How to Help Your Child With Big Emotions
How to help your child with big emotions without shutting them down
Childhood messages that can follow us into adulthood
Have you ever heard yourself say “Oh, don’t cry” when your child is upset?
I think most of us probably have. It comes from a good place. We see a child we love crying and our natural reaction is to want to make everything better.
“Don’t cry.”
“Stop crying.”
“Why are you crying?”
They seem like such harmless words, don’t they?
I heard them a lot when I was growing up. I was a sensitive child and when I felt upset, I cried.
Some children get angry, some go quiet, some sulk, I cried.
Nobody saying those things to me meant any harm. They were doing what they knew, probably repeating the same words that had been said to them.
But as a little girl, I didn’t hear those words in the way an adult might hear them.
When I heard “don’t cry”, somewhere inside I began to understand that crying wasn’t something I should do.
When I heard “stop crying”, I felt as though I wasn’t being a good girl when I cried, which, of course, made me cry even more.
And when I heard “why are you crying?”, I felt as though I needed a reason for how I was feeling.
The problem was, most of the time I didn’t have one.
I was three or four years old. I didn’t know why. I just knew how I felt.
And slowly, without anybody intending it to happen, I began learning that some of those feelings were better kept inside.
That became a pattern I carried with me for decades
When you become really good at not feeling
By the time I reached my thirties, I knew I wasn’t happy.
I felt flat. Emotionally numb.
I couldn’t fully connect with people or completely let them in, and I didn’t understand why.
And this wasn’t something that affected one small part of my life. It affected my work, my friendships and, perhaps most significantly, my romantic relationships.
Eventually I discovered NLP and holistic therapy and began doing a lot of work on myself.
What followed was huge.
I sometimes describe it as my “year of crying”.
There were decades of unfelt feelings in there.
Sadness, yes, but anger too. Feelings I had become incredibly good at pushing down gradually began to come back up and move through.
And on the other side, I found something I hadn’t expected.
A full range of emotions.
Not just sadness. Joy too. Deep feelings of calm. The ability to connect differently. To experience an emotion without needing to create a story around it or hold onto it.
The tears could come and then they could go.
They were simply energy in motion.
E-motion.
I share much more of this part of my story in Episode 5 of Behind the Stories, because there’s a lot more to it than I can cover here. But it taught me something that has become incredibly important to the work I do now.
When we become really good at shutting down the feelings we don’t want to feel, we don’t necessarily get to keep all the lovely ones wide open.
And that is one of the reasons I feel so strongly about helping children develop a healthy relationship with their emotions while they are still children.
Keeping our children emotionally open
I think there’s an important difference between helping a child learn to regulate their emotions and teaching them to shut those emotions down.
We absolutely want our children to learn how to self-regulate.
But self-regulation doesn’t mean stop feeling this.
It means gradually learning to recognise what they’re feeling, understanding that it’s okay to feel it, and discovering what they can do when a feeling becomes overwhelming.
Because all of our emotions have a place.
Sadness is okay. Fear is okay. Worry is okay. Anger is okay.
And although of course we want our children to experience happiness, they don’t need to be happy all the time either.
That’s really at the heart of The E-motions™ Series.
I want children to understand that feelings are something they feel, not something they are.
A child isn’t sad. They are feeling sad.
They aren’t angry. They are feeling angry.
Feelings come and go. They are energy in motion, E-motion.
If we can help our children stay emotionally open while also giving them simple ways to self-regulate, imagine what that could mean for them as they grow.
They don’t have to spend their adult lives learning how to feel again.
So what can we do differently?
This isn’t about making parents feel guilty for ever saying “don’t cry”.
These phrases are so ingrained in many of us that sometimes they come out before we’ve even thought about them. I know the adults around me weren’t deliberately teaching me to suppress my emotions.
It’s simply about becoming more aware of the message we do want our children to receive.
So when your child is crying, instead of immediately needing to stop the tears or find out why, you might simply say:
“I can see you’re feeling sad. I’m here.”
There’s something else deliberate in that sentence too.
I said “you’re feeling sad”, rather than “you are sad.”
It might sound like a tiny difference, but it matters.
Sadness isn’t who your child is. It’s something they’re feeling right now.
The same is true when they’re scared, worried or angry.
The feeling is visiting. It isn’t their identity.
And once we stop treating the feeling itself as something that needs to disappear, we can begin helping our children learn what to do with it.
That’s where self-regulation comes in.
Not “don’t feel.”
But “it’s okay to feel this — and you can learn what to do with it.”
I want something different for this generation
I don’t share my story because I want us to look backwards and blame the generations before us.
I share it because now we have an opportunity to do something differently.
It took me decades to reconnect with feelings I had learned to push down.
And I would love our children not to have to do that work later.
I want them to grow up emotionally open. Able to experience sadness, fear, worry, anger, happiness and everything in between without believing there is something wrong with them for feeling it.
And I want them to have the tools to know what to do when those feelings become big.
Because the aim isn't to raise children who never cry.
Or children who never get angry, frightened, worried or sad.
It's to help raise children who grow up knowing:
I know what I’m feeling.
I know it’s okay to feel it.
I know what I can do when it feels big.
And I know it will pass.
That's a very different message from “don't feel.”
And perhaps changing that message for the next generation can start with something as small as what we say when the tears come.
Want to hear more?
This subject is very close to my heart, and I go much deeper into it in Episode 5 of my Behind the Stories podcast:
Why “Stop Crying” Doesn’t Work — What Your Child Really Needs When the Tears Won’t Stop.
I share more about my own journey, what can be happening when a child can't explain their tears, and the practical T.E.A.R.S. technique I created to help you support your child through those moments.
And if you'd like to explore sadness through the eyes of a child, Sad Seal Saves the Day gently helps children understand that it's okay to feel sad, shed tears and talk about how they feel. I go behind that story in Episode 4 of Behind the Stories.
Because when we help our children stay emotionally open and teach them how to self-regulate, we're giving them something they can carry with them for life.
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