Feel Free To Be Real
“Stop crying, sweetie, be a good girl”, said a seemingly helpful elderly woman to my then-two-year-old daughter, Sequoia.
Sequoia, who had been sitting at my feet, crying her eyes out after having fallen from the slide at the play ground, stood up, faced the woman and shouted at the top of her lungs: “It’s okay to cry!”
Then Sequoia turned away from the woman and curled up in my lap for a cuddle, her tears spent.
Rather than trying to make my child repress negative emotions like sadness and anger and express only the positive ones like happiness and love, I have always tried to support my child no matter what she is feeling.
Our emotions are real, and we need to express them. Children especially need space to express their feelings and frustrations; otherwise they will not learn healthy ways of processing emotions when they come up.
As a parent, it is important for me to create a safe space for my child to process her feelings so she can feel what she needs to in the moment, let the feelings go, and move on. Sometimes we just need to take a little space to sit quietly together and reconnect. I always tell her it’s okay to cry if she needs to.
Crying Is Healthy
Crying is especially beneficial, as research has shown that nine out of ten people feel better after having a cry. This is thought to be because tears triggered by emotions (as compared to tears triggered by the cleaning process of the eye or by irritants) contain certain chemicals that can cause stress in the body.
Emotional tears have been shown to contain high levels of manganese and potassium as well as the hormone Prolactin. High levels of manganese in the body are associated with health problems, while increased levels of potassium can affect nerve function.
The hormone Prolactin functions primarily in mammals as the hormone that controls the production of breast milk – as this hormone is found in higher levels in women it may also explain why women are more likely to cry emotionally than men – but the hormone is also involved in stress levels. It is thought to be beneficial to shed these chemicals in tears as a way for people to clear their systems and feel better.
For more than physiological reasons, there are also studies that show children who are unsupported in expressing their emotions tend to experience more anxiety and depression.
Especially in sensitive children, it’s important for them to feel honoured in processing their emotions: it’s no use telling them to “just get over it”, because they can’t. Whatever the child is feeling is really happening for them in that moment.
The beauty of this, however, is that once the child has a safe space to go through whatever they are feeling, they quickly recover equilibrium and go on with their day in a happy mood.
Saying to a child “use your words” is not only useless, because a distressed child will struggle to verbalise how they feel, leading to further distress.
Though some parents believe telling children to “use their words” will teach them to speak better, the reality is quite different: what children learn from this is that the way in which they are communicating – the same way they have since they were born – is worthless. This shows the child that they will only be supported and their needs met if they articulate them verbally.
Listening To Your Child
Children communicate very clearly with their cries and body language. As parents, we have been “hearing” our children’s non-verbal communication since they were born; it would be unreasonable to suddenly expect them to switch to completely clear verbalisation of their feelings and needs when they are still small and learning to speak.
When I see that my child is getting upset or frustrated about something, I sit quietly by her and listen to her. Often she is unable to verbally identify what she is feeling or why she is feeling it, but she expresses and communicates clearly how she is feeling and what she needs in other ways.
If I take the time to sit and listen to her – not just to what she says, but also taking notice of what her body language communicates, how she sounds, the tone of her voice and facial expressions – then I can support her in what she needs and work together with her to come up with solutions.
Sometimes, no practical solution is needed, save for just listening. Often all we really need is to be listened to empathically. No comment is needed, no judgement, just to be heard with respect.
For myself, I often found myself as a child or a teenager in situations where I was uncomfortable. At the time, I didn’t feel safe or supported anywhere, so although it would have been better to call my parents or go home, I never felt there was a safe space for me, even there.
I want to raise my child to feel connected to me, and supported by me. I want my child to feel that her parents and her home are a haven where she is safe to express whatever feelings and needs that may come up in her life.
We celebrate our pain; we connect with our negative emotions and move through them rather than repressing them or dwelling in them. Only in this way can one truly move forward, learn and grow.
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