In our last article we identified that a vital tool to develop healthy emotional intelligence in a child is the ability to simply allow him to experience his negative emotions. But “allowing” is not always a simple task.

This week we will address four main components and one bonus component that will enhance our success in this process. The components are:

1)      Understanding the importance of allowing, 2)Emotional Identification  2A) Mimicking the Emotion (bonus), 3)Validation, and 4) Mindfulness

1)      Understanding the importance of allowing– Permitting a child to experience the negative emotion enables him to properly process the emotion, until it actually subsides and fixes itself.  Metaphorically, it is equivalent to baking a cake at 350 degrees over a prescribed half-hour period.  Conversely, if we raise the oven temperature to 500 degrees in order to bake it “quickly,” we risk burning the outside of the cake while leaving the inside raw.  Similarly, the mind needs time to process and “get over” the shock, anger, disappointment, hurt or any other distress which follows an upsetting occurrence.  This occurs when the child accepts the reality of what happened as a fact through observation, and does not attempt to change it.  If the child is denied the ability to process the emotion, his mind has not learned how to finish “baking” the emotion.  Like a raw cake, a raw emotion can drip all over, leaving a sticky situation behind.  The next time that same emotion is raised, the mind has no way to cope with it, leaving a mess of anxiety, suppression, avoidance or a number of other neurological issues.  If rather than accepting the reality the child relentlessly attempts to “change” the emotion, he gets “stuck” in his anxiety to unsuccessfully try to change it.

2)      Emotional Identification- Tuning in to which emotion is likely being expressed can really help the child process it in a more wholesome fashion.  Besides the benefit of putting a name to the emotion which develops emotional awareness, it also provides an identity to the actual physical sensation that accompanies that particular emotion.  You see, each person experiences a different physical feeling with their various emotions. That is how we can identify if we are feeling sad (we might feel choked up in our throat) or anxious (maybe a pit in our stomach).  If, for instance, we point out to the child that his experience was “disappointing,” the next time he has a similar physical sensation he identifies “disappointment,” to which his previous experiences with it now provide him with a tool with which to cope.  He thus remains emotionally “regulated” and needs not fly off the handle.  Parenthetically, individuals with poor emotional intelligence can often act inappropriately in social settings which arouse emotions. Since these emotions are “foreign” and uncomfortable, they often act inappropriately such as laughing at a funeral or becoming giddy when they are being observed.

3)      Validation- I must stress, we do not validate negative/inappropriate behaviors.  A child hitting or speaking inappropriately to a Rebbe due to an injustice is never valid.  However, we do validate the distress that may have caused the child to hit the Rebbe.  Validation is the act of verbally displaying that we understand that a given situation evoked an emotion in the child.  It is not relevant whether it makes sense to us or we agree with it.  We simply understand that it happened.  It is the message that, “I understand you were clearly very angry at your Rebbe for what he did.”  We are best off if we save the “But you may not hit a Rebbe/be disrespectful to a mother,” (the “content”) for a later time, when the child is not in the emotion.  Perhaps we will address this more in a future article.

Let’s use practical applications, using the examples we left off with in the last article as exercises.

“Waa! Mimi’s bike scratched me!”  By now we’ve learned that of primary importance is the emotion, not the content, and we also know that we are going to allow the child to experience the emotion without pacifying or dismissing it, so that his mind learns how to cope with it.  And we now know that we can actually verbalize to the child that it is ok for him to feel it!  Ready?  Let’s go.

Using what we learned, let’s identify the emotions.  First, the greatest indicator of an emotion in this sentence is the exclamation point (!).  We hear a wail.  A cry.  Pain.  Along with the physical pain, there is likely an emotion, such as sadness, along with a secondary emotion such as fear (if the child doesn’t know whether there is real physical damage to the pain), anger (if he told her ten times not to ride near him), or any other emotion that might have developed throughout the particular ordeal.

Now we are ready to validate the emotion, and we can enhance the effect by mimicking the child’s emotion (either tone or facial expression) so that he feels we are really in the pain with him.  We will assume in this particular example emotion with the physical pain was fear.  Here’s the response:

“Oh, that’s scary, I wonder if anything is broken…”

Another example:

Child: “I am NOT doing this homework, it is too long!!”

Parent: “I can’t blame you for feeling angry about having so much homework.  It is really difficult.”

Child: “Ugh. I hate this supper!”

Parent: “It really IS annoying to have a supper that you don’t like every week!”

(Remember, telling someone “It MUST be upsetting“, is not the optimal way to validate and very often backfires.  The implication of the word “must” is that of imposition, such as “You MUST leave this room now,” even if it is only a subconscious implication.)

4)      Mindfulness- This is a fabulous skill that’s intricacies go beyond the scope of this article.  Suffice it to say, however, that for the purpose of this article mindfulness will be used to be able to observe our child in his emotional state, yet not to be inspired by his emotion.

This is best demonstrated in the examples from our last article, “Ma, you’re so mean, you NEVER let me go to Chaya’s house!”  And, “It’s YOUR fault that I missed my bus this morning!”

Although in all the examples us parents will likely be swept into some emotion and need to be mindful of our responses and reactions, those that accuse us directly are the most difficult to avoid responding in a defensive tone (which would address content rather than emotion) .

So if we respond, “What?! I NEVER let you go to Chaya’s?” Or, “Why should I let you go if you are so disrespectful?!”  We are creating resistance and raising the emotion even more.  A better response would be, “I understand how upsetting that is, and I feel really bad that it is.”  (There is no need to reiterate that she cannot go to Chaya’s, as it is implicit in the response.)  And remember, we will explain that it is inappropriate to be disrespectful when things are calm.

Moshe Norman is a Licensed Social Worker in Lakewood, NJ, and specializes in parent-child relationships by helping parents identify and develop their child’s lagging skills.  He can be reached at [email protected]