Dealing With Complex Emotions
Hello from your friendly neighborhood behavior analyst who is stuck at home with her kids and going crazy, just like you are. In an effort to support you in any way that I can, this post is going to focus on how to talk about emotions, and how to teach your children to communicate some of the very big, very complicated emotions we are feeling right now.
Depending on the age and functioning level of your child, they may or may not know why they have an extended “vacation” from school. As parents we wonder, how much of this scary situation should we share with our children? How do I impress upon my child the importance of hand washing while not scaring them and giving them nightmares? How do I answer the tough questions my child is beginning to ask?
Let’s first talk about how much to tell our kids.
As a parent, that is completely up to you. What do you think is important to tell them? How can you phrase it in a way that impresses upon the importance of the situation without being too scary? I can’t answer that question for you, but I can help you to have that conversation. There are many resources available about how to speak with your kids about COID-19, but if your child is young and learns best by reading stories with pictures, a social story may be a good resource. Here are links to two great social stories related to COVID-19.
Now, let’s talk about hand washing.
As I mentioned in my post about potty training, hand washing is part of the toileting routine, and is something that should always be done before leaving the restroom at the end of the routine, whether or not your child actually goes to the restroom. By imbedding this into the routine, it becomes a non-negotiable. The same should be happening for other routines throughout your child’s day. When they come inside from playing, they wash their hands. Before they eat, they wash their hands, etc. If we make the change to imbed this into our new daily routines, fighting about it should decrease. The above social stories can help with this as well.
What’s Coronavirus?
Lastly, your child has no doubt noticed a difference in their daily life. Kids are always more perceptive than we tend to realize. “What’s Coronavirus?” shouted my daughter after I said the word in passing to someone about who knows what yesterday, or was it 2 days ago? I have no idea, time and space are blending and morphing into one long drawn out saga in my brain. Please tell me I’m not the only one here…
Our kids are bound to be feeling some big emotions, complicated emotions, emotions they cannot really express or describe to us. To a child this can be a scary and frustrating thing, to feel something big and complex and not be able to tell us about it is not a great situation to be in for our little ones. Here are some ways we can support them, and how we teach simple emotions to children with autism. This method is a great way to teach more complex emotions as well.
An emotion is what we call a “private event”, it happens on the inside of a person’s body. We have no way of really knowing what happiness feels like. Sure, there are clues, when someone is happy, they smile, or giggle, or maybe jump up and down, but we have no way of knowing that when I’m “happy” that the feeling I have inside is the same feeling that you have. When we’re little these emotions are typically labelled for us, someone gives the feeling a name. Once our children have the basic emotions down, it can sometimes be difficult to learn the more complex ones. There are ways we can explicitly teach this.
How do we know the difference between happy, elated, excited, antsy, overjoyed, overcome, anxious, ecstatic? The first thing we can do is to label these emotions in others, teaching our children to recognize the physical markers of complex emotions. When watching TV or a movie with your child, or reading a book with them, point out the emotion you think that character is feeling, so your child can start to put a name to the behaviors they are seeing. Then start to ask your child, how do you think Rapunzel is feeling? I think she’s disappointed that her mother said she can’t leave the tower.
The next step is to play an emotion game. Act out a certain emotion and see if your child can guess how you’re feeling, play this like you play charades, try not to use words so they have to look at your body and your face for clues. This one is super fun these days since we’re all stuck inside and need something to do!
Lastly, when you see your child may be experiencing a complex emotion, label it for them. Tell them they look frustrated, or disappointed, or ecstatic, or worried. Once these emotions are labeled for them when they are feeling them, they can attach that word to the feeling and use it again when that feeling comes up again.
When labeling the emotion you see in your child, be sure to pair it with verbiage along the lines of “it’s ok to feel this way, mommy/daddy feels this way too sometimes.” You can offer things that may make them feel better or offer a hug. It’s ok to allow them to experience this emotion and express it. We may not always be able to help them, or to make that feeling go away, but your child will feel a sense of relief in just being able to effectively communicate what they are feeling on the inside, bringing you into their world a little bit and helping you to empathize with them.
Just as we are feeling some big and complicated emotions, it stands to reason that so are our kids. In helping to support them in communicating these emotions to us, we can help to alleviate some of the fear and frustration that these uncertain times have brought us.
Are you looking for a specific topic? Send me your ideas and needs for blog posts, I’m here to help in any way that I can!