Teaching Your Child: How to help your child when emotions are high.
- Alison Hamar
- Mar 28, 2021
- 4 min read
Teaching your child according to their emotional needs (at the moment) is key to their willingness and success.
When you hear statements like:
“I hate learning.”
“This is pointless.”
“I hate you.”
Your child’s emotions often set the scene for learning.
Where do I start?
Start by asking yourself a question before teaching them.
What is their emotional state?
When you are grounded and feeling like your kiddo is in a secure and balanced emotional state, you can start the lesson. Teaching kids how to process their emotions is just as important or more valuable than the academic objective you had in mind.
What emotions to look for?
Fear, sadness, anger, anxiety: are the major ones that will stifle learning. Take the time to help process these and listen and allow your child to feel and work through these emotions first. Put the lesson aside and let this take over and become the objective. Let it take as long as it needs to take! It may not be resolved in the allotted time you had planned for teaching that day. But, no matter, this grounding process must be the priority.
What do balance and willingness look like?
Balance- look for body language and cooperate on what you need them to participate in during the lesson. If you are “co-creating” with them, you are in the flow, and both you as the teacher and your child as the student will be successful in the learning session.
Superpowered: Transform Anxiety into Courage, Confidence, and Resilience is an excellent resource for parents and teachers to help kids with fundamental tools to work through and process their emotions. We can make time and practice these skills tweaking each step for your child. To “tweak” these methods, I suggest writing a journal on what helped this week or each day and keep adding to the “what’s working list.”
There are some tools we have found that work for our students!
BREATH- teach them how to belly breath. This was modified from Wim Hoff a teacher of breathing methods that he discovered from his trauma and self-healing. Mrs. G learned about this method from her competitive surfing students, who needed to learn skills to hold their breath and stay calm when getting tossed by the waves.
MOVE- you can move locations or move their body. The idea of movement can help kids process emotions. For example, if I have a student who is fidgety or in an agitated relocating from the dining room table to outside can really change the mood. The student can get fresh air, sunlight in their eyes, and tune in their five senses:
Hearing
Seeing
Tasting
Touching
Smelling
Focus on experiencing these 5 with the nature around them. Making a game to get their bodies moving is also a tool to allow the emotional sensations to work their way through the child’s body.
Re-STATE- have a restate that journal. This is a tool that can give them a healthy replacement for repetitive thoughts. Parents can help kids train their brains. When we think of the same idea or thought over and over, it becomes a belief. “ I hate math” over and over again actually can put a mental block in the child’s ability to learn new math concepts. Or “I am stupid.” Pay extra attention to the I AM statements. This is absolute ownership - and these I am thoughts hold a lot of power. An example of a restatement journal might be:
Note you are not looking for an A+ super happy, positive statement right off the bat. The restatement needs to resonate with the child. They need to accept it as their own words and something that makes sense to them at the “heart of the matter.”
You can see some examples below.
I am stupid.
It’s ok to make mistakes; it’s how a lot of people learn.
I hate math.
I don’t remember all the steps.
I hate getting answers wrong.
It’s ok to be wrong. I am still good at learning.
What about ways I can work on my patience?
Surrender:
Surrender to the student. Let the child take the lead at this point. Remember the saying, you can take a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Instead of getting frustrated as their teacher and parent, allow them to control when they are in a balanced emotional state for maximizing their learning time.
Trust:
Trust that helping your child process and experience their emotions is a valuable learning objective. Trust that you can help your child. Trust that you show your kids how you process your feelings of fear, anger, anxiety, and sadness and have great power in connecting with your kids. And when you both are ready to get back into the academic objective, trust that the curriculum is working and is worth the time.
Believe:
Believe in them. Believe in the best of their character. Believe that they can do it. Believe that they will become their potential. See the good in them. Visualize your child accomplishing great things that they enjoy. Believe that you are right where you are supposed to be in this moment. Believe that struggle and pain lead to tremendous growth.
Is my child emotionally immature?
We all have our moments. People go through the ups and downs of life. There are red flags to give you a scope of what to look for in age-level emotional maturity.
Suggested article: https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/emotional-maturity
If you’ve tried all this and you’d like some extra help.
We’re always here.
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