How to help your child with their BIG FEELINGS

(Prefer to watch or listen? Here is a video I have made on this topic.)

By Sally Prebble, PhD

I was recently chatting to a friend who confided in me, with some sense of embarrassment, that her school-aged child regularly lashes out at other members of the family. "He still has horrible meltdowns", she reported, "he can be violent and break things. It has such an impact on the rest of the family".

I imagine she thought, when she said this to me, that I was going to be shocked, horrified or judge her for the revelation of this outlandish behaviour.

The truth is, I was profoundly unsurprised. We tend to imagine that our children's outbursts are unusual, and that everyone else's family lives resemble some kind of Brady Bunch-style perfection. We don't often peel back the curtain on these kind of daily challenges, because many of us fear that if we are having difficulty managing our children's distress it is our fault, that there is something wrong with our child, or that we will be judged as "bad parents".

So let me peel back the curtain for you. In my work, I am in the very privileged position to hear what is actually happening in family homes (and I also live with three wonderfully spirited children!) so I am unsurprised to my core if you tell me that the children you live with might kick, scream and tear up their rooms sometimes. 

No judgement here...but enormous empathy and compassion if you are experiencing these challenges! This is difficult stuff, and it does indeed have a huge impact on parental energy and the collective spirit of your family when a child is struggling in this way. 

The truth is, we live in a pretty damn complicated world. It is a busy, bossy, hectic, demanding place for our children, and many of them are struggling to manage the inevitable big emotions that come up for them in their daily lives. Our children are balancing so many demands and expectations, complicated routines, multiple transitions, complex social interactions, social media nastiness, screen overload, and parents who (let's face it) often don't have as much time as we would like to help them process all of this.

It is often too much for them - full stop.

This is particularly the case if their temperament, brain type or personality doesn't align well with the (narrowly devised) way the world wants them to be. If your child is really angry, really sad or dysregulated a lot of the time, it is likely that they are sending you a message in the only way they can figure out that they are not really coping with the pace and complexity of life. "Stop the train, I want to get off!" 

Below, I explore some of the reasons your child might be experiencing regular distress, and three avenues you could explore to support them. 

How do we help our children to cope in a challenging world?

A lot of the advice about helping children to manage their big feelings focuses on what to do in the moment of distress; how to stop the dysregulation, put an end to the shouting, swearing, kicking, throwing, or words we don't like as fast as possible (the "bad behaviour" as it is popularly conceptualised). This might be through:

• Rewards ("If you calm down, I'll buy you an ice-cream!")
• Punishments or removing privileges (If you don't stop, you can't have your screen time today!)
• Time outs ("Sit here until you are calm!"), or
• Ignoring the behaviour (*no eye contact, no expression, turn body away*).  

We are also commonly advised, at all costs, to stay calm ourselves (easier said than done - more on this later).

The difficulty with these approaches is that it they focus our parenting attention and energy on the behaviour - the symptom - which is, I would argue, the visible tip of a larger problem.

Today, I want to look a little deeper at what might be precipitating these regular distressing moments for your child. Instead of "how do we stop this behaviour", let's explore the more illuminating question "what is impacting your child's ability to cope", and "how can you support them to cope better with the demands of their life?" 

Your child's capacity to cope

We can think of our children’s capacity to cope with life's challenges as being like liquid pouring into a cup. All of the challenges of life flow in, and when your child's cup is too full, inevitably they will overflow. (This is true of us as well, of course, but we tend to have larger cups than our children and quite a bit more control over what pours into our cups).

If your child is overflowing often, the demand coming in (from whatever is going on in their lives) is larger than the size of their cup. 

This gives us three main ways we can support our children when they are overflowing: pour less in, take some out, or expand the size of their cup. 

1. Pour less in

The first way we can support a child who is overflowing regularly is to reduce the amount of demand that’s flowing in to their cup. An important step is to figure out what is overloading them and find ways to reduce the flow: is it social complexity, academic pressure, too many transitions, too much time away from family and home?

This step is harder than it might sound, because many of us don't perceive that we have much control over the fullness of our lives: jobs, lack of support, rent or mortgages to pay. It is painful and challenging to consider how our pressured and full lives might be impacting our children.

But the painful reality is, if our children's lives are over-scheduled and their spare moments are filled with homework or screens, they are not going to have the space to process their emotions and make sense of the challenges of each day. Think of it a bit like a computer that’s been fed a lot of data - it takes a certain amount of time to update the system and process all the information that has been thrown at it.

We forget that developing emotional maturity takes a lot of time, and our children need us to protect this time:

Time in nature. 

Time to play. 

Time to daydream.

Time to stare at walls.

Time to be bored for a while and then find something to do.

Time to read. 

Time to talk to us, at us and with us.

Time to chat and laugh.

Time to be very, very silly and time to be very, very serious.  

Time to notice the patterns in the woodgrain above their beds.

Time to fight with their siblings for a while and then figure out how to make up again.

Time to rest and time to sleep.

Time to be. 

Modern children, on the whole, are not getting this time. There is so much pressure on us to give our children every kind of experience, and we are so busy with our own pressures that we forget that these white spaces are essential to giving our children the time they need to process challenging emotions. 

When I start to work with a family whose child is having trouble regulating their emotions, this is one of the first things I explore. Very often, there is too much packed in their lives. Busyness is so normalised we tend to celebrate overpacked schedules, assuming that boredom and being unproductive are the enemies we have to fight at any cost.

So my first invitation to you is to have a look (really look) at your child's calendar and routines and see if there is one thing (preferably 5) that you could take out of their day, week or month.

The principle of pouring less into their cup also applies in the heat of the moment when a child is in the throes of an angry outburst or meltdown. 

If they are there, it is because more is coming in at that moment than their nervous system is able to process. They are overloaded and their nervous system has flicked the circuit breaker and shut them down. This is especially true for children with autism, sensory processing challenges or ADHD - their nervous system will easily reach capacity and when this happens, they cannot process any more. 

So in the moment of overflow, we also have to consider how to reduce the amount of information and stimulation coming in. These moments of dysregulation are not the time for talking, lectures, telling them to calm down, coaching them on new strategies, or asking them lots of questions about why they are so angry/sad/violent/depressed. 

When we respond in these ways, we’re are not only continuing to add to an overflowing cup, we are adding potent fuel to an already bubbling-over child. When they are overflowing, they need space and quiet and calm. They need non-judgemental, warm, quiet presence to process what they already have going on. 

2. Take some out 

Another way we can support our overflowing children is by helping them to remove some of what is already in their cups to create more space. We can do this by learning to support our children to notice and understand how to process their big emotions. 

In general, we have very high expectations for our children and their ability to cope with life's challenges. We expect that they should be able to calm themselves, on their own, independently, from quite an early age. We focus a lot of energy on teaching self-regulation skills in the hopes that our children will learn to do this by themselves and their behaviour will magically improve. 

These strategies come from the commonly held belief that our goal, as parents, is to foster independence as early as possible. If we’ve done our job properly, we think, they should be able to walk off with a backpack and barely a backward glance to bravely face whatever the world throws at them. 

But this image misunderstands developmental psychology and how the human nervous system evolved. We didn't evolve to regulate alone; we evolved to regulate together. With maturity, we are sometimes able to internalise this process and calm ourselves independently; but this is a maturity that evolves gradually and slowly over time out of togetherness.

We sometimes mistake the shut down coping strategies of a child (or adult) who is regularly left to manage alone as "independence". This is not true emotional maturity, it is a psychological defence against premature aloneness.  

The prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that can regulate our emotions, doesn't fully develop until we’re in our mid-twenties, so it is unsurprising that our children might struggle sometimes, and continue to need our emotional support right through their teenage years.

And let’s be honest for a moment - even as adults we sometimes struggle, don’t we? I know I do. 

When you are struggling, you might notice that you reach out to others for support. Think about how quickly you want to get home to your spouse or partner after a tricky interaction with your boss, or how much you want to speak to a friend after you’ve had a fight with someone. 

It is a myth that we "should" regulate alone. Human beings seek each other out when we are distressed because our brains were designed to co-regulate. (This is just a fancy word for the way we help each other to manage our big emotions by staying calm, connected, and supportive). Calling a friend, talking to your partner, ringing your mum, or even posting on facebook or searching up a youtube video; these are all strategies that we use to create togetherness when we need it.  

How do we support our child to empty their cup daily so that overflow doesn’t happen so much? One amazing way is learning to listen to your child with empathy. We spend a lot of time in our courses teaching the skills of listening and empathy, because it is one the of the best ways for children to learn about their own emotional worlds and build this deep connection.

So my second invitation, if your child is regularly overflowing, is to make it a regular part of your day to spend at least 10 minutes with your child to just hang out and listen. Let this be a time when they can have your full attention. Let them talk about whatever is going on for them, whatever is on top of their brimming emotional cups.   

Your job is not to solve, to fix, advise, or to teach them anything in this moment; it is just to listen and be there with your full, loving presence.

Children (like other varieties of human) want to be heard, understood, know they matter and know that we care. When we offer them our empathic presence regularly and consistently, we are helping them to reduce the build up in their cups, giving them more space to cope with the demands of tomorrow.

3. Expand the size of their cup

The final way we can help our overflowing children is to help them to expand the size of their cups. Making time to connect and be present with your child not only helps them to empty their cups, overtime it also helps them to expand the size of their cups.

This is because it is by interacting with empathic and caring adults that children learn some of the main developmental tasks of childhood: how to be present with themselves, how to notice and express what they are feeing and what they need, and how to gain some mastery of their emotional worlds. 

Emotional literacy and self awareness are really important for emotional regulation. A child can't simply buck up and calm themselves when they are distressed as a conscious choice. Self regulation requires an ability to observe and notice their inner world, identify and name their feelings, understand the needs that these feelings might be pointing to, and understand how they can take action to care for these needs. 

Over time, when we regularly and consistently support our children to process their emotions, they can and will learn to internalise the process of self soothing. They will start to hear your voice in their heads, tell themselves they will be ok, and find ways to calm their own nervous system from within. 

But they won’t get that from watching breathing techniques alone in their rooms on their tablets - they will get it by experiencing your warm and loving presence thousands of times as they work through difficult and mundane challenges, and experience their activated nervous system settle. It is only after thousands of repetitions of a well-developed adult prefrontal cortex soothing, caring for and helping me to understand and notice my emotional world that I can start to do it effectively on my own. 

This is emotional maturation and it takes place in the context of deep and loving connection. 

So my third invitation is to support the growth of your child's cup by prioritising emotional and needs awareness in your home. You can do this by sharing about your own feelings and needs (I’m feeling x, I notice that I’m needing y), checking with your child about their feelings and needs (Are you feeling x? I wonder if you are needing y?) and modelling this way of understanding other people in our lives (I wonder if your teacher was feeling x when she did that? Do you think your friend is needing y?)

What if all this sounds way too hard....

Focusing on any one of these areas could make a really big difference to your child's ability to manage the demands of their lives and to bubble over less often and less forcefully. If you are able to do all three, you would be well on your way to supporting your child to grow and mature into a more regulated way of being.

What I would like to emphasise, however, is that none of these approaches are easy or quick fixes; they are really invitations into a new way of living and being with our children that, over time, supports a more harmonious way of life.

Each of these approaches takes time, energy and learning new skills, and you may need more support than you currently have to implement these changes.

And this is where we come to the problem with the most common advice given to parents: that we can support our child to emotionally regulate by keeping ourselves calm. On the face of it, this is completely true. We can indeed support our child’s cup to grow by modelling our own emotional regulation. If our nervous systems are well regulated, we are better able to provide the context for them to learn and mature and to help them co-regulate in even the most challenging moments.  

But "being calm" is not a simple matter of bucking up, trying harder or digging deeper. The painful truth about our children's challenging behaviour is that, very often what we find when we explore deeply is that our child's distress is a mirror reflecting our own lack of capacity and urgent need for support. If you are overstretched, lacking support, or have difficult experiences from your own childhood that you are struggling to process, the advice to "stay calm" is like a cruel joke.  

Just as with our children, we need to take an honest look at our own cups. Is your cup overflowing? Is there too much flowing in? Or is your cup not as large as you would like it to be? If the answer is yes to any of these questions, the first step to helping your child manage their big emotions might be finding the support you need to care for your own cup.