Be Smart With Your Children’s Feelings
By Mark Brandenburg
All of you have heard about how
important it is to "honor your children's feelings."
While this seems like a worthy endeavor, it's a fairly vague notion
and can easily be dismissed, especially when your child is crying
or whining.
But If we look at the benefits
of paying close attention to your children's feelings, it may
become an idea that has a great deal of merit.
Raising children with emotional
intelligence
We'd all like to raise kids who are well-adjusted, happy, and
successful. How can we improve our chances of raising kids who
have these qualities?
One place to start is to acknowledge
the growing body of evidence which indicates that a person's "emotional
intelligence" is of great importance. It's becoming clear
that having a high emotional intelligence is a great predictor
of job success as well as personal success.
Emotional intelligence measures
qualities like awareness of your own feelings, the ability to
empathize with other people, listening skills, etc. Once we recognize
the importance of these qualities, we can ask how parents can
help to foster these qualities in their children.
Stop trying to mold and
shape
The first step in fostering emotional intelligence in your children
is to make a fundamental shift in your view of parenting. Many
parents see their role as someone who responds to their children's
bad behavior and attempts to "mold" them according to
certain ideals. Not only can this be ineffective, it can actually
increase the "bad" behavior by giving it extra attention.
A different way of parenting is
to commit yourself to helping your children become more connected
to their own emotions and to their families. It recognizes that
your children will be having intense emotional experiences almost
every day of their life. It calls for you to assist your kids
in learning how to manage these powerful emotions and to model
this behavior yourself.
It begins in your home every day.
It begins when you stop dismissing your kids' feelings by saying
things like, "Come on, it's ok, don't cry," or "You
should want to go to your piano lesson."
It's very difficult to see your
kids being sad or angry. But when you deny the validity of their
feelings, you further disconnect your kids from being able to
identify and deal with those feelings. In other words, you lower
their emotional intelligence.
Foster emotional intelligence
To raise the emotional intelligence of your kids, there are a
number of things you can do.
Start making it a habit to identify your own feelings as well
as the feelings of others. Try not to label people. Instead
of saying, "He was a real jerk," you could say, "He
seemed very angry."
Stop trying to cheer up your kids when they're upset. They need
to know their feelings are being acknowledged and need to know
you're there to listen and understand.
Do all that you can to keep your own emotional life balanced
so that you can be there for your kids. If you're overwhelmed
or off balance, you cannot be a source of emotional support
for your child.
Be a great listener. When your child has something to say, try
to drop what you're doing and focus completely on what they're
saying. Skillful reflection back of what they've said to you
will show them they've been heard; this is a great help to kids
wrestling with intense feelings.
Help your kids identify what they're feeling by being specific
with your questions. It's often helpful to ask something like,
"Are you feeling sad?" or "Are you feeling angry?"
Pay attention to your children's response to your questions
or comments about their feelings. Your goal is to help your
child process their feelings and to work through them, not to
fix anything or to tell them if they got it "right."
When they’re at their
worst
One of the most difficult things about being a parent is being
with children when they aren't at their best. Whining and crying
from children seems to bring out the worst in most parents.
The great irony of this is that
the more parents encourage their kids to "get over"
whatever emotional difficulties they're having at the time, the
more of these emotional difficulties will crop up. Kids who don't
feel "heard" emotionally tend to either shut down or
to get louder. Neither of these seems like a very good choice.
Our kids would live in a happier,
healthier world if they were raised in an environment in which
their feelings were honored. When parents learn the secrets of
creating that environment, they'll be an important part of that
process.
© Mark Brandenburg
Mark Brandenburg, MA, CPCC, CSC,
is an author, speaker and certified relationship coach. He has
worked with individuals, teams and families to improve their lives
for more than 20 years.
He is the author of a number of books for men, including 25
Secrets of Emotionally Intelligent Fathers. Mark
coaches parents from around the country through weekly telephone
coaching sessions on balancing their lives and improving their
parenting. He runs workshops and gives presentations for fathers
and for parents that are enthusiastically received, as well as
teleclasses for parents at MarkBrandenburg.com.
