Taking Care of our own Emotions First
We can only help children to better understand their emotions when we first take the time and effort to better understand our own.
I have noticed from my own experiences over the past eleven years that many adults and children feel uncomfortable talking about the topic of emotions.
When teachers and parents feel uncomfortable with this topic, and are unfamiliar with their own feelings, this often becomes a barrier in trying to effectively help children in their care, especially those who have challenging behaviors.
In my everyday work, I often deal with students who are experiencing strong unpleasant emotions, such as anger, frustration, loss, and injustice. These emotions can sometimes cause severe outbursts which is why I am often called into a school, to help provide solutions. These outbursts often involve the student throwing objects, hitting and kicking others, or sometimes even throwing chairs across the room.
To help better support the student in my care, and to try and prevent or minimize the unsafe behaviours, I will often start by talking to the teachers and staff involved with the student about the importance of emotional learning. This is because their own emotional intelligence is key when building in helpful strategies for the student within the classroom. For many, this is seen as a waste of their time or is a language that is unfamiliar to them, so they show signs of not being open to the solutions that I would like to offer. This is because they have not yet understood the connection between their own emotions and the emotions of the student, when addressing problematic behavior.
Teachers or adults who have poor emotional intelligence will often say and do things that can cause a vulnerable child to feel overwhelmed, which then triggers them to exhibit problematic behavior. When the adult then fails to take charge of their own emotions in response to this problematic behavior, the situation escalates resulting in the child having an emotional meltdown, and for our most vulnerable children this can even look like a full-blown crisis.
An adult who is triggered by a child’s behavior but unable to manage their own emotions is unable to effectively help a child in crisis.
Sometimes this is because the adult is unaware that the child is triggering their own emotions and oblivious to how their emotions are involved in the process. Either they do not understand their own emotions, or they have not taken the necessary time to step back and check in with their emotions. Either way they do not take charge or manage their emotions and so their own feelings of frustration, helplessness, or generally not feeling in control of the situation can cause them to say or do things that lack the patience, compassion, and understanding that the child needs to calm down.
Teachers and adults that have higher emotional intelligence are often able to help such a child calm down much earlier in the process, even before a crisis occurs. This is because they are in tune with their own emotions, and therefore can sense how a child is feeling. They have become master detectives, noticing the facial expressions and non-verbal body language that communicates how a child is feeling without expressing it with words. This enables them to avoid certain situations with the child, prevent certain problematic behaviours from surfacing, and when problematic behaviours do surface, they take care of their own emotions first, managing them effectively. They know how to remain calm, providing a safe space for the child to exist. They can help the child navigate through their turbulent emotions and bring them to safety.
When we are experiencing a child in crisis, the difference then between coping and managing the situation or not coping is our capacity to understand and manage our own emotions.
When we fail to understand the importance of emotions, we can sometimes ignore and fail to acknowledge how someone else is feeling, or even tell them they are wrong to feel a certain way.
I saw a small child lining up after recess one day. He was only about 5 years old. He had tears rolling down his face and was crying loudly. I do not know the reason he was crying nor if his reason for crying appeared justified, but I heard an adult standing next to him say, “You are not sad. Stop crying!”
This did not make sense to me. It is undeniable that the little boy was feeling sad. All the signs of sadness were there. He was crying and there were actual tears.
It is true to say that his crying may have been exaggerated or not justified but his feeling of sadness was valid. If we are teaching our children that their emotions are not valid, or important, they will eventually cease to express them outwardly but now their emotions will be an invisible force on the inside that they will not come to understand nor learn to manage.
I have noticed that halfway to solving any problem for a child is validation. If a young child cries, with tears streaming down their face, I would get down to their level, look into their eyes with a warm presence and I would say, “I see you are crying. You look like you are feeling sad.” When I have done this many times in the past, the child looks at me and will often nod in agreement. Just this look of care and offer of validation helps the child to feel heard and seen. In most cases, the problem is already solved, and the child will naturally stop crying. And tomorrow when they feel sad, I will be the first person they will seek out to share it with.
Telling our children that the emotion they are experiencing is wrong, or trying to move them on before they have processed the emotion is not helpful.
Trying to solve the problem too quickly is not helpful either.
Children need to learn that everyone experiences emotions and a full range of emotions, and that there is no emotion that is “bad”. Every emotion we experience is our body’s natural way of communicating to us that something significant is happening and that that we need to take note of it.
Would you like to help the children in your care become more emotionally intelligent?
Firstly, begin by asking the following questions to see the level of your own emotional intelligence:
How often do you tune into your emotions?
Do you know how to identify an emotion when it surfaces?
Are you able to verbalize it out loud?
Have you figured out what triggers your unpleasant emotions?
Do you easily lose control of your emotions?
Do you make efforts to effectively process and manage your emotions?