Emotions

Some emotions you might identify with are:

▫️Anger
▫️Sadness
▫️Frustration
▫️Happy
▫️Excited
▫️Worried

Sometimes these emotions are BIG, and often hard to cope with. In our children they may look like screaming, kicking, yelling, crying or hyperactive and buzzing around. Knowing how to manage our children’s emotions are often one of the most difficult things that parents come to me with and I often start with this, emotions are normal and necessary.

Humans have evolved for millions of years to be able to detect threat to keep themselves alive. When we do detect threat (or something that is hard and/or scary) our bodies have a physiological response (modern day threat is everyday life challenges, meeting work deadlines, financial stress, for some kids it is going to school, being in social situations, participating in a soccer game).
These physiological responses in our body can cause big emotions, and this often can lead us into the ‘fight or flight’ state.
So, the tail of the ‘Sabre tooth tiger’ is very much true, we have kept ourselves alive over millions of years by having the ability to detect threat in our bodies and move into a state of flight or flight to protect ourselves and once the danger/threat passes moving back into a state of feeling safe and settled.
However, it’s not just the Sabre tooth tiger anymore, in our modern world we detect threat everywhere (life stress!) – even if it isn’t life threatening….and it is often something we must face!
So, what to do? How do we help our children (and ourselves) to manage these challenges in life?
Tune in for the next part about how we do this…..