Showing our emotions to our children
Why might we find ourselves afraid to be human in front of our children?
Have you ever had a really hard day - the kind of day that at one point in your life would have left you bursting into tears as soon as you arrived in the door, maybe throwing yourself on the couch and really feeling the emotional weight of whatever had happened? Maybe you remember seeking comfort in those moments, from a partner, family member, friend, or even a pet? Perhaps you had a sense of feeling minded and cared for in your vulnerable emotional state, and there being a sense of comfort in that even as things were still hard.
Does that look different now that you are a parent?
Do you find yourself ‘holding it together’ during those difficult moments? Maybe waiting until the kids go to bed before you allow the tears to come or seek comfort around your own emotional needs?
Maybe you do let the tears come (or they come despite your best efforts to stop them), and you find yourself quickly wiping them away with a bright reassurance, ‘Mummy is fine’.
How we navigate our own emotional experiences can be complicated as parents. Many parents we meet tell us that they are concerned about a potential negative impact of their child seeing them upset, or angry, or scared.
We understand this concern. And truly, the interaction between parents’ and children’s emotional worlds is complex. There are some circumstances where children’s experiences of their parents’ emotions may impact upon their wellbeing, such as in the case where a child grows up in a home with frequent, sustained patterns of high expressed emotion (e.g. patterns of very intense emotional reactions).
However, this is very different from a the experience of child who grows up with a moderate, buffered level of exposure to normal human affect in response to day to day stressors.
What do we mean by that?
Well, essentially we mean a child who grows up with a parent who shows their humanness from time to time!
A ‘human’ in this case being someone who sometimes gets tired, sad, snappy, anxious, jealous, lonely, tearful, scared, irritable……..and on the list could go.
When we show our normal human emotions to our children, we are doing just that - normalising those emotions. We are showing that emotional responses, even those involving a degree of distress, are universal and part of the fabric of daily human existence for most of us.
Of course, the ‘parent’ part of us can still be there during these moments checking in with ourselves (in as much as we can during a heightened moment!), ‘what are they seeing right now? How can I support them to understand this?’ We can model for our children how we engage with our emotions, how we seek support, how we support ourselves, and how we make sense of the way we are feeling in relation to whatever may be happening for us internally or environmentally. We can even reflect later on what it was like to feel that way, and if needed offer some reassurance to our children at that point about how we are feeling now.
And this powerful tool can act as a blueprint for our children, shaping their understanding of how emotion shows up in so many ways, no matter who you are. It demonstrates that there is no perfect way to respond to that emotion, but that when we make space for it and maybe even welcome it, we can find ourselves with far more choices about how to respond.
So if you are feeling afraid to let your emotions show in front of your children, or you are feeling guilty because they showed up whether you wanted them to or not - take a breath right now and give yourself grace. It’s ok to be human, even in front of your children.
