How to Handle Negative Emotions in Children

The hardships we face in life continually lead us to think about how we can protect our children from these difficulties and the negative emotions they may produce. Many parents work hard to ensure that their children do not experience the same difficulties they faced, trying to protect them from pain and the negative emotions that follow.

Unfortunately, this excessive fear may lead parents to take escalating measures to protect their child from any negative emotion, leaving the child unaware of these feelings and unable to understand how to manage them. Life, with its harsh and chaotic circumstances, naturally produces negative emotions such as fear, pain, discomfort, anger, shame, sensitivity, sadness, disappointment, and others. It is important, however, to understand that these negative emotions are normal and that a child experiences many of them from the day they are born.

A parent's role should therefore not be to protect a child from negative emotions or meet every need so that the child never experiences them. Doing so will leave the child unable to deal with life's difficulties and challenges and make them more sensitive.

How can children overcome negative emotions?

We enable our children to overcome negative emotions when we, as parents, understand that our role is to help them manage these feelings. The following example illustrates this:

If a child returns from school after arguing with a classmate or feeling angry about a teacher's behavior, the parents should do the following:

• First:
• Listen to the child to understand what happened.
• Second: Show understanding toward the child's feelings, because understanding these negative emotions is three-quarters of the solution. Parents should not dismiss the child's feelings by saying that there is no reason to be sad or that the teacher and classmate did not mean to do it. Parents should also avoid becoming angry or upset with the teacher or the child's classmate, as this increases the child's sensitivity.
• Third: Try to connect with the child about what upset them. This means telling the child that they have a right to feel sad because the teacher scolded them in front of the other students, or that losing a friend is not easy.
• Fourth: Tell the child that the negative situation they experienced was uncomfortable, but that it could be an opportunity to learn how to manage their emotions and the difficulties and challenges they may face in life. Finally, we can ask whether the child felt relieved while talking and expressing their feelings, and explain that they can tell their classmate and teacher how they feel and express their need for the friendship to be respected.

The importance of negative emotions in children

The value of negative emotions becomes apparent when we help our child treat them as an experience from which they can emerge with greater awareness—an experience that enables them to understand themselves and their needs, as well as those around them. It teaches them that, as human beings, we cannot understand the true meaning of happiness without experiencing sadness and pain. To enable our children to do all of this, we need only talk with them and contain their feelings so that they know we understand and value what they feel. They can then put those feelings into words and express them more easily. A parent's role is therefore to listen carefully to their child so they can help the child manage negative emotions.

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