Caring for My Child’s Emotional Health

Kristen Bailey

As parents, we are very careful to care for our children when they are sick or struggling with problems at home or at school. Sometimes it’s easier to support our children with these visible factors than it is to help them with their internal struggles. Our children’s emotional health is a high priority that we are responsible for as parents.
As parents, we are the best equipped to prepare our children for facing positive and negative emotions and their impacts.
Our children’s emotional health, like their stress levels, their happiness, their joy, or their sadness, effects their educational abilities, their physical health and wellness, and ultimately the course of their life. It is scientifically proven that long periods of stress increase the risk of illness, just like long periods of sadness can become dangerous depression. Our coping skills, or the ways that we choose to deal with our emotions, can give us a better or worse future.
How can we best support our children in coping with their positive and negative emotions in a healthy way? A few easy ways we can help our children grow into emotionally healthy adults are by building connections, knowing ourselves, listening, and learning.
Building connections with our children. Just like we take care of our children when they are sick, or we monitor their condition when they have a fever, we can take the time to monitor our children’s emotions by spending time with them. Take family trips, eat dinner together at the table, spend extra time doing activities that help you get to know your child as an individual. Seeing your child when they are happy makes it very clear when they are sad. It’s easier to establish a healthy emotional foundation when we take the time to create one together as a family.
Knowing ourselves and our emotions as parents. Teaching children to be emotionally healthy requires them to know how to name their emotions and to process them. A big piece of emotional health is the ability to say, “I am feeling ___________.” After identifying the feeling, children can better understand why they feel this way, sit with the emotion for as long as they need, and then release the emotion as they work toward peace, or a solution. Naming your emotions and understanding them is hard work that needs to be modeled by parents first. How can we teach our children something if we do not use it ourselves? As parents, it is a great benefit for our children when we learn how to name and experience our own emotions. We can say, “I feel angry because ______,” or “I feel happy because________,” and then allow ourselves to fully experience that emotion before releasing it. Our children learn that “bottling up” or hiding our emotions is unhealthy, because we show them the healthy way to express and release them instead. We train them how to communicate what they are feeling when we practice doing it ourselves.
Listening to our children. Another great way to learn our children’s emotional state is to listen to them. As parents, we must take the time to ask questions, to understand our child’s reality, and to encourage them to name their emotions within that context. As we listen to our children, we can carefully coach them along to understand what they are feeling and the healthiest way to cope with those emotions, either by talking about them, responding to them, or releasing them.
Learning our children. Finally, we can’t know how to help someone if we don’t truly know them. Sometimes problems are obvious, like catching a cold. Sometimes we can see the symptoms of our child’s struggles, pressures from friends or school, through their actions and emotions. Other times, it is beneficial for us to really spend time getting to know our child so we can understand when they are having trouble processing their emotions.
There are a lot of life lessons and challenges in our children’s lives. As they grow, they learn the best ways to deal with their emotions as adults. Just like we parents protect our children when they are sick, we want to make sure we are training them to be healthy in their emotions and coping mechanisms for the future.