Raising Emotionally Healthy Children
One definition of good mental health is the ability to tolerate the full range of one’s emotions. Many people have trouble tolerating their emotions—especially negative emotions. This is why our society has issues with addictions and other behaviors (like overeating or compulsive shopping) that help one avoid negative emotions. Helping your children identify and tolerate their emotions is the key to raising emotionally healthy children.
Name and Identify Emotions
Did you know that psychologists have identified about 100 emotions? Yet, studies show that the average person can only name three emotions. We are not born with the ability to name and identify the emotions that we experience. As with all of life, we must be taught the names of emotions and how to tell which emotion is which.
As a parent, you are the primary source for teaching your children about emotions. It is never too early to begin to help your child identify feelings. When your children are very young, name the emotion you believe they are experiencing based on the situation. If a two-year-old is having a temper tantrum, you can say, “You are angry because I said no,” or “You are disappointed because we can’t go to the park.” As your children age, continue to talk with them about the emotions they are experiencing.
You can also model for your children how to talk about emotions. You can say, “I’m really discouraged because our new plan to get to bed on time is not working.” This helps children understand emotions in context.
In naming and identifying emotions for yourself and your children, you are giving your children the building blocks for emotional health. You will avoid having a child like the twelve-year-old boy I knew who told his parents that he learned more from the Disney Pixar movie Inside Out than they have ever taught him. A great resource for helping you name and identify emotions is the Emotion Wheel. A copy of this can be found here.
Listen—Really Listen—to Your Children
“Children should be seen and not heard.” I cringe when I hear this adage. I believe it did much damage to young children. The longing of every heart is to be seen and heard.
Most parents today no longer hold to children being seen and not heard. Yet, we still struggle with hearing our children in the true sense of the word. When we truly hear someone else, we listen to their perspective and affirm their experience.
As parents, we can get tripped up in really hearing our children. We love our children and do not want to see them hurting or suffering. We desire to make things better for them. As a result, we often listen to our child and then quickly jump to soothing or trying to make the child feel better. In doing this, we neglect to affirm the child’s feelings and perspective.
As a parent, I have often been guilty of this myself. If my son’s feelings were hurt by a playmate, I might have listened, but then jumped quickly to distracting my son into a fun activity to help him feel better. When my daughter was angry, I might have acknowledged her anger, but quickly gave her ideas of what to do to get rid of her anger rather than exploring more the underlying feelings that were driving her anger.
Children who do not have their feelings heard and affirmed by caregivers often grow into adults who either stuff their feelings or question their feelings. Those who question often ask themselves, “Should I feel this way?” Instead of accepting their feelings, they wonder whether their feelings are valid or appropriate.
The best advice I can give parents is to not rush to try to make things better for your children when they are having negative feelings. This is difficult. We have trouble sitting with our own negative emotions. Therefore, we are quick to soothe our own feelings of rejection, embarrassment, boredom, and sadness through distraction such as eating or entertainment. Because we have trouble enduring our own negative emotions, it is difficult for us to endure the negative emotions of those we love.
Listening, really listening, to your children allows your children to sit with their emotions and not soothe them or push them aside. This helps your child develop distress tolerance. Distress tolerance is necessary for resilience. Many people who struggle with mental health issues never developed distress tolerance skills as children and must learn them as adults.
Conclusion
To truly see and hear your children. Listen to their expression of their feelings. Give them words for their feelings if they do not have them. Let them know that the feeling they are experiencing is appropriate for the situation. Remember to keep the child’s perspective in mind. Not getting an ice cream cone when you are three years old is a big deal. Falling and scraping your knee when you are five years old is very painful. Don’t rush to make everything better or shut down your children’s feelings. Show empathy to your children. In this way, you will raise emotionally healthy children.
About Sarah Bolme
Sarah is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with 30 years of experience providing mental health counseling to children, youth, and adults. She resides in North Carolina with her husband, and is the proud parent of two adult children.