Analyzing Your Children Sentiments Positively - Part I

Blog by Tushar Sheth

Welcome to the new series of my blog "Behold the Power of Parenting". I'm really excited to share it with all kinds of parents today. I'm here to talk to you all about understanding your child's emotions and we're going to take a developmental approach and is going to just get started right off the bat with a photo of a tantrum so I can kind of all bring myself into the mind of the child and into the mind of a parent.

I think every parent can probably relate to that moment when you just are about to enter that power struggle with your child and it's really hard work to be able to manage helping your child through some tough emotions while at the same time setting a limit or a boundary with them. And your parenting is such hard work that if we really do value our children we simply must cherish our parents and so it just really important. I think that we remember that parenting is such tough work and perhaps the hardest job that most of you have in life so parents can start with talking to their kids about four basic feelings there's clearly a lot more feelings that exist but these four basic feelings seem to be the most universal that most people can relate to and most people experience in everyday life. 

So the four most basic feelings we have here are mad sad scared and happy and a parent's job is really complex when it comes to emotions because these feelings can be along a continuum. So, if you can think of feelings along a feeling thermometer then there's really a range of feelings so for example happy there's a range of feelings from tent or joyful all the way up to ecstatic or format you can be a little bit mad. You could be annoyed or frustrated or you could be really really mad and furious and most kids don't have the ability at a young age to figure that out what are the different ranges of emotions and a parent's job is really to help them with that. To help expand their emotional vocabulary and the way that they can put into words how they're feeling in the moment so we're going to start with infants and think about a parent's job when it comes to raising an infant in terms of emotional development. 

The task of infancy is really to bond with a caregiver and to understand that their needs are actually important and really in infancy children come into this world without the ability to fully regulate. They rely on their caregiver for that so things like feeding they rely on a caregiver to feed them diaper changes sleeping they need a parent to maybe help themselves soothe. So that they can get to bed so we think of parents as the external regulator of the child's emotions and in that the parent even in the first six months is teaching the child about feelings.

So every time the parent responds to their infants cues and meets a need and can give them some pleasure which is sort of one of the emerging emotions in infancy the child learns about feelings and about feeling states so just an example of this is that a child's smile they don't come into the world smiling but after a few days and only a few days they do smile but this smile is actually more of a reflexive smile. It's something that just happens with the neurons in the child's brain that sends off a note to the rest of their body when they read someone else's smile. So when the caregiver smiles at them they smile back it doesn't actually hold emotion yet until over the course of the first six months

of life the parent starts teaching them that and there is an emotion tied to it. Ofcourse, this isn't verbal teaching turns aren't saying necessarily. You're smiling.

You must feel happy but what happens is when the parent smiles back at the child there's all these neural chemicals that go off in the brain and helps with bonding and a whole other host of development that makes the brain develop and grow. And that's where over time over the first six months the child will learn that. When I smile, I actually feel something they don't know that that word is happy yet and then they move into toddlerhood and what happens with kids in toddlerhood is they start walking they start exploring they're becoming independent.

And here they actually learned that there's consequences for their actions. They learn to respond to their parents negative cues. So what this means is as they're exploring and going out in the world toddling around they inevitably come in contact with some or dangerously close to some sort of danger right maybe it's a cord that's on the floor or the corner of a table or a plug and the parents go no. Don't stop it and all of this kind of introduced a shame for the child and I'll shame not necessarily being a bad thing it actually helps the child to know oh I need to stay away from that plug or I need to stay away from the corner of that table but for the first time parents are sort of introducing these negative words to their child because up until now they've probably been celebrating every first step every every time the baby has reached for something and gotten it the parents have really celebrated that. So they're also learning about pride and being proud of themselves at the same time.

Then come the preschool years and what's happening during the preschool years is that the frontal lobe is really developing a lot more where the kids are gaining more control over their limbic system which is basically our feelings Center and they're also learning to talk and use more words. So as their vocabulary expands their ability to put emotion emotional states into words expands.