When Naming Your Child's Feeling Backfires

Has labelling your child’s feelings in a difficult moment, telling them to breathe or trying to get them to use tools backfired?  You are not alone! It’s something I hear pretty regularly.

When I ran a preschool I noticed something. Around 3-4ish onwards, a lot of children DO NOT like it when caring adults label their feelings. In fact, it usually makes everything so much worse. This situation got me thinking, what’s going on? There were other things also happening around this time. Transition regression, kids who had been coming forever suddenly had a little separation anxiety again, parents were reporting real challenges around “I can do it myself” for things children couldn’t quite yet do themselves and tantrums were on the rise. 

In Dr Dan Siegel’s model “Name It to Tame It” he talks about the importance of connection before redirection. We need to connect before we label, but how do we do that when our child is screaming at us and pushing us away or there is more than one child with needs? This is where I struggle with a lot of parenting models. They present a cookie cutter approach and then parents are left trying to fit the mold. Everyday parenting is anything but a cookie cutter.

So how do we take this important strategy and build it into something usable?

Part One:

As parents and caring adults we do a whole lot of guessing and assuming about a lot of things. When it comes to feelings, if we are being really honest, we don’t really know how anyone feels except ourselves. Whether that is our children, partners, friends, strangers etc. When you teach children the language of their emotions, and make space for them, we adults aren’t right as often as we’d like to believe we are. So, when we try to label our child’s feelings in a tricky moment sometimes we flat out guess wrong and that’s really frustrating for our children. 

There's also another important point to consider, most adults don’t have a strong base in emotional intelligence. Ready for the why? You never learned it. Unless you work in a field where this was part of your training, you never learned this stuff. In fact, you likely experienced the opposite. Feelings were meant to be suppressed and this has been a longstanding sign of strength in a variety of settings.

"Dealing effectively with emotions is a key leadership skill. And naming our emotions - what psychologists call labeling - is an important first step in dealing with them effectively. But it's harder than it sounds; many of us struggle to identify what exactly we are feeling, and often times the most obvious label isn't actually the most accurate." Susan David - Harvard Business Review

Therefore, the ability to identify feelings is something a lot of people have only just started doing. As a result, part of your parenting has been building your emotional intelligence on a nearly vertical trajectory, versus slowly over time. Any skill building done quickly doesn’t lend itself to confidence, it lends itself to second guessing and feelings of inadequacy. Essentially you are figuring out your feelings and your child’s feelings at the same time. In tricky moments that’s not working out so well for anyone.

Part Two:

Whenever big feelings come into play, our stress response gets activated (our amygdala takes over). This is true for both you and your child. In my course Building Resilience Through Kindness I dig into this in detail! In that tricky moment we aren’t able to learn or apply tools that we don’t have. That’s the same moment that you are telling your child how they feel, how to fix how they feel, and on top it asking them to do things they never do except when they are having not awesome feelings. They don’t like being told how to do anything in general so they really don’t like being told how they feel. Really, it’s a recipe for disaster. Again, this process isn’t intentional. The messaging out there is clear => validate your child’s feelings. What is less clear is how complicated that really is.

And here’s the other thing that is missing from all the parenting books. We need to get out the door when this is happening! There is actually a time limit on some of these interactions. Addressing this is so much more complicated than ‘naming it to tame it’ but this is why so many parents are spiralling. The naming isn’t enough for emotional regulation, there is some skill building that needs to happen for it to work.

So what do we do?

“Name it to tame it” is a really important skill, but it is a skill that you have to build and develop in periods of calm and connection. The ability to name feelings means you have to have a feelings vocabulary. We tend to do that feelings vocabulary building during tricky moments. Here’s a little note about that, you can’t actually learn in moments of stress, your brain literally shuts down. That means we need to build those skills outside of moments of difficulty in fun and engaging ways. 

One way to do this is to take a different approach to reading books to help you build these skills. By reading books with the goal of building feelings language you are making sure you are building skills in periods of calm and connection instead of tricky moments.  Using books also provides you with a frame of reference. Have you ever tried to loop back on a tricky situation to recap and your child just stares at you blankly or can’t recount what happened? Use a book and suddenly the conversation blossoms!

This didn’t answer what I need to do in the moment!

Yes I know, because it’s layered. There is no quick fix. Short term fixes are not long term solutions. This is why I created a program and course. So that you can learn the layers in a way that is practical and effective. 

Here’s your mini-tip to try in the mean time. Instead of labelling feelings in the moment, label them as BIG FEELINGS. “Wow, you are having really BIG FEELINGS right now.” This will steer your conversation away from labelling your child’s feelings for them. From there you could do some reflective reading and skill building to get in touch with what feelings they were feeling. Spoiler alert, it’s probably not just one and that’s another reason we get annoyed when people label feelings for us. It’s not that simple!

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Book Reference: The Whole-Brain Child by Daniel Siegel & Tina Payne Bryson