Bounce Back

One of the most powerful skills you can give your kids is the ability to deal with their emotions and be able to bounce back from negative emotions to positive ones. Here are 10 practical tips to help parents teach their children to be emotionally resilient.

- Anna Partridge

Those big feelings, like disappointment and anger, are hard to take. They are hard enough for adults who understand emotions and have rational minds to deal with them but, for kids who have not developed this level of rational thinking, they are much trickier and often cause significant angst in families. It’s our job as parents to help our children recognise their feelings and not “rescue” them from the hard ones but help them develop their own strategies for dealing with them. Every feeling comes for a reason.

Anger is a clue that something is wrong and we need to make it right again.

Fear or being afraid stirs up our fight-or-flight instinct and we need to take it seriously to change a situation.

Sadness is a cue to retreat from the world and take time to heal from the event that has caused the sad feeling.

Loneliness helps us to reconnect to others and live our lives together.

Tiredness tells us to stop, take a rest and recharge the batteries.

Anxiety is a sign that something is a threat or a fear and we need to sort it out.

The positive ones are also there for a reason. Being excited, happy or calm allows your body to release the “happy chemicals” such as dopamine and endorphins to promote a relaxed state. Also known as the feel-good chemicals, these hormones have a calming effect on the brain so you can let your body relax and do its job.

However, the negative feelings are often the strongest, certainly for kids, and we need to help them find strategies to bounce back.

By design, the cycle of life is meant to be up and down. If you were always up you would have the impulse of an addict, always searching for the next high. If you were always down, you would be depressed. You wouldn’t be able to feel the ups and release those happy chemicals.