How as a parent you can tune into your child’s emotional signal

Kids who can understand, recognise and manage their feelings in a healthy manner grow up to be matured, responsible adults with healthy mental health and excellent well-being. 

Your child can experience complex feelings just like adults but they may not be able to express it to you properly. As their parents you can help them to do so in a healthy, appropriate manner. 

Sometimes kids don’t know how they feel so they may act out in other ways. They might show it through facial expressions, body or behaviour. They might act out in a problematic way if they are not taught to manage their feelings in a healthy manner from a very young age. 

Here are some ways you can tune into your child’s emotional signal:

1- Cues

Sometimes a child might find it difficult to express their feelings.

Tune into your child’s emotional signal by checking their body language, listen to what they have to say and observe their behaviour.

Try to figure out what they feel and why and help them identify these emotions so that they can express themselves in a healthy manner.

2- Feeling

Remember that there is a reason behind every child’s behaviour. 

Once you understand why they feel a certain way, you can help them express it.

3- Name 

Help your child to identify and label what they feel.This will allow your child to express how they feel very clearly to you. 

It helps your child to develop an emotional vocabulary that they can use to express and talk about their feelings.

4- Empathy

By labelling their feeling, they will be able to name what others feel as well.You might ask them to reflect on what someone else is feeling.

You can teach them empathy and to identify other’s feelings by sitting them down and teaching them painting or drawing.When they draw facial expressions they can understand how a person looks like when they are upset, angry or happy.

This will give them a better idea on how others might feel in certain situations. 

5- Role model

Kids learn so much by observing and learning from their parents everyday. 

If you want your child to be more in tune with their feelings then you can help them by being a good role model for them to follow.

Show them clearly how you feel when you are in different situations so they learn to feel and express their feelings like you.

6- Praising 

When your child learns to express their feelings, you should encourage and praise them so that they continue to do so in the future.

It teaches them feelings are normal and that it’s okay for them to talk about it. 

7- Listen

More than giving advice to them, learn to listen to them first. 

Sometimes your child might just need to vent out how they feel and the best thing you can do for them is provide them a safe space where they can talk about their feelings without any judgement.

8- Distractions 

Even after teaching your kids to identify their feelings, sometimes they won’t be able to express it anyway.

In these cases, the best thing to do is to distract them and spend some quality time with them doing activities that they love. 

You can read a book to them, play a musical instrument with them or solve a puzzle. 

This will prove to be a nice distraction and once your child understands how they feel you can go back and have a conversation about how they feel.

For more such blogs, please visit our site : https://lilamigosnest.com