Member-only story
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, really.
The common characteristic of these responses is the emotional charge that “attacks” others. And their recipients have to endure the attacks because they usually carry some type of accusation or demand. An adult can buck, respond, or mirror the unspoken emotions of the attacker. A child doesn’t know how to protect themselves in this situation yet. First of all, kids haven’t developed strong boundaries yet. They still depend on their caretakers, are often still emotionally merged with them, and are very much influenced by them. That’s part of normal development. Because children associate themselves with their meaningful adults, they can’t help but take those kinds of attacks and accusations personally.
Secondly, kids don’t know how to decipher unspoken emotional contexts. Yet they don’t see the adult’s underlying fear — “I’m afraid you’ll hurt me” — in “Hey, watch, where you’re going!!!” yelp.
