Handling Children’s Feelings in Public Places

2008 January 28 by: Scott

You can learn to predict your child’s emotional moments. There are certain situations in which young children often become emotionally charged. These situations include:

• Being with several people: with the whole family at dinner, at a family gathering, a meeting, a birthday party, the grocery store, church, or temple.

• Moving from one activity to another: leaving home for day care, leaving day care for home, stopping play for dinner, going to bed.

• Being with a parent who is under stress: the parent is cooking, cleaning, shopping, trying to finish a task on time, and is upset because there’s so little help.

• At the end of any especially close or fun-filled time: after a trip to the park, after a good friend leaves, after wrestling, chasing and laughing with Mom or Dad.

When children become emotionally charged, they can’t think. They simply can’t function normally. They become rigid and unreasonable in what they want, and are unsatisfied with your attempts to give them what they want. They can’t listen, and the slightest thing brings them to tears or tantrums. Their minds are full of upset. They can’t get out of that state without your help.

The help your child needs at this time is to have you set kind, sensible limits, and then for you to listen while he bursts out with the intense feelings he has. This spilling of feelings, together with your kind attention and patience, is the most effective way to speed your child’s return to his sensible, loving self. A good, vigorous tantrum, or a hearty, deeply felt cry will clear your child’s mind of the emotion that was driving him “off track” and will enable him to relax again and make the best of the situation he is in.

“Do I have to listen to a screaming, flailing child in the middle of the supermarket?”

Several adjustments of our expectations are necessary before we can let ourselves to be on our children’s side as they do what they need to do in a public place.

• We need to remember that every good child falls apart often in public places. This is, for some reason, the way children are built!

• We need to remember that our society has trained people to disapprove of children doing what is healthy and natural. People disapprove of horseplay, of noise, of exuberance, of too much laughter, of tantrums, of crying, of children asking for the attention they need. This disapproval is out of line. Children are good, and their needs are important, including the need to offload bad feelings.

• We need to decide that, as parents, it’s our job to treat our child well. When other adults criticize him, it makes sense to do what we can to be on our child’s side. If a child doesn’t have his parent to protect him from harm, who will?

• We need to realize that being parents means that we will have to advocate for our children in many settings: with doctors and nurses, with teaches, with relatives, and with strangers.

• Finally, we need to acknowledge that children legitimately need far more attention than it is comfortable to give. Adults who gave less attention to their own children, or who got little attention themselves as children, will be upset when they see you giving undivided attention to your child. We can expect these upsets, but we don’t have to be governed by them.