How To Help Your Child Deal With Other Adults’ Emotional Outbursts
And help everyone feel safe along the way
Veronika Hlebova recently shared her advice on how to protect our children from adults who sometimes have uncontrollable emotional outbursts. Unfortunately, we are not always there to be the buffer, but when we are, we can help our kids and those adults better understand what’s happening, where our boundaries are, and whose responsibility it really is to process those feelings.
“Don’t you have a pair of eyes? You just ran over me!” — exclaims a grandmother when her four-year-old grandson runs over her foot with his bike. Mother calmly “translates” grandma’s emotional reaction: “Sweetie, grandmother didn’t like when your wheel ran over her foot.”
“I didn’t mean to!” says the child, “I didn’t have time to stop!”
“I know,” says mom. “You’ll be more careful next time, right?”
The child nods.
Grandmothers often communicate using emotional outbursts, like “Can’t you see?”, “What were you thinking of?”, “You are a liar!” etc. etc.
…I just painted a portrait of someone who isn’t very aware of their emotions and doesn’t reflect on what the impact could be on the child. It can be a grandparent, a parent, or anyone at all…
