Analyzing Your Children Sentiments Positively - Part II

Blog by Tushar Sheth

Parents, I am continuing my new series on Analyzing Your Children Sentiments Positively - Part II here sharing my insights and experience in parenting children positively further.

And so here is where you start seeing just mad sad happy and scared you start seeing things like excited and so kids start understanding a little bit more that there's a difference between two feeling States. Here they also start paying attention more to the feelings of others. So empathy starts to emerge and this is really mostly in the context of their caregivers that they are able to read other people's feelings States. It may not happen with a complete stranger yet at this point and once kids move into school age and they start going to kindergarten first grade they really end on they continue to develop emotional awareness emotional expression. But here is where some of the regulation of feelings comes in they start learning coping skills. 

They also start improving what's called theory of mind which in a nutshell is the child's ability to see the world from another person's point of view that they can imagine that you know even though I liked stumbling upon this turtle that my parent looked scared. And so maybe my parent didn't think that that was okay and so here is where mixed emotions come up they start learning that you can actually have two emotional experiences to the exact same stimulus and that's really important for further development of empathy and also for them to be able to imagine a different feeling state. So later in life if they're sad they also know that they can get through that sadness because they have coping skills and they can imagine feeling happy again and then adolescents hits and in adolescence it's in a way we've gone back to the two year old who's just learning to walk we have adolescents who are really trying to gain independence from their caregivers. They are maybe having the first job they have best friendships. Their friendships really emerged as the context in which they're learning about themselves and others and they start having more abstract thinking so they can think about all the complexities of this world and with that can come some negative feeling some anxiety some sadness as they contemplate their role in the world what life means all of these more abstract or even more existential things. They also will develop at this at this stage what we call emotional autonomy in other words they really realize that I don't have to feel something just because my mom or my dad feels it so.

They feel intentionally sometimes different from their caregivers. They're very aware that just because my mom or dad or someone close to me my caregiver said that I should be happy. I don't necessarily feel that way and this can be hard as a parent because your child starts feeling something different from you you're not necessarily as in sync as you once were perhaps. But all of this goes back always to parents and I like this visual because it really shows that the individual we as human beings everything we experience feel do the way we act on this world is all in the context of other systems so that can be school systems, healthcare systems.

But the most kind of prominent one is the family system and so we really need to think about and hold in mind the family system. When we're thinking about the individual or the child and again this goes to the importance of caregivers so what can you as a parent do to help expand your child's emotional thermometer. How can you help them develop a lot of coping skills so that when life brings them disappointment they have their first break up or they have a fight with a best friend or they get yelled at by their boss? What are the skills that you want them to have and all of this really starts the most basic building block? Here for the parent to teach this is a tune minton min is really a system of communication between the parent and child it's a way that the child expresses something maybe its dissatisfaction.

Maybe it's I got my hand stuck in a chair and I can't get it out or maybe it's a bid for the parents attention. Ah! and it's like mom I want your attention right now I need you I want you so the parents role here is really to observe their child read the cue and decode the queue which sometimes is the hardest part and then respond to it and when this happens the child then signals back to the parent that was exactly what I needed or hey that wasn't quite what I needed. i'm still distressed and that then sends this back and forth between the parent and child sometimes we call it a serve and return interplay between the parent and the child but this is really the key element so that the parent can pay attention to what triggers their child's of motion and then be able to respond to different emotions after a parent has the ability to really understand what their child might be feeling it's important to start labeling those emotions and one of the easiest ways in the most playful ways to do this without it feeling like a teaching moment like a lesson is just to play with your child when you play with your child you especially if you're following their lead and just being curious about what they are curious about you are teaching your kids that you care about what they are thinking what they're doing you're showing them that what they do is important and matters to you.

And you're also helping increase their self-esteem a whole host of really good things that come from a parent just attending to their child and some of the easiest ways to show your child that you're attending to them are to narrate their play so simply just be a sportscaster watch what your child is doing. If your toddler is playing with um I don't know a toy dog that they're kind of pulling along and making the dog walk just say I really like how you're making the dog walk you're trying really hard at that and you can also reflect a lot of parents I talked with are really concerned about their child's vocabulary and increasing their verbal expression and sometimes parents will do that through asking a lot of questions.

What noise does this animal make? What color is this? What color is the fire truck? Instead of asking questions we can actually help increase our children's verbal expression by just reflecting back what they have said and this is so simple. But if the child says the dog barked you could say "yes! the dog barked" and that lets your child also know that you're paying attention to what he said and what he said is important to you. Here another important task for a parent is to practice redirecting rather than saying no don't stop quit not. And there are things that we need to tell  and tries again with her child. You can imagine that the resolution of this little outburst might go much better. So in addition to parents modeling and using feeling words we also want parents to model positive coping strategies.

So just like you figure out for your kid that they like basketball or they like to go on a walk. Figure out what works for you and we have the whole list here of things that can help you get to green and they're wide-ranging. But it may be things like taking a bath it may be calling your sister. It may be taking a walk. Whatever your coping skill is that really helps you. if you or when you use it label that for your child say you know what mom got really mad at the bank and when I came home I called my sister and I vented and now I feel better or I came home and I took a deep breath and now I'm ready to have fun and play with you again because I was able to calm myself down this teaches children coping skills but also teaches them that they don't have to worry about you the parent.