Gone are the days of telling our children to stop crying, hold in their tears, or just smile. I find that many of us remember this parenting approach from when we were kids, and are now seeking ways to better support our own children as they navigate the world. Often we understand the importance of emotional health, but are not always clear about how to actually help children feel their emotions. The following list can be a useful guide.
1) Learn to be a loving parent to yourself; then you can best be a loving parent to your child. Because we live in a culture that does not honour emotion, feeling is a skill that needs to be learned. The more we practice feeling our own emotions, the more we can support children when they need us. The more we express a range of feelings in front of them, the more they will feel comfortable expressing a range of feelings in front of us.
2) While supporting your child, imagine that the emotion they are feeling is like a wave that comes in, peaks, and then passes. Often, if you stay with your child and let them freely express emotions like sadness, anger, or fear then over time you will notice a little sigh. Often their sigh is an indication that the peak of the emotion has dissipated.
3) Help your child connect with their body, where the emotion resides. It can help to place your hand over their heart, let them know that you are here for them, and ask curious questions about what they are feeling, where they feel it in their body, and if it reminds them of a colour or image. You can also help encourage them to express their emotion through painting, working with clay, writing words, bouncing a basketball, throwing stuffed animals around the room, or anything else that might help express the emotion through action.
4) Know that children often do not come to us with words when they are upset about something, but rather show their upset through behaviour. If your child seems to be acting in a wild, very quiet, obsessive, combative, or unusual manner then their behaviour is often telling us that there is a deeper emotion inside of them that needs to be felt. As their caregiver, we can help steer them away from the distracting behaviour, and towards their body where the emotion resides.
5) Acknowledge your own discomfort with painful emotions. When children come to us with a strong emotion, it can be common to want them to just be quiet, not because we don’t want to support them, but because their pain triggers old pain in us that we don’t want to feel. When your child is upset, take a deep breath, recognize the feelings in you that may be triggered by your child’s emotion, tell those feelings that you will attend to them later, and then be with your child as they feel their feeling.
Find a free worksheet on how on emotional health: here
The sun, cloud, and rainbow metaphors that make up the story in my children’s book The Girl and the Sun were molded piece by piece from my own pain and subsequent drive to overcome it. I use these metaphors every day to parent myself and my children. They are not my own ideas. They come from many teachers along the way: Anita Johnston, Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, Jeff Foster, Tara Brach, Marianne Williamson, and many counselors and colleagues who guided me along my journey. Through The Girl and The Sun I can now share them with the world. Please visit www.ashleyandthesun.com/free-handouts-parents-and-teachers for free handouts and www.ashleyandthesun.com for a thorough explanation of the sun, cloud and rainbow metaphors.