What to do when your child is highly emotional
- Focus on You – stop, breathe, check in with yourself – are you able to calm yourself? You need to try your best to remain calm so that you can attend to your child’s emotion without adding your own. This might mean taking some deep breaths or even going outside for a moment (if your child is safe).
- Ensure safety – if your child is engaging in unsafe behaviour, you may need to approach them calmly and ask them to hold your hands or you may offer to hug them. If they are receptive to it, you could redirect them into another room or outside.
- Validate and connect – as you approach your child, it is important for them to know that you understand how angry they are. By hearing what your child is saying (or what their behaviour is saying) you are giving the message that you care and understand, which in itself can have a calming effect. This might sound like; “That is really hard for you” or “You are really upset….I can see that by what you are doing” or “This is touch, I can see that”.
- Accept it as it is – even though you might not agree with why your child is upset, you need to accept that they are. Trying to quickly change their emotion usually does not work and can often make things worse.
Consider someone trying to suddenly change how you feel e.g. “Oh just calm down, you’ll be grand” or “why are you so fed up? Just snap out of it”.
So, instead of: “why are so fed up, come on, snap out of it and watch some TV with me”, you could try: “you really are so upset aren’t you; I can see that. I’m not sure why – maybe you can tell me and I will try my best to understand”.
- Normalise – explain to your child that it is ok to feeling any feelings at all. Everyone gets big strong feelings from time to time. What matters the most is what they do with this feeling.
“It’s ok to get very angry and it’s ok to tell me that you are angry. You can even say to me: “Mum I am soooo mad at your right now” and I will say “I understand, now let’s do something about this”.
In the above statement, you are normalising the emotion and also suggesting a way of managing it (other than shouting or other less helpful behaviours that you child might be engaging in).
- Regulate – When a child is overwhelmed with emotion, their ‘feeling’ brain (midbrain structures/reptilian brain) is typically highly active, and so they are unable to engage in rational thinking or behaviour.
In order to help a child increase the activation of their thinking brain (where they should be able to access more rational behaviour) you can help them to engage in a number of behaviours that typically soothe the midbrain/feeling brain such as: Walking, dancing, running, drumming, singing, tapping, breathing exercises, music and movement more generally (e.g. yoga poses, stretching, gentle swaying or rocking).
It is important that you pick just one or two of these activities to try at a time so as not to overwhelm your child. Ultimately, you want your child to be able to access these activities themselves when they know they are about to become overwhelmed with an emotion. This will require a lot of practice with a parent first though.
In more details these strategies might look like this:
- Walking: with headphones; with another ‘safe’ person that the child feels comfortable with; walking with a pet; walking by the sea; walking while counting or talking about their preferred topic of interest.
- Running: to a specific target; round the garden as part of a game; running with a dog or pet; running uphill.
- Drumming: have a drum in a place that is separate to the main living area (out in shed, in utility, in a calm down space in the garden).
- Tapping: your knees from left to right; tapping while focusing on breathing.
- Singing: a favourite song; singing with someone in the family; humming; putting on the sound track of their favourite film or TV programme.
- Breathing: matching an adult’s breathing for three breaths; ask them to imagine blowing out the anger/sadness; ‘smell the hot chocolate, blow the hot chocolate’; using Spotify or a relaxation app and allowing the child to pick a breathing exercise.
Please note that these are not ‘distraction’ techniques as you have already acknowledged and validated how the child feels and now you are trying to help them work through that feeling by engaging them in something that will help them to activate their ‘thinking brain’ and they can feel more calm and centred.
Dr. Rebecca Quin, Principal Clinical Psychologist, BA, MSc, D Clinc Psych, C.Psychol.PsSI M4603