how to help our children through difficult times
We all want the best for our children, and it is very difficult for us as parents to see our children suffer. When they were babies, if they were in pain, scared, or emotionally hurt we stepped in immediately to soothe them, and take the pain away. We controlled the environment to ensure that anything that caused them difficulty was removed.
As our children get older, and head towards early and later adolescence, this becomes more difficult. They experience situations beyond our scope of control. This is difficult for us as parents. We feel some a sense of control at being able to remove difficulties for our kids, and we feel helpless when we can’t. This comes from a good place, we only want our children to be happy, but it can lead to unhappiness, theirs and ours, once we realise that ultimately we can’t control the weather around our children.
There are two tools that I would like to suggest in helping ourselves as parents, and our children through difficult times. The first is to help them to widen their perception of the situation, and the second is to understand that one of the best ways we can help our children during difficult times is to first ensure that we have worked on our own response to the situation.
During difficult times, it is natural to only focus only on the negative. We tend to give heavier weighting to negative experiences than positive ones. Honing in on the negative helped us to survive when we were being chased by sabre tooth tigers thousands of years ago. What makes it harmful in modern times is that it can eclipse anything positive that is also occurring, making it harder to see anything other than the negative.
With our children, how we can help with this is by not minimising the importance of the difficulty they are experiencing, we recognise it and acknowledge it, but we help them to widen their perception of how they view this situation by asking ‘What else?’.
For example, your child comes home and tells you that they had a terrible day because their best friend did not want to talk to them. Acknowledge and recognise the sadness they feel. Allow them to feel that and attune to that. You can say things like ‘I can see that made you feel really sad’ You notice what they are going through, and you acknowledge it. Once they feel supported, you can then ask ‘What else? Did anything else happen today that was positive?’ Even if it is just that they ate something great for lunch, it helps to widen the perspective on the experience, to not just focus on the negative aspects of their day. Once they have been able to widen their perspective, you can then help them to recall a similar situation in the past, and remind them of how they managed to be ok after it. Ie ‘Remember that time when Shylo didn’t want to speak to you and pulled away from your friendship group, but then you got closer to Chloé and Emily and now you are really close to them?’
Another tool that we have as parents is to understand that the best way we can help our children during difficult times is by working on our own responses, and ensuring that we attune to what they are feeling, and then respond rather than react.
This may sound counterintuitive, you are probably thinking “But how can our responses to a situation help our children in that situation?”
Our children learn how to respond to a problem based on how we react to that problem and understanding that the one thing that we can control when we can’t control the weather around our children is ourselves, is liberating. It may feel easier to try to control the weather around our children rather than ourselves, but ultimately, you will have better long term outcomes with the latter.
As parents, we are the greatest role models our children have. They learn everything they know based on what we teach them, but more importantly, what they see us doing and how they see us behaving and responding. When your child comes home and tells you that they did not make the sports team that they’d hoped to make it into, of course they will have their own feelings and responses about this, but your response to that also will greatly shape their thinking and their response. Your reaction teaches them how to think about what has happened. For example, telling them that “it is so unfair and that it is not right”, will prompt those feelings in them too, you are teaching them to think that way about it, whereas telling that that you can see that they are sad about it, and acknowledging the feelings that they have about it and attuning to it but having a more neutral response will shape their future feelings about this situation in a way that is healthier for your child.
Take a moment to sit with your own response to any negative situation. In that pause, and in that moment, ask firstly what else you can see about the situation beyond the negative, and secondly, ask how your response to the situation may shape your child’s response, and wether that response is going to help them, or hinder them. As parents we all aspire to helping our children during difficult times, helping them to widen their perspectives on a situation and noticing our own responses to that situation can help in this regard.
