Notice and Name
It was a bumpy start to middle school for my youngest this year. Eight classes, five minutes to transition, lockers, lots of new. He was nervous but also pretty pumped to have more independence and to be going to a school with friends he didn’t see in elementary school. The weekend before school started, he came home from playing at the park with a painful, swollen right ankle. He’s an active kid and had slide-tackled while playing soccer and fallen multiple times while rounding the tree roots that serve as bases during kickball, all typical stuff for a day of playing. Kids fall, and we figured we’d just been lucky so far in his eleven years of life.
What started as a probable fracture turned into a bone infection that required surgery and a much different start to sixth grade than anyone had planned. Now we’re talking about months in a boot, navigating the halls of middle school on a knee scooter, and spending weeks on crutches watching the soccer games he thought he’d be playing. Tough, emotional roller-coaster stuff.
But that’s part of the road of life…and we’re so lucky that getting in and out of the shower without putting weight on the right ankle was one of the hardest parts of the whole situation. He’s making a full recovery, received the best medical care from multiple specialists, and worked with his teachers to learn material he had missed in class.
My son’s personal growth through this journey has a lot to do with how he manages big feelings. As parents and educators, we often want to shield or distract our kids from uncomfortable emotions. There are certainly times to diffuse those feelings in the short-term, like when meltdowns happen in the grocery store check-out line. But most of the time, it’s healthy and useful to sit with those feelings and explore them.
In my work with families and schools, I often hear emotions put into two buckets - good feelings or bad feelings. This doesn’t really make sense or help anyone to actually process their feelings, so let’s reframe here. Feelings give us information and the accompanying body states help to prepare us for whatever we’re experiencing. Whatever our kids are feeling is okay and some emotions might accompany a body state that’s more uncomfortable, but there are not good emotions and bad emotions…just emotions.
Let’s unpack that and first consider our body state. When my heart is pumping hard and my face is hot, I notice those body cues. My brain then decides what to label that feeling and starts running a script in my head to manage that feeling. Depending on the context and my prior experiences, my brain might decide that I’m feeling embarrassed or that I’m exhilarated…but the body cues are pretty much the same. This means that the way we decide to label our feelings matters A LOT in helping us manage those feelings in healthy ways.
So let’s make sure that we have lots of words to name our feelings. Especially with kids, it’s helpful to know a few main buckets. When our kids are little, we might start with happy, sad, scared, and mad. To help our kids notice these feelings and the body cues that often accompany them, we can get descriptive. “I see you’re skipping around the room with a big smile. You must be feeling happy and maybe even excited.”
As kids get older, we tend to stop talking so much about the feelings and more about the accompanying behaviors. It’s so helpful to create an open emotional culture in our households, so keep creating space for naming and processing feelings…but let’s expand those buckets a bit. Perhaps the buckets now are joy, sadness, trust, disgust, fear, anger, surprise, and anticipation. Support kids to unpack those uncomfortable emotions like fear and anger by getting even more specific. “I hear that you’re scared, but are you more nervous or actually feeling terrified?” Any of these feelings have a wide range, and it’s empowering for our kids to study the feeling enough to clearly name it.
Health scares of any kind start me on an emotional roller coaster and it’s always helpful to pause, study, and precisely name what I’m really feeling at any given moment. Our kids are watching and learning just as much from what we do as what we say. When my son asked me if I was scared before he was rolled back into surgery, I was able to pause and take a deep breath before responding. “No, I’m not scared. I’m grateful that you have the best care and that you spoke up when you were feeling pain. I’m anxious because waiting is hard. But mostly I love you and I’m glad that I get to be with you when you wake up in a few hours.”
I want my kids to see that I pause to name exactly how I’m feeling because it’s a simple, powerful tool that we carry with us. That brief pause shifts us from being overwhelmed by the feelings to using those same feelings as information that prepares us to manage stressors in healthy ways. As parents, our words and our example have so much weight. When we share how we frame emotions in healthy ways, we empower our kids with greater self-awareness and the power to respond to bumps in the road of life with their own inner toolkit.
