Emotional health, says parent coach Krissy Pozatek, means accepting the full range of human emotions, both the painful and the positive. For parents who wish their children nothing but happiness, that can be difficult.
When my daughter was four, she said to me, “Mommy, I’m worried.” She had tension in her voice and fear in her eyes.
Concerned, I asked, “Sweetie, what are you worried about?”
With mounting frustration, she replied, “I don’t know.”
My first instinct as a parent was to get in there and try to fix it, as if I had the power to remove the painful emotion from her body. I wanted to tell her that everything was okay and there was nothing to worry about, then make her some popcorn, put in a movie, and give her an extra snuggle.
But with my background in wilderness therapy and now as a parent coach, I knew I needed to resist my first impulse. Trying to fix kids’ feelings or distract them from their emotions doesn’t work. It can even create more problems, because it encourages kids to look to us for emotional rescue and disrupts their ability to process their feelings naturally.
[For more of this story, written by Krissy Pozatek, go to http://www.lionsroar.com/how-t...ally-resilent-child/]
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