Managing emotions is not an easy matter, especially if emotions, thoughts and actions go their separate ways. If, in addition, as adults, we do not know how to handle or recognize our own emotions that drive us every day, it will be more difficult to educate our children in emotional intelligence and teach them to learn to regulate the emotions they experience in the first person.
That is why in this article we have proposed to bring together the main strategies that can be used by parents to successfully guide their children’s emotions , something very necessary for the mental health of all people and for the improvement of the educational system.
Put them into practice!
Strategies for Raising an Emotional Expert
- Know the basic emotions
The first thing of all would be to learn to be able to recognize the basic emotions that are presented to us every day, which we can classify into emotions of approach and emotions of defense . Approach emotions are so called because they produce us the desire to get closer to our loved ones and to share the well-being that we feel with them, and these emotions are joy, love and curiosity. Defense emotions, on the other hand, are those that cause us discomfort and within which they are: fear, anger, sadness, joy … All of them are basic because they drive us to carry out an action.
- Recognize them when they occur
Once we understand each of these basic emotions, the next thing to do is learn to identify them when they arise. For example, restlessness in a child can express joy, nervous laughter can express fear, wrinkling the face can be a gesture of disgust, a fight between siblings can be an action that implies anger … In addition to identifying these expressions in our children and in ourselves, it is necessary to teach the little ones to name these emotions when they arise.
- Don’t hold back the emotion
We should not make our children feel ashamed for their emotions, and this is a mistake that we make every day with expressions such as “Isn’t it hard for you to be afraid of the dark when you’re so old?” … or “No one will love you if you get angry like that ”. Emotions must be felt, we must be free to experience and express them in order to learn to channel them later. If experiencing these emotions is something that is restricted and self-conscious, there will be no way for children to learn to handle them and, what is worse, they will tend to hide them and not want to experience them firsthand. Big mistake!
- Channel emotions
Emotions set us in motion, for example: anger towards the boss for having fired us can make us feel like hitting or arguing. Channeling this emotion is to control violence and guide the momentum towards positive transformations in our lives, as well as new approaches and professional challenges. In this case the emotion is detected and its experimentation is allowed (we do not hide it), channeling it, incidentally, towards positive behavior. We must not forget that emotion and behavior usually go hand in hand, and that is why it is so important to learn to identify what happens to us at all times.
- Reflect on each emotion
All emotions have a cause and it is important that we reflect on this. Why do I feel that fear, that joy, that anger or sadness? Some emotions are well founded, but others make less sense or do not produce behavior consistent with our way of being. A good example of this are those moments when we are angry and we want to scream and fight with the world, this being an attitude that is actually very far from our education and our desire to actually act. By discovering the reason for our most inconsistent emotions, we can make them disappear little by little.
- Adapt the emotion to the environment
We cannot always express happiness if we are in front of someone who has received sad news, for example, nor can we express disgust at the dislike of the favorite dish prepared by our grandmother. Finding effective strategies for these moments is part of managing emotions and also of good manners.
- Develop empathy
Finally, it is sought that people understand our emotions so that they can help us, and for this we must create empathy. If our child wakes up from a scream in the middle of the night due to a nightmare that scares him, we can tell him about our childhood fears. This would undoubtedly be an excellent way to connect the emotions of our children with ourselves and to turn children, through example, into true emotional experts in the future.
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