Kids Self Esteem and Empathy

How to Build Your Child's Self Esteem Using Empathy

We are often urged to use the basic parenting discipline of re-inforcing "good" behavior with praise, and ignoring "bad" behavior.

The danger with this approach is that it can lead us to ignore one of our childrens' fundamental needs - the need to express all of their emotions and still receive unconditional love from their parents.

It is important that your child is allowed to express his or her anger, frustration and sadness in an accepting environment. OK, you might not like it - wouldn't we all love for our kids to be happy and cheerful 100% of the time? Well humans are not like that, so it's unreasonable to expect our children to be so.

If we force our children, by lack of acceptance or understanding, to suppress so-called "negative" emotions, we only store up emotional trouble for them in the future.

Article on Empathy and Your Child's Self Esteem

Forigiveness cont....

On Wednesday's blog I wrote a bit about the importance of teaching your children forgiveness, and how crucial it is to put past hurts aside so they can move forward. Forgiveness is powerful stuff and the discovery workshop I took last weekend emphasized just how important it was to forgive others who have let you down and hurt you, but in actuality the most important person to forgive is yourself. How many times have you let yourself or others down and then felt guilty about it. Teach your children that guilt is a very toxic emotion and one we need to rid ourselves because it keeps us from truly loving others and ourselves.

Kids can be so hard on themselves and tend to blame themselves when things are not right in the family and this chips away at their self esteem. It is imperative to sit down with your children and teach them how to set the guilt free and forgive and love themselves. I learned a very powerful exercise in the workshop I took, but teaching your children to drop the guilt and forgive themselves can be as simple as substituting guilt with motivation by emphasizing and calling attention to what your children are doing right, not what they are doing wrong. Praise them every chance you get and also make sure to give them lots of hugs!!!

Happy Parenting,

Monicka

Kids and emotions

What do kids learn about emotions from their parents?

Yesterday my friend, who is a student in a counselling class, told me of an interesting conversation he had with his fellow students.

The question being discussed was, "If you were a counsellor and you had two scenarios, a)A client who was very distressed and crying or b)A client who was angry with you the counsellor, which would be more difficult for you to deal with.

I assumed that everyone would answer (b) but in fact it seems that the split was around 50/50. My friend was an example of someone who would not be fazed at all if his client was angry, but would find it challenging to handle someone very distressed.

What does this have to do with kids and emotions? Well these reactions to emotions are learned at a very early age. It is worth thinking about what you might be teaching your child about emotions rather than just automatically passing on your own reactions to, for instance, anger or sadness.

Anger and sadness may both seem like "bad" emotions but this is not true. Anger is a useful and powerful resource that helps us stand up for ourselves when necessary. It can be a driving force to take us to new levels of success and achievement.

Sadness is the natural "other side" of happiness. If we were never ever sad, we could never fully appreciate happiness. And learning to express sadness appropriately and to ride it out in a healthy way rather than trying to suppress it is a very important lesson.

While it may seem like a good idea to try and squash anger or sadness in our children, it is better to teach them that all emotions are OK, and help them learn to be resourceful in dealing with whatever they are feeling.

Happy parenting.

Cassie