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POSITIVE PARENTING
By Dr. Dick Hardel
Metro Lutheran
Michael Sherer, Editor

Emotional Wellness

No matter what age we may be, it is difficult to clearly express what we are feeling to another person. This makes parent/child communication even more difficult because the child does not understand the feeling, nor has words to express the feeling and the parent often does not have the ability to understand what is not expressed. So both the child, struggling with a problem, and the parent, trying to care, want to resolve the issue quickly, but often end up in total frustration. This frustration adds to the messiness of familying.

Feelings are neither right nor wrong. Feelings are simply ours or someone else’s. Often in relationships with our children we adults think it is our duty to solve our children’s problems. Instead we are to love them and guide them as they learn to express and respond to deep feelings. There is a direct connection between how kids feel and how they behave. As parents, we are to help our children feel well by accepting their feelings. It is very easy for parents to become trapped into judging the feelings of the child and trying to resolve the problem quickly.

Parents don’t usually accept their children’s feelings. Parents often say, “You shouldn’t feel that way, Jennifer.” “Stop your crying, now! There is no reason for you to be upset!”

Such denial of feelings can confuse and enrage the child. The child then fails to learn about the feeling and also learns not to trust her feelings. Without knowing it, the parent communicates to the child that she should not trust her own perception, but to fully rely on her dad’s perception.

Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, in the new edition of their bestselling book How To Talk so Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, provide helpful hints for parents to help their children with feelings.

• Listen with full attention to the child. One of the best gifts a parent or other care-giving adult can give a child or youth is their full attention.
• Acknowledge the child’s feelings with a word—“Oh” . . . “Mmm” . . . “Ahh”. . . “I See.” This helps the parent stay focused on the child’s feelings without denial or giving advice.
• Give the child’s feelings a name. Often the naming of a feeling moves the feeling from subjective to objective. Finding a descriptive word lessens fear of the unknown. Naming the feeling helps both the child and the parent.
• Give them their wishes in fantasy. “Billy, I wish I had a magic wand that could make it possible for us to travel to Disney World for a….How long would you like to be there? Three weeks! How about six weeks! And we would be the first in line for every attraction and ride. And all the food would be free, and…what else could happen, Billy!”

Wellness is not the lack of illness but rather to have God centered in every aspect of life no matter what surrounds a person or doesn’t surround a person. Assisting children to wonder where God is in the midst of their deep feelings helps them live well emotionally.

FAMILY ACTIVITIES

1. As a family, make a list of all the feeling words that you know. Carefully explain the meaning of each word.
2. Cut up the list of feeling words into individual words and put them in a bowl. At a family gathering time, each person picks a feeling word and without speaking the word, helps the other family members guess the feeling by only using facial expressions.
3. A variation of activity 2 would be to act out the feeling.
4. For family devotion time read a series of Psalms and describe the feelings of the Psalmist.
5. A variation of activity 4 would be to read Old Testament and New Testament Bible stories and underline the feeling words in the story and discuss the feelings of the people in the Bible story.