A reader asks:
I struggle to maintain a healthy relationship with my emotions—in part, I think, because I didn’t have very good models for this when I was a child. Now I have two young children of my own and want to create a better emotional environment for them. How can I help my children to become emotionally confident and resilient?
There are a lot of factors that go into this—many of which, like their genetics and basic personality structure, you can’t control—so I don’t want to give the impression that if you just do these things, you’ll be guaranteed children who are highly self-aware and emotionally confident.
That said, I do have a few simple, practical suggestions…
1. Reflective Listening
Reflective listening means that, especially when your child is upset, you listen carefully and occasionally reflect back what you think they’re feeling or experiencing.
For example, if one of them is upset because their brother took a toy from them, you might say: It seems like you’re pretty angry right now.
What you’re doing here is implicitly validating their emotion—communicating to them that it’s okay to feel that way even if it doesn’t feel good.
The more you can show them how to do this, the better they will be at validating their emotions themselves. And the ability to acknowledge and validate difficult emotions (instead of trying to avoid them) is the hallmark of emotional maturity and key to emotional resilience.
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2. Verbalize Your Own Emotions
Most parents avoid talking about the difficult emotions they experience in front of their children.
Unfortunately, this can make it seem to kids as though it’s not okay to have difficult emotions, because from their perspective, it looks like the adults in their life never do!
On the other hand, if you can simply verbalize how you’re feeling from time to time—I feel sad right now. or I’m feeling pretty frustrated.—you model for your children that it’s okay to have difficult emotions and to talk about them.
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3. Model Constructive Self-Talk
How we feel emotionally is the result of how we think. Which means if you’re thinking is overly-negative, extreme, dysregulated, or otherwise unhelpful, your emotions will follow suit.
You can help your children to better regulate their emotions by modeling constructive, realistic self-talk.
For example: Instead of Ugh… We’re never going to make the game on time. try I’m worried about being late but even if we’re a little bit late it’ll be okay.
You’d be surprised how much of your overly-negative or unhelpful self-talk gets verbalized and then absorbed by your kids. Try to be more mindful of this.
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But remember…
You don’t have to do these all the time! I personally aspire to do all these but probably fail to more often than not. So, even if you do one or two of them every once in a while, that’s still a powerful learning experience for your kids.
Next Steps
Here are a few resources that might be helpful:
- If you want to learn more about emotional resilience, you might be interested in Mood Mastery, a 4-week emotional resilience masterclass I teach a couple times per year.
- A Brief Guide to Emotional Intelligence
- How to Be More Emotionally Stable