By Sue-Lynn Teo
If you’re a millennial parent, chances are you’ve come across social media posts talking about the need to “name or acknowledge your child’s feelings” or “stay with the feeling”. These parenting approaches are all aimed at one thing: connecting with your child and allowing them to feel that they are seen, heard and understood.
Connection is key to successful behaviour management. As all behaviour is communication and challenging behaviours often have emotional sources, seeking first to understand the “why” behind our child’s behaviour is important.
Psychologist Dr John Gottman researched various methods of parenting and found that emotion coaching works best to get to the heart, or the “why”, of a child’s emotions and behaviours.
What is emotion coaching? It is a parenting style that helps children understand and regulate their emotions. There are five essential steps to emotion coaching. Let’s look at a common scenario to illustrate this: a preschool child hitting his or her younger sibling after they took his or her toy.
1. Tune in to you and your child’s emotions
Firstly, tune in to what you, as a parent, are feeling, in response to your child’s behaviour. You might be feeling angry, frustrated or overwhelmed. Remember, it is the thoughts and beliefs (e.g. “Siblings must share and be nice to each other!”) regarding your child’s behaviour that triggers your emotion, not your child’s behaviour.
Next, tune into what your child might be feeling through observing his or her facial expression, body language, posture, tone of voice and what they say.
2. Recognise emotional moments as opportunities to role model
Take a moment to pause, take deep breaths or say a silent prayer for grace and patience, so you can respond calmly instead of reacting. In this scenario, a common reaction would be to feel angry or frustrated and say, “Stop hitting!”, “Share with your brother/sister!”.
Remember that modelling how you, as a parent, manage your own emotions (i.e. showing how you calm down) is a far more effective teaching tool then telling your children to “calm down”. As parents, we won’t always be able to stay calm all the time and there will be times where we react instead of respond. Offer the same grace and compassion to yourself as you would to a fellow parent.
3. Listen with empathy to what your child is feeling
Be aware of the underlying emotions behind the more “obvious” emotion. For example, when your child says to his or her sibling, “Stop taking my things, go away!”, it can seem like they are feeling angry, but they could also be feeling upset, frustrated and maybe even jealous (e.g. “Why do I have to share my toys with my younger sibling all the time and why does no one ask them to share?”)
Put yourself in your child’s shoes and imagine what it might feel like. In this scenario, to have your younger sibling take a toy from you, possibly without permission and being told that “you must share because you are the older one”. Angry? Frustrated? Upset? Jealous? Possibly a mix of these emotions.
4. Validate your child’s emotions by identifying and naming them
Identify what your child is actually feeling instead of telling your child what you think he or she should feel. Remember that while feelings lead to behaviours, feelings are not the same as behaviours (i.e. hitting), thus validating your child’s feelings does not mean that you agree with the behaviour. Validating the feelings allow your child to understand that while all feelings are okay, not all behaviours are.
Go down to your child’s level, validate the emotion first and then set the limit. Validating statements usually follow this framework: “I sense/hear/see that you are feeling frustrated and upset (emotions) because your younger brother took your toy without asking you (underlying reason). You don’t like it when he does that. It makes you feel so angry that you want to hit him (elaboration)”.
Remember the goal of validating your child’s feelings is not to stop them from feeling a certain way, but in contrary, provide a safe space for them to process and make sense of their feelings, knowing they are seen, heard and understood by who matters the most to them… you. That is the heart and essence of connection.
5. Set limits or boundaries and problem-solve
In the same calm and firm tone, set limits or boundaries to their behaviour. For this scenario, you could say “At the same time, hitting hurts. I won’t allow you to hit your brother.”
Offer helpful alternatives and co-regulate with your child. For example, you can say, “Let’s sit here together and take some deep breaths to let our anger out”. Listen to your child as he or she continues to express his or her emotions about the situation and continuing validating the emotions as needed. Practice being non-judgemental and allowing for the feelings, rather than dismissing or invalidating them.
When your child has calmed down in his or her own time, problem-solve. For example, you can discuss about how your child might want to categorise his toys as “toys to share” and “toys that belong only to him” (to be fair, wouldn’t we even as adults want certain things to only belong to us?) and play with the latter only when the younger sibling is not around.
You can suggest some phrases your child can use, for example, “I’m not done with this toy yet. I will let you know when I’m done” or brainstorm how your older child may adapt his or her play to suit his or her younger sibling. If the younger sibling is verbal, also teach them ways to request kindly (e.g. “Can I have the toy when you’re done?”).
It starts with small steps
Remember that children don’t learn to share because they are told to share but learn through modelling from significant others. This means parents displaying sharing behaviours more often helps too!
Validating our child’s emotions can be incredibly hard when we as children were not given the space to feel those emotions and make sense of them. It will take time to get more familiar with understanding and regulating their emotions and that’s perfectly normal. It starts with small steps.
By building up your child’s understanding and regulation of their emotions, you are helping them succeed in many other ways as they become more self-confident, develop better social and academic skills and become physically healthier!
To find out more about our preschools, visit https://littleseeds.edu.sg.
Sue-Lynn Teo is an Educational and Development Psychologist at Redwood Psychology and parent of a K1 child attending Little Seeds Preschool (Ascension)
References: Lisitsa, E (2024, March 4). How to engage in emotion coaching. https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-digital-age-emotion-coaching/
