role hold a calm space with them, to help them through the storms, not to force them to feel something different, said Pinhorn.
This generation of parents likely was not taught this skill themselves, so very often, parents are dealing with their own triggers at the same time as their little ones are dealing with theirs, says Pinhorn.
“Parents need to become the observers of their children’s emotions and not the absorbers — in other words, we want parents to become curious and not furious when their children are experiencing big emotions,” said Pinhorn.