Helping Kids Work Through Big Emotions
Trying to reason with kids grappling with stress and anxiety can be like banging your head against a brick wall - nothing seems to get through. Sure, you might be able to rationalise how their thoughts contributed to their current state, but this still leaves them in an uncertain, scary place. What if our help was better aligned to areas of their brain firing away (learn more). It may explain why reasoning often doesn’t resonate with the strong feelings or survival instincts children or teens experience, but it’s all too easy for adults to try and reason with the strong feelings and survival instincts they face.
How we tend to naturally deal with kids’ feelings/survival instincts.
A different way to help kids in distress - the 3 R’s
Psychiatrist, Dr Bruce Perry developed a simple but powerful model for dealing with 3 major functions of the brain which might be predominately activated:
Survival Instincts (Brain Stem): The Regulatory self
Feelings (Limbic System): The Relatable self
Thinking (Higher Cortex): The Reasoning self.
Dealing with Survival Instincts - Help kids regulate
Whether a child or teen is losing it (fight), running away/avoiding (flight), or frozen in panic, our initial focus should be to help keep them safe and guide them towards regulating themselves. Helping them reduce hyperventilation and muscle tension will reduce their chances of lashing out with their body, or running away in despair - it brings them back to a place they can productively move forward. So, when they are in survival mode, we can focus on supporting them with tools to help them survive, rather than try and rationalise them through it. In my experience, it is near impossible to teach survival skills in the moment - I think they should be done out of the moment, ready to dispatch in the moment. That said, there have been many times I’ve tried everything to help regulate kids, and nothing seems to work. Sometimes it’s just about placing them in a safe and calm environment where their body invariably self-regulates.
Dealing with Strong Emotions - Relate to kids
Emotions are there to serve us, and there is a good explanation as to why they are happening, even the scary ones. Emotions will always reside within us - as hard as we try, we can’t get rid of them, yet so often we try. We may be able to bury feelings, but they inevitably rear their ugly head in all kinds of unhealthy behaviours. Connection, on the other hand, is something we humans long form. Vulnerability, curiosity, and acceptance are a great place to start.
Through vulnerability, acknowledging the common emotions humans experience makes life less isolating - talking about the messy parts of life we all face builds connection, essential for happiness and resilience. Examining emotions with curiosity, not judgement, allows you to distance yourself from the emotions and not get so caught up in them - we can help kids move away from feeling as though they are that given emotion, to simply experiencing the emotion. Accepting emotions and allowing them to ‘sit’ tends to give emotions less of a hold on kids, reducing the effort required to push them away. As they say, resist and it will persist… acceptance is the antidote to resistance. In other words, emotions come and go, so help kids sit in them, do their thing, and reconcile that this is OK. There are all kinds of ways to do this - the ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) framework is a great place to start - it is loaded with tools we can use to help accept emotions rather than push them away.
Dealing with the Rational Self - Reason with kids
I think reasoning with a child/teen happens fairly naturally for adults, especially advice-giving! The problem is that advice-giving often passes your worldview onto someone else - life is often more complex than that. Age, personality, genes, upbringing, and life events all come into play, meaning everyone’s way of reasoning is a representation of their unique selves. Advice-giving can be like putting diesel in a car that requires unleaded petrol, it may work for you, but undermines the fact that someone else may run differently!
Questioning, on the other hand, allows us to steer children into self-discovery, which I think is far more powerful and tends to stick. It prompts kids to form helpful thought patterns that fit within their frame of reference and their worldview. It’s about asking questions that help them reason and discover for themselves. It allows them to come up with their own creative solutions, resulting in feelings of pride and empowerment.
The 3 R’s: A different way of dealing with strong feelings and survival instincts
Examples of using the 3 R’s
So in practice, when kids are stressed or anxious, try focussing on the area of the brain that is predominately at play.
Here are some examples:
Example of being in Survival Mode (Regulate)
Scenario: They are lashing out at someone.
Speak slowly/calmly/reduce words. We will get through this. Let’s give your body a chance to settle and regulate itself. My go-to’s are distraction, mindfulness, listening to music, or deep breaths, which I find put a wedge in the panic cycle and speed the process of self-regulation. Having said that, sometimes all you can do is keep them calm and safe until their body self-regulates, realising that rationalising with them may only amplify their emotions.
Example of strong Emotions (Relate)
Scenario: Isolation due to something that happened with peers at school.
Life’s problems can be so hard hey mate. Where do you feel the emotions the most? Head, throat, stomach? They don’t feel nice hey. I’m feeling for you, you’ve had it tough today. It’s no wonder you feel sad or disappointed (name it to tame it). I’m here for you, and if you don’t want anyone around you, it can be really helpful to process your emotions by writing them down, even if it’s just in dot points.
Example of reflecting later (Reasoning)
Scenario: A child excluded someone during a game earlier in the day (thinking = reasoning).
After dealing with the emotions attached, dive into curiosity. Ask why this bothered them (lack of fairness, friendliness etc). Was their something else that may have resulted in the exclusion? What might be going on in the person’s life who excluded you? What thoughts help you deal with what happened? Conversely, what thoughts don’t help? Are there all-or-nothing thoughts, catastrophising, or blaming that are keeping them stuck? Bring it back to the controllable and aim to keep them curious.
In all of this, it’s not to say you can’t reason with children, especially when they might be doing the wrong thing. But I wonder whether our expectations are too high, particularly of younger kids who are still navigating the heavy bodily sensations emotions and survival instincts bring. As I look back on my kids, mine certainly were. In navigating this, I’ve found it helpful understanding some of the major functions of our brain; it helped me understand the primary ‘mode’ I needed to be in to help kids and teens productively move forward.
For a bunch of practical tips on ways I regulate, relate, and reason with kids, see Practical tips for helping kids ‘out of their mind.’