Durrant – opportunities to teach

Learning about emotions is one of the biggest challenges for children. I think if we remember that they’re born into the world without even a sense of self, that to expect them, by the age of two or three when they’ve just developed some language and they’re just starting to understand about relationships to expect them to be able to understand their emotions, reflect on them, control them, plan for them, is just absolutely unrealistic. And yet that’s a situation in which children are often physically punished: for tantrums, for crying, for getting angry, for yelling—and really what these children are demonstrating is that they have emotions just like we do, but we have decades of experience in how to manage them.  

What we need to do is draw on those experiences and have a more constructive and more competent response than the child. So, if we respond at the two-year-old’s level of yelling and hitting, we’re not doing anything to make use of that opportunity to teach them ways of managing their emotions. We don’t want to kill their emotions. Emotions are an important part of being human–and expression and experience and communication and enjoyment—but we do need to help them understand what they are. 

A young child who’s having a tantrum or having a ‘melt down’ is going through a storm–an emotional storm– and they’re as frightened of it as they are angry. They’re really scared of what their bodies can do to them. And so if a parent, the parent who they most depend on and trust and need for their security then hits them, or yells at them and escalates that storm, the parent has really violated the child’s trust and sense of security and they’ve also missed their greatest opportunity to help that child start to learn about emotion.  

So if the parent can stay calm, and can provide a secure base for the child while they’re going through this and then later when things have settled down to be able to help them label the emotions they felt. To show the child they feel that way sometimes too. To talk about what they do when they feel that way. To communicate that they’re there to help them, they’re there to provide a safety net for them when things have gone just out of control in the child’s mind and heart. That they’ll be there to help them through it and that they will help them learn to manage that over time. So what I think is ironic is that many situations that we call ‘disciplinary’ situations we often link that to punishment situations when really disciplinary situations are teaching opportunities. So a situation where a child is saying ‘no’ or is crying or screaming or throwing himself on the floor and pounding, that if a parent thinks of that as a disciplinary situation and they automatically then link to punishment, they’re going to come in and probably lose that opportunity whereas if they think of a disciplinary situation as an opportunity to teach, this is a window of opportunity to help move my child along the developmental pathway to my long-term goals. Long term goals often include things like being able to control anger or express it constructively, to communicate clearly, to cope with sadness and disappointment, to be able to delay gratification, to be able to express emotion in a way that doesn’t harm other people. And so to get to that long-term goal, parents need to seize these early moments to start giving that information and support and teaching to the child.