Pexels / Can You Be Too Supportive of Your Child’s Negative Feelings?

There’s plenty of evidence that when parents help preschoolers understand and cope with negative feelings, they teach kids important skills.

But here’s something that gets less attention: research suggests that supportive responses to our kids’ negative feelings may not always be helpful.

Can You Be Too Supportive of Your Child's Negative Feelings?

Vanessa Castro and her colleagues had moms rate how they typically respond to their third graders’ negative feelings and also rate their social adjustment. They found that moms who reported being more supportive also rated their children as more socially skilled — but teachers said these kids had fewer socioemotional skills and more problem behaviors.

So, how do we understand this surprising finding? Unfortunately, the measure of emotional support used in this study was a mixed bag,including a wide range of responses like distracting, comforting, and problem-solving, so it’s hard to know which specific responses were or weren’t helpful.

And because it’s a correlational study, we can’t tell what causes what. Maybe kids who have trouble getting along at school need more emotional support from parents. Maybe they’d be even worse off if their moms weren’t so supportive!

But the findings are worth sitting with. It’s possible that, as parents, we sometimes overdo emotional support in ways that work against our children’s coping and relationships.

When support becomes too much

When we pay attention to our kids mainly when they’re upset, we can accidentally teach them that that’s the best way to get our attention.

And as kids get older, their social lives get more complicated. The strategies we used to comfort our upset toddlers may not be enough to teach school-age children how to manage their emotions in situations when we’re not around.

Here are some things worth considering as you think about your role as your child’s “emotion coach.”

1. Focus on emotional behavior as well as emotional experience

Too often, people believe the myth of emotional venting — the idea that we have to “let out” negative emotions. There’s not a shred of empirical evidence to support this! In fact, acting aggressively by, say, punching a pillow and imagining hitting the target of our frustration, can actually intensify anger (Kennedy-Moore & Watson, 2001).

School-age children need to learn:

• What to express

• With whom to express it

• How to express it effectively

They need to begin to imagine what kind of response they hope to get from others, and what actions are most likely to get that response. They have to learn effective ways to ask for what they want, or to tolerate less-than-ideal situations without resorting to tantrums.

2. Consider peer reactions

From about first grade on, other kids tend to react negatively to kids who frequently become very emotional at school. They may feel uncomfortable, or they may simply prefer to spend time with kids who are easier to get along with.

Unfortunately, some kids are entertained by big emotional displays and may tease or try to provoke these reactions.

School-age children are beginning to be able to imagine someone else’s perspective in greater detail. They can start to consider what someone else wants, in addition to what they want.

They’re also becoming aware of social norms — the unwritten rules about expected behavior in different situations. For instance, if no one else is crying after losing the baseball game, your child might need help recognizing that his reaction is bigger than the situation warrants and might even make teammates feel bad.

3. Avoid overdoing for kids.

In general, we don’t want to do things for our children that they can do for themselves because that robs them of the opportunity to learn important coping skills. If we overdo in the emotional realm, we may accidentally teach our kids that they can’t handle any distress on their own, and they have to get an adult to fix things.

Babies and toddlers have few options — other than crying or yelling — when something isn't right. School-age kids have a wide range of coping options:

• Distract themselves

• Say encouraging things to themselves

• Think about a problem in a new way

• Ask for specific help

• Keep trying

• Take a short break then try again

• Walk away from an unhealthy situation

Ask questions instead of giving answers

In a calm moment, you can help your child think through which options are likely to work best in a particularly challenging situation. Don’t just give answers — ask questions to guide your child toward coming up with a solution:

• “What have you tried so far?”

• “What do you think might help?”

• “How do you think they’re likely to react?”

• “How will you know if it’s helping?”

Support alone isn’t enough

In no way does Castro's study (or this article!) imply that parents should be "unsupportive" when their children are upset. Having parents who are frequently harsh or uncaring is devastating for kids. Parents can be an important source of comfort even as children grow into adulthood. We all need people in our lives who are always on our side.

However, if we think of our job as parents as helping our kids learn how to be in a relationship, then it's clear that support alone is not enough. We can and should acknowledge our children's feelings and offer our loving acceptance, understanding, and comfort.

We also want to help our children learn to manage their emotions, communicate effectively, and care about others.

We may be their emotional training wheels, but our goal is to help them become capable of riding confidently even when we’re not around.

Warm wishes,
Dr. Eileen

P.S. This is exactly what the Emotion Coaching workshop is about — moving beyond just comforting your child's big feelings to actually building the skills underneath. If this article resonated, the workshop goes deeper.

LEARN MORE

And premium members get $20 off through March 31st!

Subscribe now