It can be difficult as a parent to know how to respond to your children’s expression of emotions, big or small. You may be comfortable responding to some emotions, like sadness or fear, but are at a loss when facing others, such as anger—especially when that emotion is directed at you!
Sam is playing with their blocks, building a very detailed creation when it collapses. They respond by screaming and throwing blocks around the room. Parent notices and asks, “Sam, what’s going on?” Sam exclaims they hate these blocks, blocks are stupid, they want to throw them away. “Sam, don’t talk like that, they’re only blocks; it’s no big deal. Just take a break and then try again.” But Sam replies with, “No, I hate blocks and I hate you!” before throwing another block and slamming their bedroom door.
Parents often come to me asking how to understand and support their children through big emotions. As a mother of two—with one child still a preteen—I am very familiar with these situations, whether it’s blocks, drawings, “terrible” food, losing in a game or sport, or any of dozens of other challenging moments. How do we support our children in processing their emotions in these moments, without feeling emotionally overwhelmed ourselves? How do we let them know that we understand and “get” why they’re feeling this way, even when a behaviour is not acceptable?
The answer is in learning to recognize the emotion behind the behaviour, as the behaviour is a reaction to their emotional response. By responding first to their emotions before we tend to the behaviour, we support our children’s emotional development by teaching them how to understand and accept their emotions. This then leads to building confidence in their ability to process emotions in the future as well as developing their skills in identifying, tolerating, and validating their own emotions.
All of this starts with us, as parents, coaching our children through these moments of big emotions so they learn to internalize these skills for themselves.
Recognizing the Emotion Behind Behaviour
The first step in doing this effectively is to recognize that both you and your child will bring your own inner world experiences to the moment—connecting this experience to other experiences from your worlds. In the example above, both Sam and Parent are getting caught up in their internal meanings, which adds to their emotional distress.
It’s not really about the blocks for Sam. They’re worried that they can never get it right, just like they can’t run fast enough in tag at school to avoid getting caught. They’re thinking, “I need to get this right otherwise I am always a failure.” Meanwhile, Parent is worrying they don’t have the skill to interrupt a tantrum (“I don’t have time for a tantrum”), nor support their child during a frustrating experience (“Isn’t playing with blocks supposed to be fun!?”)
As Parent and Sam interact, these worries, unknown to each other, amplify the misunderstanding until Sam is not only worried they’re a failure, but believes that Parent is disappointed and angry at them for being a failure! Parent is feeling like they’re no good at parenting, unable to properly support their child to be strong and resilient—essentially feeling like a failure themselves!
Coaching Through Big Emotions
(using Emotion Coaching, an Emotion-Focused Family Therapy strategy)
As parents, we know all too well that being able to manage our emotions is important. To feel emotionally balanced, we want to feel like we can manage and regulate our emotions when they arise rather than our emotions having control over us. So how do we teach our children how to regulate their own emotions, be they sad, mad, or even happy or excited?
First, we need to slow the process down rather than quickly try to step in and “fix it.” I know, I know, this is the hard part—but I assure you, it will be worth it.
Step 1: Check Yourself
Am I calm? Do I need to take a few breaths before responding to my child? Can I convey kindness and understanding based on how I’m feeling right now?
Step 2: Notice and Acknowledge
Notice what’s happening and slow things down by first acknowledging how your child is feeling and naming the emotion. Anger is often easy to identify, particularly as in the example provided above when a child is throwing things around! Other emotions may be more difficult to identify, so in those cases, it can help to be tentative with your approach. Try saying, “It seems like you’re sad…” or “I wonder if you’re feeling afraid…”
Step 3: Validate the Emotion
This is the most important part. By validating the emotion, you do not have to agree with your child’s emotional reaction in this situation, but you are connecting with your child by showing that you understand why your child is experiencing this emotion at this moment. In other words, you want your child to feel that “My parent gets me.”
This can be particularly helpful to remember with young children who have big reactions to what we feel are small issues. We know they’ll get over having their sandwich cut into squares instead of triangles, for example, but to children that have little control over their day-to-day movements, it may be the biggest deal in a given moment.
You want to voice reasons why your child is experiencing the emotion they’re feeling (based on what you know about them and the situation) by using “because” instead of “but”—“I understand why you’re angry/sad that I cut your sandwich into squares because you just learned to draw triangles and they are your favourite shape.” Keep in mind that you may need to repeat it and have three to four “becauses” to help connect your child to their experience.
Validation also helps your child connect their emotions with the reason for their emotional experience so that they are more in touch and accepting of their emotional experiences over time. It shows your child it’s okay to experience this emotion in this given moment, even if others may not have this same emotional response.
Step 4: Wait and Meet the Emotional Need
Often the hardest step to do, but it’s important not to rush into problem-solving. Give your child space to feel and be in their emotion; to absorb what you’ve said during Step 3, “Validate the Emotion.” Waiting gives your child space to take it all in and regulate. Once regulated, they can be in a more rational frame of mind to decide what to do next (problem-solve).
You can also meet the emotional need at this stage keeping in mind that every emotion has a corresponding need. For example, sadness needs comfort; anger needs space or boundaries; fear needs reassurance.
Step 5: Problem Solve (or Redirect, if Needed)
Once your child is regulated, they will be better able to engage their rational brain and problem-solve or repair the situation for themselves. Give your child the space and opportunity to come up with their own solution, and by doing this you are also empowering them to build skills in problem-solving—sometimes coming up with solutions you never thought of!
Depending on the age of the child, you may need to help in this area and give them some ideas to start finding a solution, or you may need to redirect your child if they are younger and need a change of environment before being able to access problem-solving. By redirecting, I mean leading them to another space away from the challenging stimulus to maybe engage with another toy or sit and read with them for a few minutes to disconnect from the situation while processing the emotion.
This may also involve letting your child know it’s not okay to throw blocks when they are angry and giving them another option of what to do instead. (This is important as we parents are often able to tell our children what not to do, but don’t always give them an alternative!) This is the time to discuss the behaviour, once their emotions have been regulated as this is when your child will be more able to take this information in and apply it to a future situation.
If you can learn to implement these steps when your children are expressing big emotions, over time, their emotional responses will become more manageable both for you and them. By experiencing validation from a parent consistently and over time, your child will develop a capacity to tolerate and manage their own emotions rather than acting out or developing mental health symptoms.
Effective Validation of Emotions with Children
So let’s go back to Sam and their parent, this time with the tools we’ve discussed, and see how this situation plays out:
Sam is playing with their blocks, building a creation that collapses. Sam responds with screaming and throwing the blocks around the room.
Parent notices and takes a breath (Step 1, Check Yourself), before moving close to Sam and saying with a soft voice, “Sam, I see that you are so angry as your block creation collapsed.” (Step 2, Notice and Acknowledge)
Sam yells, “YES, I hate blocks, I want to throw the blocks away, this is stupid.”
Parent replies again with a soft voice, “You’re angry because you worked so hard on that creation and now it’s fallen apart and you feel like you can’t do it again.” (Step 3, Validate the Emotion)
“Yes,” Sam replies, “and I hate these blocks! They don’t work the way I want them to and I can’t get it right!”
Parent responds, “Yes, it’s so frustrating when you can’t get it right and you wish it would work the way you want it to work.” (repeating Step 3, Validate the Emotion)
“Yeah,” Sam replies and looks down at the ground.
Parent responds, “Yes, and then you just want to get rid of the blocks as you’ve worked so hard and you don’t know if you can do it again.” (continuing to reinforce with Step 3, Validate the Emotion)
Parent moves closer to Sam and sits near them. (Step 4, Wait and Meet Emotional Need)
“Yeah,” Sam responds and starts to gather up the blocks. “I’m going to try something else now, I want to build a skyscraper and see how high I can build it.” (Step 5, Problem Solve)
Parent, “Oh, that sounds like fun! I’m going to watch you for a bit and see how high it gets.”
And there you have it—Sam is able to process through their emotional state with support from their parent. In helping Sam understand why they are having the emotional response they are having, Sam feels heard and understood and was able to process and regulate their emotion to a place of trying again. Sam learned to trust that in healthy relationships, it’s okay to reach out for emotional support rather than bottle up or ignore emotions. There’s space to share your emotions with another person and they won’t dismiss or get overwhelmed by your emotions, or make you feel like you are “too much.”
With this strategy, our role as parents is to help our children regulate their emotions through validation, and not to rush to fix or problem-solve. I know this can be difficult to do, especially when you can see the solution yourself and it’s so easy to just give this to our child. What’s important here is to remember that you are trying to support your child’s emotional development, their ability to identify, understand, and tolerate emotions and to have compassion for themselves during their emotional experiences.
The strategies presented above are drawn from the Emotion-Focused Family Therapy model, created by Dr. Adele Lafrance, Dr. Joanne Dolhanty, and Dr. Les Greenberg, which helps build greater connections with family relationships. If you’d like some individual assistance in implementing new parenting strategies with your child, we at Transforming Emotions can be your support and guide. Book a free consultation with me or one of our other therapists to discuss your parenting goals.
