Teaching Feelings

Teaching Feelings

How did you learn how to tie your shoes? Who taught you how to throw a baseball or ride a bike? How is it that you know the capital of Florida or your multiplication tables?

Well, the short answer is, someone taught you. As we grow up and learn new skills, those skills often become intuitive. We just know, well, what we know. You do not have to think about it, you just know it.

A good illustration of this is when you watch a new driver. The experienced driver just, drives. He can use one hand on the steering wheel and maintain a conversation with his passenger all while remaining in his lane and monitoring fellow motorists.

The new driver, on the other hand, must attend to every detail of the driving experience. The amount of pressure he puts on the gas and break pedals. The positioning of his hands as he turns the steering wheel. The proximity of other cars as they travel in the opposite direction.

For the new driver, this experience can be overwhelming, challenging, and at times, scary.

But let me ask you a different question. Who taught you how to handle your feelings? Who taught you how to differentiate anger from frustration, and frustration from fear? Who taught you that happiness is a good feeling that you want to experience all the time, while sadness is one that you want to bottle up and keep hidden away?

As parents and teachers, we tend to do a very good job of teaching what we loosely refer to as “skills.” We teach our children information about the world and how to do things. But do we do a very good job of teaching them how to experience the world or how to interpret their feelings?

Generally speaking, the answer is no; we do not do a very good job of teaching our children how to experience their feelings. In fact, we do a poor job of teaching them how to label their emotions, leaving them to make the connections on their own. Let me use an example to illustrate.

As a child, there are often times when we experience excitement. That mixture of emotions (joy and fear) and chemistry (adrenalin and cortisol) we feel when we enter a new situation or anticipated activity. When young children experience excitement, the feeling is somewhat difficult for them to explain. Depending on past experiences and exposures to things in life, they may recognize one part of the feeling (i.e., joy) but not the other (i.e., fear), though they struggle to find the words to articulate how they feel.

 

As parents, the responsibility falls on us to help our children identify and label their emotions. Though we tend to do a relatively poor job at it.

 

To stereotype a bit – though with some factual support behind it – mothers and fathers tend to manage this issue differently. Mothers tend to deal with emotions in one of two ways. Some mothers tend to tell their child how they are feeling. The child will say, “I feel sad.” and the mother will respond, “You’re not sad, you are just bored.” This tendency, though close to the overall goal, invalidates the child and can lead to mislabeling. After all, what if the child really is sad?

Other mothers will be too emotional. They will flood the child with emotional language that is too complicated and too difficult to understand. In this situation, the child quickly learns that it is best to just not say anything.

Fathers, on the other hand, tend to respond by squelching the conversation. They do not really want to deal with the emotions and feelings, so they avoid the conversation by either deflecting it to the mother or redirecting it to something else. Again, the child does not learn why they are feeling this way, how to interpret the feeling, or how to label the feeling for future reference.

Instead, parents should listen first. When you see your child experiencing a strong emotion, as them how it feels. See if they can explain it. Have them talk about how their body feels. For example, with excitement, her tummy may feel funny and she may be a little shaky. She may say that it is hard to think or that she is nervous about what could happen.

Sometimes you may need to give them the words. For example, you may need to ask, “Can you feel it in your tummy?” or “You look happy, does this feeling make you feel good?” or “Have you felt like this before? Is this how it felt before you went to Disney for the first time last summer?” By asking them questions – as opposed to telling them how they feel – you are helping them explore it.

Once you have an idea as to how they feel about it, next you want to validate and relate. “I’ve felt like that before, too! It is such a weird feeling, isn’t it? When I feel that way, I can feel it in my chest, because my heart starts beating really fast!” and then, in a whisper that makes it seem special, you might say, “I really like this feeling, what about you?”

Obviously, that is the approach to take with relatively positive feelings, such as excitement. But we must do the same thing with negative emotions. How many times have you uttered the words, “Don’t be sad.” to your child? Why do we do that? Why do we tell them not to be sad? Sad is a perfectly appropriate response to many situations in life. Just as they need to appropriately identify and label positive emotions, they should do the same for “negative” behaviors [I used quotes there because there are no truly negative emotions when we experience them at appropriate times.].

When the family pet dies, your child should cry. He/She should be sad. And you should help them understand that. Talk to him/her about it. Tell him/her that you are sad, too. But then turn it in to a learning experience. Talk about the good times the family had with the pet, and use it as a time to reflect positively on the past, while looking forward to the future.

When your child is about to go on stage for the first time as an eight year old in the school play, he/she should be anxious. And, again, you should help him/her understand that feeling, process it, and experience it in a “positive” way. As many of you have likely seen, when we do not do so, that play may be the first and last time he/she is ever on stage. If the child does not process the emotions in a healthy way, it will be a feeling that they seek to avoid for the rest of his/her life.

These issues reemerge, somewhat, in adolescence. As the chemical surge of puberty hits, teens begin experiencing a mixture and intensity of emotion that they have never felt before. Again, as parents, we need to help them understand these feelings. If you set the stage for good emotional communication when your child was younger, you will likely have fewer problems helping your child adjust to puberty.

On the other hand, if you did not set the stage for good communication, this will be a very difficult time. In such a case, you may need to seek the support of a mental health professional. This is not because your teen is mentally ill; rather, he/she needs to talk with someone trained to understand emotions and can communicate with them in a way you cannot.

So the bottom line is simple, managing emotions is just as much a learned skill as throwing a baseball or doing a multiplication problem. And, as always, we are our child’s first teacher. Teach them now, so they will manage themselves better in the future.