In our last blog about parenting, we talked about how to bring the calm–why you should try to limit your emotional reactions when your child is having a meltdown. Even when you are feeling frustrated, overwhelmed, triggered, angry--that’s for you to manage, and will not usually help the outward situation with your child. But for many parents, managing your own emotions in front of your kids often feels like stuffing them down.

“It’s common for parents to feel like they’re masking their emotions or pretending they’re fine in the moment with their kids,” says therapist Laura Miles. “Parents don’t want to burden their children with emotions that are too big for them to handle, but then later parents start to feel the strain of that denial. It’s a difficult balance–how do parents demonstrate emotional expression to their kids without asking children to take on responsibility for those emotions?” 

DEMONSTRATING EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION

Therapist and perinatal coach Adele Stuckey says a big part of teaching kids how to express emotions in a healthier way is to show them. 

“As the parent, you can practice verbalizing your emotions in front of your kids. You can say, ‘I’m feeling frustrated about this. I need to take a deep breath,’ or “I need to step away.’ Or ‘I’m feeling sad because grandpa is in the hospital, and I need some space to be quiet so I can feel my feelings.’” Adele says. “We can show kids that it’s not anyone else’s job to make the feelings go away, but it’s okay to ask the people around you for support. This can be done in an age-appropriate way–you might express your feelings and then suggest an activity or shift in behavior that will create some space for your emotions. Maybe you watch a movie together. Or you might ask for minimal noise, or for your child to maintain their responsibilities.”

Expressing your feelings in this way can help you to get what you need, and it also helps your child learn what to do when they experience similar emotions. Children are often more receptive to modeling than they are to instruction–this is why telling your kid to “say thank you” often doesn’t work as well to instill the habit as thanking them often for their own helpful behavior. 

WHY IS THIS SO HARD? 

If the feelings you’re experiencing are related to your interaction with your child (their tantrum, meltdown, whining, etc.) and not from an external situation, this can feel especially difficult to manage. Why is this so hard? 

Essentially, when your child is dysregulated, their meltdown may send you back to how your caregivers reacted when you were a child. Did your parents yell? Use punishment? Send you to your room? 

“When working with parents, I often hear a lot of shame, guilt, and negative self-beliefs around emotional expression,” says Adele. “If parents weren’t given healthy examples of emotional expression from their parents, caregivers, or adult figures, they may have no idea what to actually do in the moment.”

Now that you are in the parent role, your child’s tantrum may trigger a trauma response in your brain. What’s your impulse when your kid is really pushing your buttons? It might look like this: 

Fight - yell back, lash out physically

Flight -  ignore their meltdown; sending them to their room

Fawn - cave into their demands just to make the crying stop

Even if you are trying to break the cycle by parenting your child differently than how you were parented, it can take so much effort to calm your own nervous system in these moments. Turning off that trauma-response brain might take all your energy, so it’s understandable why you might not have any left to try to express your emotions to your child. 

SETTING YOUR FEELINGS ASIDE

Your kid throws a tantrum. You manage to calm your body enough to parent in the moment, but you know you don’t have time right now to step away and process your feelings. There it is–that “stuffing my feelings down” sensation. 

“I like to use the idea of ‘setting feelings to the side’ rather than ‘stuffing them down,” Adele suggests. “The difference to me means that I’m not pretending the feelings aren’t there, and I’m setting an intention to come back to them.” 

There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to kids and emotions. There’s the stimulus overload of a tantrum. Identifying whether the behavior is developmentally appropriate for your child’s age. Feelings that appear around what the child is actually doing, saying, or feeling. Memories that come up that are unrelated to the child’s experience, but grounded in the parents’. Family dynamics, unintentional comparisons, the reactions of other family members or people out in public. Whatever emotions are coming up while you’re parenting, one thing is for certain: the stress is real. 

COMPLETING THE STRESS CYCLE

One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, as a parent, is to prioritize completing the stress cycle after you set your feelings to the side. When you have time alone, revisit the emotions you felt during the interaction with your child. Then choose a strategy that feels right for you. 

Emily and Amelia Nagoski, the authors of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, suggest these six ways to complete the stress cycle: 

Physical activity - Anything where you use your body. A brisk walk. A trip to the gym. Dancing, roller skating, swimming. 

Creativity - Make something, anything. 

Laughter - One hack that can get you there: think about a time when you laughed really hard, and try to re-tell that story to someone. 

Cry - This is one of the body’s most basic mechanisms to release stress. One thing that may help is to focus on the crying itself rather than “feeding” the sad emotions. Focus on the physical sensation of crying rather than continuing to let your brain pile on reasons why you are sad or stressed. 

Physical affection - Start with a long, strong hug for about 20 seconds. This creates oxytocin, which can slow your heart rate and make you feel safer. Physical affection with a pet works, too. 

Deep breathing - Try a deep breathing exercise like square breathing. Deep breathing exercises calm your vagus nerve and help you complete the fight or flight stress response. 

Parenting is challenging, especially in a pandemic. If you’re looking for more strategies on how to tune into your somatic body experiences to understand how you automatically respond in difficult parenting situations, the new Parenting in the Pandemic course from Creative Health Collective is for you. Work with Adele Stuckey to channel your creative spirit and bypass self-limiting beliefs that are keeping you stuck. If you’re a parent who is looking for something more, click the button below to learn more about the course. 

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