25/02/2023
My son and I were walking in our neighbourhood last summer when a father and little boy walked past us. The little boy was crying. The father said to the little boy, “Stop crying or your mother is going to hear about this when we get home.”
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I said nothing to my son and we kept walking.
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Moments later my six-year-old said, “Why did that Dad tell the boy to stop crying? You can’t just stop crying when there’s a reason. You have to get the tears out. Why did that Dad even want him to stop crying?”
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Our kids are wise. And when we parent through a relationship that is unafraid of tears and feelings of any kind, our kids don’t become scared either. They see them as normal. Sad, angry and frustrated are just as valid and necessary as their “positive” counterparts.
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Just as the waves are not the ocean, our children are not their emotions. Their emotions pass and we need to learn to ride the waves, rather than try to bend reality. Many of us were raised to stuff “negative” emotions deep down where they couldn’t be seen. And so we repeat it, without a conscious thought.
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Or we try to fix it by distracting our kids to make the hurt go away because it feels painful for us to see our kids in pain. But more often than not, what I’ve found is that when I allow my son to feel disappointment or sadness and walk through it with him, he bounces back far quicker than I expected.
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We allow our kids to become resilient when we make space for their emotions. When we’re brave enough to sit with a crying child, whether in our living rooms or on the sidewalk, we validate their feelings.
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They learn that we have their backs, that they’re not alone with their emotions and when we hold them up to the light together, rather than make them hide alone in dark places, they’re not so scary after all. 💕
