Parenting Blog

“I'm afraid that if I continue to parent my son as I did when he was a baby (meeting his needs), he won't learn to control his emotions." -- Joanna

It's true that when little ones get to about 14 months, parenting gets more complicated.  Babies have needs that parents aspire to meet whenever possible.  Kids have wants, which are their strategies to meet their needs.  We still try to meet kids' needs, of course -- but we can't, and shouldn't, meet all their wants. That's where parents have to get creative, or maybe where the real parenting begins!

But this fear so many of us have about whether our child will learn to control his emotions is, I think, where we start to go wrong as parents.  Most of us assume that when kids stop being so easily controlled, we have to stop giving them unconditional love.  We start putting conditions on our love in order to control them. We think we're changing their behavior but in actuality we're withdrawing the support they need to thrive.

And this is all based on a mistaken idea of how kids learn to control emotions. Denying emotion or making ourselves wrong for having emotions doesn't help us control them.

Here's how a child actually learns to control his emotions:

1. We accept ALL of his feelings, and help our child feel safe enough to express them, even while we limit his actions (for instance, he can be as mad as he wants, but he can't hit.)

2. We resist all forms of discipline, which are essentially punishment (such as time outs, or consequences.)  Instead, we meet our child's needs, including her need for a deep nurturing connection with us, which eliminates most "misbehavior."  Then, we help our child stay on track with positive, respectful guidance, help processing emotion, and scaffolding (which just means that we help them to learn the skills until they can do it themselves.)

3. We model healthy emotional self-management by resisting our own little "tantrums" such as yelling and instead choosing to speak respectfully to our child and everyone else.  (This is the one most of us are still working on!)

When kids feel good, they "act good."  Kids who are parented this way turn out to be respectful, considerate, delightful kids, right through the teen years.  They learn to "control" their emotions because they have a healthy emotional life, not because they have been humiliated, made wrong, or forced to be untrue to themselves in some way.

If you're still working on "controlling" your own "tantrums," you'll be glad to hear that your kids will almost certainly be better at managing their emotions than you are.  Why?  You're doing the hard work now to help them learn how!

 Join me live at noon ET on the Great Parenting Show TODAY  to hear more about how kids develop the ability to manage their emotions.

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