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How to Help your Child Deal with Big Feelings

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Children often use behavior to communicate how they are feeling, but wouldn’t it be so much better if they would use their words instead, and just talk about how they feel?

But getting your child to talk about how they feel is not always easy, let’s face it, some adults find this difficult. Recognising the emotions you are feeling, being able to name them and talk about them, and know how to handle the difficult feelings in a helpful way, is an important skill to learn.

Help Your Child with Big Feelings

Having this sort of emotional literacy can contribute to your child’s overall mental health and emotional wellbeing.

But where do you start?

How to Help Your Child With Big Feelings

There are lots you can do to encourage ‘feelings’ talk, here are a few simple ideas:

  1. Get into the habit of acknowledging your child’s emotions at the moment. Make sure you include pleasant emotions as well as the more difficult ones.
    • ‘I can see you are excited about the school trip today, what are you looking forward to most?’
    • ‘I guess it must feel frustrating when you have to stop doing something fun because it’s bedtime.’
    • ‘Are you feeling apprehensive about your test tomorrow?’
  2. Use as many emotion words as you can, this will help add to your child’s vocabulary as well as teaching them the words for the emotions they are feeling.
  3. Talk about your feelings
  4. Use books / poems /stories

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What’s the best way to teach someone?

Show them.

You are an important role model for your child if they see you doing something they are likely to do it too. Let your child see you talking about how you feel about things. Keep it age appropriate of course, and again include nice and not so nice feelings.

‘I’m feeling really nervous about my job interview tomorrow.’

‘I just saw someone dumping a load of rubbish on the side of the road, it made me feel quite angry.’

‘I love sitting in the garden when the sun is out. That is when I feel at my most relaxed.’

When I work with children I often use poems as a tool, here’s one I find useful:

FEELINGS

What makes you feel happy?

What makes you feel sad?

What makes you giggle?

What makes you mad?

Is it OK to feel this way,

What do you do when you’re feeling blue?

Do you shout and stamp?

Or run and hide?

What can you do when you’re mixed up inside?

Try this approach: I read this first and then we answer the questions together. I will talk about my answers first, I find this technique useful as children can sometimes be reluctant to talk about how they feel if the focus is all on them, it’s less uncomfortable if someone else is doing it too!

Here’s a poem about a feeling that we all experience sometimes.

ANGRY

My sister and my brother were fighting on the floor,

She wacked him with a cushion,

‘Help!’ he cried ‘No more.’

She wacked him with another,

This time round the head.

‘Right that’s it I’m getting you’

My little brother said.

‘You’ve made VERY ANGRY

I’ll get my own back soon.

And up he got and chased her

Round and round the room.

‘HELP, HELP I DON’T WANT TO DIE!’

My sister shouted out.

Then Mum came in and said

‘What’s all this about?’

‘She hit me.’

‘No, I didn’t let me have my say,

Mum it was an accident

His head got in the way.’

How to Help a Child with Anger

When children have anger issues it can be hard to get them to talk about it, they often feel bad about the fact that they get angry or just assume that if you want to talk about it that means they are in trouble. This poem ‘Angry’ takes a light- hearted, non judgemental look at this emotion and can be used as a way in to talking about this subject.

I read it and then ask the child how they would feel if someone was annoying them like this? Can they think of a time they felt angry? Ask your child if it’s ok to feel angry. They might say no because they think anger is a ‘bad’ feeling to have. Explain that it’s not bad but perfectly normal, and then perhaps spend some time thinking about helpful ways to deal with this feeling.

Teaching children to talk about how they feel is not something that is on every parents ‘To Do’ list, but if you want your children to use their words instead of their behaviour to communicate their more difficult feelings, the time you spend helping them to do this, must surely be time well spent.

*The poems in this article are taken from my book ‘I’m Not Afraid of Spiders. Poems About Feelings’

About the Author

Jane Rogers is an experienced and qualified Parenting Practitioner, and founder of The Cambridge Parent Coach. Jane is passionate about Positive Parenting and loves to share the ethos and ideas of this way of parenting. Her parent workbooks: ‘How to Encourage Good Behaviour’and ‘How to Use Positive Discipline to Improve Your Child’s Behaviour’  along with her book of poems for children ‘I’m Not Afraid of Spiders, Poems about feelings’  are available on Amazon www.thecambridgeparentcoach.com

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