What Can I Do to Help My Child/Teen?
One of the most frequent questions I get from parents of my clients.
As a play therapist working with children and teens, I work to support their supporters: their caregivers, usually parents in my case.
I meet with them first without the children and teens present. This is when I work to set the cooperative landscape we will navigate together in order to help their children. They know they can reach out to me with questions and concerns and that I will do the same.
One of the most common questions I get is a variation of the title: What can I do to help my child/teen? This usually means that the child is feeling big emotions and the parents want to fix what is wrong. Usually, my answer boils down to this:
Be the calm center of their storm.
Hold onto the suggestions you want to offer.
Hear and reflect their emotions.
In my work with children, teens, and families, I discuss four emotions: glad, sad, mad, and scared. Most of what children are experiencing will fit into these categories. It’s important for us to help name these feelings to build a feeling vocabulary (a component of emotional literacy) for our children (and ourselves and our partners if we didn’t have emotionally supportive parenting).
It’s also important for us to validate these feelings in our children. We do this in two separate but linked ways.
The first is by hearing and reflecting the feeling without judgment.
“I hear that (it looks like) you are feeling _____.”
The second is by naming the feelings in ourselves.
“I am feeling sad at the loss of ____.”
Sometimes, parents don’t want to share their “negative” or more vulnerable emotions because they feel that their children need to see that they are happy. This is a myth. Our children need to know that we are human and normal. They long to know that we, too, have feelings. They long to see that we can have feelings and that they eventually pass. If they are really lucky, they will get to learn that our feelings can inform us on how to move forward in ways that tend to our wants and needs.
The next time you are looking for a way to help your children or teen during their big feelings, give this a try:
Be the calm center of their storm.
Hold onto the suggestions you want to offer.
Hear and reflect their emotions.
Give it a try and let me know how it works. I look forward to sharing more about emotional literacy for families in future posts. I will also share more strategies for staying calm as parents. I know I have needed them throughout my parenting journey!