Mental Health Monday - Tune In to Your Kids' Feelings

Emotions are the heart of the human experience. Day in and day out, our feelings wash over us naturally, like waves on a beach. What does not come as naturally for many people is how to manage uncomfortable emotions like sadness, frustration, and anger. Childhood is primetime for learning to handle these feelings appropriately, and tuning in to kids’ emotions is one of a parent’s most important jobs.

As children grow and their vocabularies expand, they gain the ability to speak about their feelings and the feelings of others, but they need parents’ help to manage emotions. Experts have distinguished between emotion-coaching and emotion-dismissing parents. An emotion-coaching parent monitors a child’s feelings, helps the child label his or her feelings, and sees negative emotions as opportunities for teaching children by coaching them how to deal effectively with strong feelings.

In contrast, emotion-dismissing parents view their role as to deny, ignore, or change negative emotions. It’s hard to see our children upset and hurting, and many parents jump to helping kids feel better as soon as possible. However, an emotion-coaching mom or dad recognizes the value in helping their child process the feeling as they console—for example, “I see you’re sad your ice cream fell to the floor; that would make me sad, too” or “I can tell you’re mad your brother took your toy. Let’s ask him to give it back.”

Helping kids tune into their feelings and the feelings of others is an incredibly important part of parenting, the result of which could be a generation that grows up with strong emotional intelligence and appreciation for the power of feelings.