WHEN PARENTS EXPRESS NEGATIVE EMOTIONS
Negative emotions tend to stimulate emotional reactions in others. When someone is sad, we feel sad. When someone is angry with us, we often feel anger in return. If someone is really scared, we may suddenly become unsettled or worried. If we are already upset, then another person’s emotions will stimulate our own feelings.
This helps explain why it can be so difficult to listen to a child cry or why being empathetic is easy sometimes but difficult at other times. If you have had a bad day and feel unsettled emotionally, listening to your children may become more difficult. All it takes is for your child to get upset, and suddenly your unresolved feelings come up in reaction to your child.
For example, if you are already frustrated because there seems to be too much to do and not enough time, you will have a greater tendency to overreact to your children. If your child is upset and frustrated with her homework and you are trying to help her, it will trigger your own frustrated feelings. Suddenly you’ll find yourself lashing out in a frustrated manner with your child. What started out as a loving gesture of help turns into a painful argument.
When parents react to their children’s negative emotions with more negative emotion, it doesn’t make children feel safe to express negative emotion. When parents express negative emotion, they are bigger, louder, and more powerful. Strong adult emotions intimidate children into not expressing negative emotions. Eventually, children become numb to their feelings when it is not safe to express them.
When they express negative emotions, parents are bigger, louder, and more powerful and intimidate children.
Some mothers regain control of their children by letting out a loud, high-pitched, emotionally charged scream. Suddenly, their children behave. They suddenly behave because it is suddenly not safe to feel negative emotions, and, the child becomes obedient out of fear. While this method works in the short run, it numbs children to their inner feelings and suppresses their inner willpower.
Strong adult emotions make it unsafe for children to feel.
Fathers establish control and dominance by yelling in a mean, angry tone. Suddenly their children behave immediately. Again, the children behave because it is not safe to express negative emotions. They become temporarily obedient out of fear. Children often suppress anger, because their parents get angry in return. While this kind of intimidating control used to work, it doesn’t work today. Children raised with this kind of intimidation either become rebellious later and resist cooperation or they become submissive and lack direction.
If we are to help our children manage their feelings, we must also manage our own feelings. To overcome our tendency as parents to expel our unresolved feelings on our children, we need to take time for ourselves to cope with stress and process unresolved emotional issues. Unless we take time for ourselves to cope with stress, we block our children from learning to manage their feelings.
To help our children manage their feelings, we must also manage our own feelings.
Parents cannot patiently listen to children express resistant feelings of anger, sadness, and fear if they are holding in unresolved feelings of anger, disappointment, frustration, worry, or fear. If parents are resisting dealing with feelings within themselves, then they will automatically resist dealing with their children’s negative feelings.
Children cannot get the empathy they need when a parent is resisting what he or she hears. When children get the message that their emotions and needs for understanding and affection are an inconvenience, they will begin to suppress their feelings and disconnect from their true self and all the gifts that come from being authentic.
Until the parents deal with their own feelings, they are less effective in helping their children to manage feelings. Yet, if they do take time to cope with stress and nurture their own adult needs for conversation, romance, and independence, they are able to come back and give so much more to their children. When parents take care of their own needs first, then they are most capable of putting into use the five skills of positive parenting.