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Key points
- School-age is a time of rapidly changing emotions.
- Parents can help children maintain balance with emotional support and understanding.
This is the third post in a series on children’s emotional development. Here are five ways to support that development during the primary school years:
1. Continue all of the emotional support from the toddler and preschool stages.
Even though children are older now, they still need their emotions to be seen, acknowledged, validated, reflected, and accepted by the adults around them.
When children run into difficulties—at home or at school—parents can help more if they remember that emotions are usually at the root of the troubles. Aggression may be caused by fear or hurt; feelings of shame can cause a lack of remorse; lack of motivation can be caused by sadness or anxiety. When parents recognize the feelings that drive the problem behavior, they are more likely to respond with warmth and empathy rather than harshness and punishment.
2. Be alert to hidden feelings.
Younger children can’t hide their emotions well, even if they want to. But by school age, they are able to suppress feelings, and there are many reasons why they might do that. Peers and adults enforce “rules” about emotional expression, most notably about boys crying or girls being angry.
Parents may respond to feelings with dismissal: “Don’t be a crybaby… You have no reason to be scared." Or parents may react to feelings with rejection: “Go to your room until you can have a smile on your face… I can’t hear you when you talk like that." Help children bring their feelings out of hiding instead of giving them more reasons to suppress them.
It is easy to think children are fine if you don’t tune in closely to their emotional state. I read an article recently about a father who was asked by a reporter whether his son was anxious about school. The father said yes. The reporter asked how long he had known his son was anxious. The father said he had known since that morning when he asked his son about school stress and anxiety because he knew he was about to be interviewed on the topic. Before he asked, he would have said that he knew his son’s emotions and that everything was fine.
3. Promote deeper knowledge of how emotions work.
Emotional knowledge is not just knowing the names of feelings. Emotions need to be known deeply, not just named or understood intellectually. The primary school years are a great time for parents to share that knowledge with their children. You can explain that all feelings are natural and normal, and they give us important information. Feelings contain a physical component, such as shaking with fear or blushing with embarrassment. And feelings have urges, such as the urge to kick someone—or kiss them.
4. Be a good emotional role model.
Children are easily flooded or overwhelmed by their emotions. At the same time, children get frequent messages to suppress, hide, deny, or ignore their feelings. In other words, to dam their flow of emotions.
The best way parents can help children face and feel their emotions is to be good role models for healthy emotional responses. It isn’t fair to ask children to take emotional steps that we don’t take ourselves. To assess your status as an emotional role model, you can ask yourself these questions:
- Do your children see you sitting with painful or uncomfortable feelings, or do they see you screaming or withdrawing?
- Do your children see you face your fears, or do you avoid things that scare you?
- Do they see your sad tears flow, as well as your tears of joy?
- Do they see you make things right when you’ve made a mistake instead of angrily blaming others or being lost in shame and guilt?
- Do they hear you describe how you wanted to express anger in a destructive way, such as kicking your boss, but you knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, so you found other, healthier outlets for your anger?
5. Have regular feelings time.
A great way to pay caring attention to school-age children’s emotions is to have regular feelings time. This is often best in the evening before sleep when children are more open to their emotions.
The parent begins feelings time by asking, “Does anyone have any leftover feelings from the day?”
If the child doesn’t have any, the parent can offer one, such as, “I was really frustrated at homework time today, and I could see you were frustrated too. I still feel a little of that frustration in my body. I am going to shake it out (then the parent can give a funny little body shake). Oh, I feel better now. Do you have any leftover feelings?”
Feelings time helps children recover their emotional balance and experience calm, contentment, engagement, and joy. Feelings time also builds connection and helps parents and children reconnect if a connection has been disrupted.
