Raising emotionally healthy children who will live their BEST life..
My 8-year old’s face was lit as bright as our Christmas tree as she leaned over her sister in eager anticipation. I have never seen a child as excited about a gift in my entire life.
The most surprising part? It was a gift she was giving.
I’d say it was around my daughter’s third birthday when it became clear we were in over our heads.
Between unmet expectations that a child will always listen to their parents and the harsh reactions and discipline that flowed from our frustration, we felt like we were hitting our heads against a brick wall with our fierce pig-tailed little lady.
Tornadoes. Pre-natal hormones. A strong willed child. A strong willed toddler.
Some things in nature are a force to be reckoned with.
Want to see a confident, experienced parent drop to their knees in desperation? Look for someone parenting a strong willed child. The strong willed child is excellent at launching great parents into full-on emotional breakdown mode with behaviors such as defiance, oppositionality and intense emotions.
“I didn’t have fun at recess today mom, Annie said we weren’t friends anymore this year, so now we’re not friends anymore”.
These were the words of my 6-year-old daughter on her first day of the First grade. She and Annie had been best friends the year before, but it appeared Annie had grown close with another classmate over the summer.
As I inquired about how school went that first day, my daughter’s exterior appeared tough, but I could tell underneath she was crushed.
Witnessing our child get hurt by a friend or peer is hard to see as a parent. Maybe it’s because, on a certain level, we can feel the pull of that basic human need to be liked and accepted, and want nothing more for our child.
While witnessing our child having friendship problems isn’t easy, it is a normal and healthy way for your child to learn life-long emotional coping, conflict resolution, and communication skills.
Let’s talk about an easy 6 step plan to not only help your child navigate their friendship problems but also to prepare them to successfully deal with relationship conflict in the future.
This step could be the easy one, if it weren’t for all that pesky emotional baggage we carry around as parents. When you see your child experience social pain, it brings back issues and challenges from your own past. When the emotional area of our brain gets activated we are more apt to engage in any number of unhelpful behaviors, including jumping in prematurely, interrupting, offering unsolicited advice and trying to control/fix the outcome of the situation.
Being aware of the emotions popping up for you and holding back when the urge to ‘fix’ sets in, will allow you to keep your lips sealed until your child has had a chance to fully explain. When we are mindful of our emotions we’ll know when the right time to respond comes.
This piece is utterly important. Why? Not only will empathizing with your child strengthen your relationship, feeling heard and understood is the conduit of moving your child from their emotion brain (amygdala) to their more rational problem-solving brain (pre-frontal cortex). It’s also the key piece that humans need to go from emotionally stuck to feeling heard and understood which allows us to move on and work through the situation.
Dr. Brene Brown defines empathy succinctly and effectively “empathy means to feel with other people”.
When we empathize we can see things from our child’s point of view and provide a safe space free of judgment or criticism.
Great questions are the beginning of great conversations. When you approach your child’s situation with an open and curious mind you can ask questions that will help you to gain insight to what’s underneath her struggles and how to get to the heart of the situation. Some great open-ended questions to ask are:
What bothered you most about what happened?
How did it feel when that happened? How do you think they may have been feeling?
If you could go back and have a ‘do-over’ what would you do differently?
Far and away the best thing you can do as a parent when helping your child solve friendship problems is to give your child the skills to initiate and engage in active problem-solving. Working through our emotions is key, but we also don’t want to stay stuck in the land of ‘the feels’ forever.
By initiating a conversation on how your child wants to move forward gets them to critically think about what might make things less stressful next time their friend leaves them out or takes something without asking.
Someday, my honest hope is that communication and problem-solving skills are universally taught in schools (shocking coming from a therapist I know). How can we be shocked to see children as young as preschoolers engaging in relational aggression when we don’t give our kids the framework they need to solve friendship problems?
Your kids love hearing stories about you versus getting lectured. Discuss a time you had to work something out with a co-worker or sibling and the related challenges/successes that followed. A great mini-framework to offer your child covers basic communication and conflict resolution skills:
Despite any uncomfortable feelings you may have regarding your child’s peer conflicts, it’s essential you step back and allow your child the time and space to proceed as they wish with their peer relationships.
My daughter continued to talk about Annie and their severed friendship for weeks. I had listened, empathized and offered feedback but my daughter still didn’t have the confidence to approach her old friend.
Then one day after school she got into the van and nonchalantly mentioned, “oh mom I played with Annie in gym, we talked about it and now we’re friends again.” It certainly wasn’t on my timetable (Annie’s family are good family friends of ours), but she did put into place the important concepts we talked about when she was fully ready.
About Angela Pruess LMFT
Welcome! I’m Angela, a Licensed Children’s Mental Health Professional, Positive Parenting coach, and mom to Spirited Kids that help me learn and grow (grey hairs) every single day. I believe EVERY child deserves to live their BEST life and that emotional health is the magic key to lifelong success and happiness. Read more about me and the Parents with Confidence manifesto.
Mornings have always been a struggle for our family.
First off, this mom is NOT a ‘morning person’. She is more like an ‘if you breathe too loudly or look in my direction for too long you will feel my wrath’ kind of person when the sun is rising up in the sky.
I’m working on it.
Because of the fact I’m not running on all cylinders in the mornings, getting the kids organized and out the door with positive moods and spirits intact has been a challenge to say the least.
Not to deflect any blame here, but I also attribute some of our morning routine stress to my children’s young brains. Many kids struggle with transitions (aka morning routine) because the area of their brain responsible for executing these tasks is still under major development.
Plus there’s the issue of having them stop something they’re presently enjoying and want to do (playing, sleeping ect) to start doing something they have to do, which usually isn’t exactly a party for any of us.
After years of raised voices, high tension and our mini-van peeling into the school parking lot I decided it was time to do things differently. I was making things harder then they needed to be, and making some changes would be well worth sending everyone to school feeling confident and loved.
I also realized my kids were older now and I was still doing a lot of the things for them in the mornings, which not only served to stress me out but took away valuable opportunities for my kids to develop personal independence, responsibility, and self-care.
It was time for a change, and the truth is, we started with the basics.
So often we adults assume our kids know most of the things about life…when really they don’t! Honestly, we just can’t remind our kids enough in regards to what expectations are.
Just as we get frazzled with the stresses of life and forget tasks on our to-do lists, our kids need consistent reminders of what they need to do to get out the door in the morning, and how they are expected to do it.
Lay out the morning routine often, and in detail, allowing them to ask questions afterward. S-P-E-L-L it out for them leaving little room for confusion.
I’ve heard this a million times, yet this was the first year my family actually got our behinds in gear to do it! This is hands down the best way to stop yelling at kids in the morning. One example that goes a long way to ease morning stress is choosing a week’s worth of outfits on Sunday nights.
We have our kids pick out all 5 outfits in full and put them away in a designated drawer to grab from each day.
We also started having our kids make their own lunches this year and we make them all on Sunday night. I am kicking myself for not starting this years ago! The kids love it and it let’s me off the hook in the mornings, big time!
We do all their lunches on Sunday night and boom- we’re set for the entire week! Anything else you can do the night before, do it.
With all the shift and change of the world around them, children thrive with consistency. When it comes to giving our child a leg up on successful mornings, keeping expectations the same each day makes it easier for them to manage their time and space.
When they have a predictable routine and expectations they are able to internalize the flow of things and utilize less energy completing the tasks. Their neurons get used to traveling the same path allowing them to utilize the brain’s amazing ability to go on ‘autopilot’.
Every morning I throw on my knee-socks and run up and down the stairs at 5 am while listening to the ‘Rocky’ theme song and throwing back shots of espresso. Well, not exactly, but most parents can attest to the fact that in the mornings we are in ‘go-mode’.
The overwhelming mental to-do list for the day surges through our minds leading us to easily fall into the role of ‘drill sergeant’ with our child. I think we can all agree that nobody wants to wake up this way and that instead, starting the day with a mindful moment of connection is much more likely to get things moving in the right direction.
Parents often don’t realize that night time is a long period of separation for a child from their parent (yes your child’s negative behaviors at bedtime may stem from separation anxiety), so taking even a few minutes to lay with them, or sit beside them at breakfast and be present with them gives them the re-connection they need to move forward and accept direction throughout the morning.
As a child therapist, the first thing I tell parents with kids who struggle with transitions and following a routine is to use visuals!
Visuals make information concrete for kids, making it easier for them to process (comprehend and commit to memory), compared to auditory input (ie you nagging them).
Your child is still building their executive functioning muscles (working memory, motor planning, and organization ect) and visuals will help automate things for them.
Another resource that falls under the category of visuals is a visual timer. We just got this one for the bathroom and kitchen counter, and being able to see the time physically going down is extremely helpful for the kids to be accountable for their own time.
I could be shooting myself in the foot here, but as of now, mornings are going WAY better around our household. Turns out, my kids really enjoy not being nagged all morning long and having me approach them warmly without immediately trying to control and manage them.
They do still need prompting at times, but I’m confident that as they grow and we make these practices habit they’ll require less follow up from their dad and I (which translates to more coffee time, people).
On top of teaching self-sufficiency, the best part of the new morning habits is sending the kids to school on a positive note, feeling confident I’ve sent them off connected and prepared, in hopes of giving them the best possible start to their day.
Other articles you’d love:
2 Easy Ways to Stop Power Struggles and get Kids to Listen
Positive Parenting 101: The Ultimate Beginners Guide
How to Make Your Family a Safe Haven from the World
When it comes to teaching our child emotional regulation skills in challenging situations, the majority of parents fall victim to the same oversight- and it’s a biggie.
Just by the dejected look on my three-year-olds face, I can tell what’s to come before the sounds start to come out of his tiny mouth.
We’re at a playdate with friends, and I’m happily nested on the couch chatting with another mom about who’s gotten the least sleep in the past week when I hear the faint sounds of whimpering emerge.
Many girls coming into my office are high achievers, spreading their time between athletics, community and a bustling social life. For all practical purposes, it would seem their future college résumé will write itself. However, these qualities don’t impress me much.
“With butter! cut off the crust please!”
My 8-year-old daughter sits at the kitchen counter slowly relishing the last bits of her third piece of toast.
As I momentarily ponder how someone so small can consume so much toast, I glance up at the clock to see that once again the morning minutes have escaped us. I alert my daughters that it’s time to go to school, prompting them to please pack-up their backpacks and get their jackets on.
Stuck.
It was a feeling I had grown all too familiar with in my early years of parenting.
It wasn’t on account of motivation, as I was always determined to be the very best mom I could.
It wasn’t on account of not trying, as I certainly used every trick in the conventional parenting playbook- timeouts- check, threats-check, punishments-check.
