Our emotions form the basic building blocks of our lives. We feel good or bad based on our emotions, whereas there is no such thing as good or bad emotion. Each of the emotions—sadness and joy, anger and calmness—are feelings we must experience. As a result of research, psychologists have suggested that some emotions are innate. These feelings are; happiness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. The basis of this thought is the view that these feelings are universal. So, if each of the emotions is something to be experienced, why do we sometimes feel bad? Because we don’t know how to control our emotions.
The foundations of emotional development are laid in childhood. In this period, in addition to the child’s temperament, the role model people around him, cultural influences, the level of trust in the relationships they establish with their parents and the social interactions they establish with their peers have an important effect on their emotional development. In short, parents should take on the role of guidance to help children recognize their emotions.
For example, let’s take the anger of a child whose toy is not bought. The child impulsively throws himself on the ground, shouts or cries. What would you do? While all of you are doing research on what to do when faced with such a situation, ‘give logical explanations to your child, explain the situation in detail, talk to him like an adult.’ You have read the sentences. Yes, it is really important to communicate with the child, but logical explanations made in that moment of anger or depending on age may make sense for the child for a while, but may not later on. The reason for this is that the decision-making mechanism (which is related to the ‘Forebrain’ and is the last part of the brain to develop evolutionarily) is not yet developed in children and instead the ‘Limbic System’, which is responsible for emotions, is more active. In other words, it is important for children to make logical explanations for their brain development, but due to their age, they experience their emotions more. Continuing with the toy example, instead of saying, ‘We can’t buy this toy right now, we can’t move it home or we don’t have money,’ to a child who has such a tantrum, say, ‘I understand how much you want this toy, it’s a really nice toy, but we talked before that we can’t get it today. If you want, we can sit down somewhere and talk about what you like most about this toy and what kind of games you want to play with it, and if you still want to buy it later, we can consider buying it’. It is very important to understand and listen to the child’s wishes and needs in terms of emotional development.
One of the biggest mistakes made is to make sentences such as ‘why are you crying, there is nothing to cry about, you are crying for everything’ to a crying child. Such sentences cause the child to feel guilty for the emotion they are experiencing at that moment, and as I mentioned at the beginning of the article, we cannot separate the emotions as good or bad, each of them must be experienced when the time comes. The child who is exposed to such sentences may think that the feeling of sadness is an emotion that should not be felt and may suppress this feeling in his later life, but since that emotion cannot disappear, it manifests itself in different ways (for example, as anger and aggression). In addition, the child who is blamed for the emotion he/she experiences may have difficulty in expressing his/her other emotions over time, he/she may start to gloss over his/her feelings, therefore he/she cannot recognize his/her feelings, cannot develop his/her empathy skills and starts to exhibit problematic behaviors.
The duty of families is to raise children who are aware of how they feel, recognize their feelings, and reflect their feelings in a healthy way. They can do this by talking to children about their emotions, not being insensitive to their emotions and responding in a healthy way, by explaining how they manage their own emotions (role-model work). For younger children, it would be helpful to use picture storybooks. Asking questions about the emotions of the people in the pictures (What do you think this person is feeling? Why might he be feeling this way?) and creating new stories through these questions is very useful both for the child to learn about emotions and for spending quality time with the parent.
People who can manage their emotions, have developed emotional intelligence, can establish healthy relationships with their peers, have high levels of self-confidence and self-esteem, have developed insight skills, have high empathy skills, can control their emotions and therefore create ways to cope with stress, are open to different ideas and opinions, open to self-development They are people who achieve higher success in school and work environment compared to others.
