What to do when you aren’t sure what your child is feeling…

Understanding emotions and how your body

responds to them takes practice and patience.

Understanding the emotions of your child takes the

same level of practice and patience.

Not all of us grew up in homes where we were able

to share our feelings in an emotionally safe family.

You may have come from a family that was

uncomfortable with sharing emotions. Maybe they

were even so uncomfortable that they would do

anything including showing aggression to stop it.

That discomfort is a fear response and it creates a lack of emotional safety

inside a family. You may have come from a family where sharing positive feelings

was okay but negative feelings like anger and sadness were repressed in the

same manner. Again, this is a fear response around negative emotions and

another emotionally unsafe place for our negative emotions.

Feelings are just that, feelings. They can convey a need for connection or a need

for reflection. Being a family that is emotionally safe is the key to helping your

child with feelings, especially when they are struggling to figure out what

they are.

Here are a few things you can do to help your child with feelings:

a. Check in with yourself first to understand what you feel when your child has a

particular feeling (for this example we will use irritable). What feelings do you

need to check at the door before caring for your child? Is your plan to be a

"reactive chaos monster" or a "calm center of safety" for emotions? What can you

do in the moment to be that calm center of safety?

b. Let your child know that you see there is something going on and you are

here to help. Your child might not fully understand the emotion they are

experiencing, so let them know that emotions or feelings are difficult to

understand and might even be confusing. No probing needed, just sit with the

emotion, and attend to it as the child leads. Be empathic and actively listen with

compassion.

c. If the child is still struggling to share or if it is a BIG problem (one where

adults need to step in), check in with teachers or staff to see if anything

happened during their day that might have caused this issue. Teachers have a

vested interest in seeing your child succeed and grow. Work together to see if

there was something that happened or if something needs to change in the

classroom that would improve your child's wellbeing.

d. Spend some time engaged with your child in play afterwards. Let the child

lead the activity and make it is positive experience. This calms the fear response

and transitions the body and brain back into a regulated state.

e. Attend to your emotions. Working with children can bring up the ways we

didn't have our needs met as children and we may have some unresolved hurt to

deal with. Know that the process of changing the way you were parented to the

way you want to parent your children has a name ... transitional character. You are

changing not just the childhood of your child,

but the future generations of your family. It is

a bold and courageous change.

f. Know that parenting isn't easy and is a work

in progress. We as humans do fail often and

when that happens, reflect, apologize, repair the

relationship, and make a plan that will prevent

further injury.