Speaker 1Hello and welcome to the How Not to Screw Up Your Kids podcast. So, pour yourself a cuppa, find a comfy seat and enjoy the conversation. This episode, Children Who Feel Emotions Intensely, is for all of you out there who have listened to a number of podcasts, mine and others, read a whole host of books and blog posts about how to help children who experience big emotions and you're feeling it's just not working for your child or it's just not working consistently or effectively enough. It's as though your child is currently experiencing emotions in a whole other way. Well, this episode is for you and I've got you. Now, before I start, I just want to say a couple of things. And the first thing I want to say is that I'm really not one and not a real big fan of labelling children. Let me explain why. I don't feel it's helpful, for example, to have labelled this podcast maybe to say that I have a child who is intensely feeling, for example, or a highly sensitive child. Now, I'm not disrespecting the belief around that. I just don't believe it is a helpful narrative because I truly believe that even if we don't say this outwardly and or overtly, our children pick up on the labels that we give them. And if we've shared that label or we've shared that conversation with someone, it can often just slip out. And the reality is we become, think about us as adults and our children are no different, we become the person people see us as and how people treat us because it creates this imprint. And I think that's a really important thing. And I think that's a really important thing and it very much comes from those early experiences. So you may well be of the view that you have a highly sensitive child or a deeply feeling child or whatever child label that is out there. But I guess my view is that when we label children that way, we almost create this notion that that is a hard and fast wired into them and that there's no change. And I'm going to talk specifically around neuroplasticity. I'm going to talk about neuroscience. I'm going to talk a little bit more about neuroplasticity. And my view is always, and this is why I'm so passionate about what I do and why I do what I do, is that I fundamentally believe with every ounce of my being that wherever our children find themselves and wherever we find ourselves as adults is that we can work towards being in a different place. That's the whole premise behind Carol Dweck's work in terms of growth mindset. And that's why for me, I have such a, probably quite a visceral reaction to this notion of labeling our children in that way, because it just makes me feel that we've rubber stamped them and that there's no other way that they can be. And yet we know that that doesn't have to necessarily be the case. Now, in terms of setting the scene, I think it's helpful to talk a little bit about early development, the commentary around that, mingled with a little bit of evolution and a little bit of neuroscience, as I think it will be really helpful for you to be able to understand what might be the underlying issues behind things. Now, I just want you to sort of think, we're going to take it right back to the fact that as human beings, we're fundamentally animals, we're primates. And our young are incredibly vulnerable compared to other young in that our babies, our children, are not in a position to fend for themselves, to keep themselves safe, to feed themselves or to remove themselves from danger for a very, very long time. And it's why there's a huge plethora of research around attachment, attachment, attachment, attachment, attachment, attachment, and why it is so important for these attachments to happen in those early months for our children, because that attachment serves lots of purposes. But from an evolutionary protection perspective, it keeps the human species going, because a young child knows that actually they can focus their time and attention around assimilating and finding out about their environment, learning what's truly dangerous and what isn't, and learning about just general properties of their environment, people, all of these things, because they know that they have this attachment to someone who's going to scoop them up and remove them from any danger, should there be any. So there's an inherent part that has that. Now, you might argue, well, then when you look at this, that actually we've got a nervous system that is specifically hardwired and finely tuned to respond quickly around survival. In lots of ways, our brains hold purpose. And so we've got a nervous system that is specifically hardwired and finely tuned to is to keep us safe. And so it would make sense that we would have this system that would be super sensitive initially when children are young to danger. And then as they get older and they mature and they've got more information about their environment and they understand more about the environment that they live in, that you'd sort of dull down some of that sensitivity, particularly in the areas that are just not a threat. So when we think about children who may feel things incredibly intensely, and I'm not just talking about those, the feelings that we would probably, all of us would much rather have less of, like anger and frustration and sadness and disappointment and shame. But they also typically feel emotions, big emotions, and those emotions intensely when they're the flip side, so really extremely happy. So when we're looking at this episode, I want you to be thinking a little bit with this lens of a hardwired system, because our nervous system that is there specifically to keep us safe is hardwired. Its sensitivity can be tweaked. And my view, because I tend to adopt quite a lot of this sort of real scientific neuroplasticity ability that our brain can to evolve. When we talk about neuroplasticity, it's simply that our brain is plastic. It is at its most plastic in terms of easy, to mould shape in those nought to five years. It is then in those years up until our brain sort of fully mature at around the age of 23, 24. And then it then becomes more difficult. So at all stages, we have plasticity. There are some stages that are more plastic than others. But what we do know, which we never used to realise, and we thought at 24, that was it. Well, we didn't even think it was 24. We thought it was 18. But what we do know is that our brain is plastic. And we don't even know now is at any stage, I'm 55, if I decided to start learning to fly an aeroplane, which is not on my bucket list, I'll just say that, but if I chose to, then I could learn to fly. I could learn to play a violin. I could learn to ski. I could learn to be excellent at chess. It just requires more practice, more exercising that muscle, because my brain is not as plastic. You know, if you've ever played with that, the sort of the clays and the play-dos that have a different consistency, particularly the ones that are really helpful for children who just need to sort of exercise their hands a bit more, you'll find that you can do it, but there's some, the consistency is just harder. So I just think it's helpful to think of it in that sort of framing. So I want to start, first of all, with a little bit of practice. I want to start with a little bit of practice. First of all, what we're going to do is I'm going to start with some questions that I think are interesting to consider. Then I'm going to share my top five tips about what you can be doing. And then I'm just going to talk about three things that I think you probably want to avoid. So these are some of the questions I think which are interesting to be considered, because they'll allow us to target the support for our children in the best possible way. And they usually seek to address what might be the underlying issue. So the first one is, simply a question of, if you've got a child who's feeling emotions intensely, is, is there a skills gap? Now, what we typically see in young children, and you will be listening with all ages and stages of children, but with children under five, typically those big explosive tantrums, those big explosive violent or angry or physical outbursts are super typical. And you tend to see it with lots and lots of children. So if you've got young children who are feeling emotions intensely, that are at preschool or even starting at school in those early years, most of the children, the range is pretty much, they're all sort of doing similar things. What then typically happens is, is our children then move up to sort of six, seven, eight. The gap between a child who may have a skills gap and the typically developing all other children then begins to get bigger. Now, I'm not saying that if there's a skills gap that your child is not typically developing. Children just generally develop profiles and spikes, I like to think of, around different aspects of their development. So we talk about physical development, we talk about emotional development, we talk about their vocabulary, we talk about their fine motor skills, we talk about their communication. We could write a huge list of all of the areas that our children develop in. And what tends to happen, I talk about this idea, there's a spiky profile. You could have a five-year-old that may, communicate like a six-year-old, but emotionally regulate like a two-year-old, but their gross motor physical skills in terms of coordination is like a seven-year-old. So we get these sort of different nuances. So when I talk about is there a skills gap? I'm not talking, is this a child that has got additional learning needs? I'm just simply saying, when it comes to managing and regulating emotions, does my child have a skills gap? And you'll notice that I really emphasise this idea about skill. So often as parents, and I think this is where we often, strategies don't work, or the processes that we put in to support our children don't work across multiple situations, is that we typically focus on, I have this problem. My child does this. This is the problem. And then we seek to solve the problem, which is fine, because that solves the problem in that situation. But when we shift our emphasis to actually, what's the skill? Where's the gap in the skill that my child has currently, which actually might take me a lot longer. But if I can really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really bridge that gap, if I can instruct, teach, equip, create, build, whatever it is, what they need in those skills, then actually, that skill can be used across a multitude of different situations. And now, I've got a child that can really fly, because I've not just fixed one problem in one scenario, I've given them a skill. So one of the questions is simply a, do I actually think that my child might have a bit of a skills gap? Or is this actually just part of their general character and their temperament? Yeah, which it could be. We all have friends who seem to experience emotions incredibly intensely. So when they're happy, they're the life and soul of the party. They are the person you want to be around. But when they're sad, everyone knows about it. They regale everybody, or they're difficult to be around, whatever that might be. So it could be that there's a skills gap. It could be that it's part of their general character and temperament. It could be, third option is that it could be sort of environmental or situational. So this isn't actually a skills gap. This isn't part of their character, but in certain environmental, you know, certain environments and certain situations bring this type of behavior on. So in which case, that is likely to be more time restricted or situation restricted. So if it's environmental, so that it's most likely to come up where they're in environments that they find stressful or certain people that they're around. So it could be a skills gap. It could be part of their personality. It could be environmental or situational. Or we could be looking at some brain circuitry, which needs a little tweaking. So imagine this idea of a, we've all either got a smoke alarm or we've experienced a smoke alarm that seems to go off at the slightest whiff of something that we fried or something in the toaster. So imagine a highly sensitive smoke alarm, which needs reprogramming to be less sensitive in its monitoring and detecting danger. And that's very similar to what I was speaking about earlier on about this idea that we've got a heightened nervous system when our children are super, super young. And as they're equipped with the skills and the knowledge through those early experiences into their teen years, that sensitivity should be sort of almost, posh word, downregulated. But in essence, what we then do is actually we've experienced these situations often enough. We know these particular situations and actually we don't need to worry about those. We don't need to be as sensitive. And these are the ones that we really need to be. So it could just be around that. And I think just keeping those in mind is a really helpful way of then not feeling, as I think is often the case with parents who have children who feel these emotions so intensely, is that they often feel that they're failing, that they're, as a parent, that they've created this, that they're doing something wrong, that there's something wrong in the parent and there's something wrong with the child. And instead, I'm hoping if we can frame it around one of those four, or maybe even a combination, that actually that sort of makes us feel a bit more empowered that we can make a change. Because I believe there has not been a child or a family that I've worked with where we haven't seen a positive outcome as a result. So those are some of the questions that you might have in the background. So now let's look at the practical. What can I do? Because regardless of where your child is there, there are things that you are going to want to do. If it's a part of your child's general character and temperament, then it's still about being able to temper some of that in social situations, just because of the societal norms that they, it's not. Some of the intense emotions and the behavioural choices, because it's all about the choice of the behaviour, the emotion is valid. It's the behaviour that they choose from that is something that we want to sort of help refine. So let's start with the behavioural choices. Let's crack on with these five. So the first one is. Very similar to what we have done, we've talked about previously when we talk about managing big emotions, but I'm going to give you some context and then go back to this oversensitive nervous system is that the first thing we need to be doing is we need to make sure that we validate the emotions. Remember, the emotion is our children can feel any emotion that they have. What we're trying to do is we're trying to make sure that we validate the emotions. What we're trying to do is help them make different choices. So it is about validating the emotion, but also making a very clear distinction between the emotion, which is valid, and the behavioural choice, which is a separate thing. You can feel jealous, you can feel angry, you can feel frustrated, you can feel shame. What we're trying to help is help them make those different choices. So it is about validating that emotion. That's a really. really crucial first bit, because that helps our children switch into, right, this person understands how I'm feeling. They see me as I'm feeling right now. Now, if you've got an intensity, a child who feels emotions intensely, they're not going to interrupt their complete and explosive tirade at you by, oh, I feel so much better now that you have validated my feelings. Absolutely won't. And we'll talk about managing expectations. But what you will get over time is a repeated, reinforced wiring in the brain that says, this person sees me. This person understands me. This person is not diminishing my experience, but helping and scaffolding me. So validating the emotions is a really crucial first part. The second bit, and you can do the validation also in the labelling. It's about labelling at the emotions, because that builds the vocabulary, which for some children may then bridge, if it's a skills gap, that bridges the skills gap. If it's a wiring, then it also activates the logical part of the brain, which also helps with part of that rewiring. If it's a temperament thing, then that also helps in terms of building that vocabulary and understanding the distinction. And if it's environmental, then again, it's that notion that they've been heard and they've been seen. So when you validate and label, you can do them at the same time. So I can see Jack, God, it must be, I can see how angry you are with your brother, because you spent absolutely ages building that incredible village and you were telling me all about it. And then without any thought, without any care, he's just come and walked through all of it and destroyed it. And you feel that it's so unfair that, you know, he, he deserves to be hit. So you're validating how he feels. You're in lots of ways. And I think the more we're able to, it's, I think sometimes maybe feels unnatural to over-dramatise or to kind of go down that road of how they're feeling to such an extent. But actually when we do that, your child hears more and more of a sentence of a, of a discussion that says, yeah, that is exactly how I feel. Oh my goodness me. They completely get it. Yeah. Yeah. And so that helps with the validation. And so that helps with validating and labelling those emotions. And what it does do is this whole idea about naming to taming. It's this, when we label an emotion, we force our brain's activity to go from the emotional region of the brain, which is sort of at the back. You know, we often talk about that's, that's often where the sort of the more primitive survival pieces of our sort of brain activity takes place. When we label it, we take it to that sort of what they call, that executive functioning, that kind of problem solving, rational thinking, which happens at the front. And so we're beginning to make those connections between the nervous system. Oh my goodness me, protect, protect, protect at all costs, danger, danger, danger to the intellectual bit that says, I wonder actually whether we might approach this particular problem in a slightly different way. Again, just by validating and labelling the emotion, you're not suddenly going to have a miraculous shift. But if you're going to label it, you're not suddenly going to have a if you're not doing that in all of the strategies that you've tried, then you're not going to go anywhere. Those are absolutely the two crucial pieces and it fits hand in hand with, you know, what you can do. Number five, which is around setting realistic expectations. So we'll talk about that. But those are the sort of the first two bits. The third bit is on focusing this shift about focusing on bridging the skills gap, not just the problem. So whatever that might be. So we're going to problem solve with our children and we're not going to do this in a scenario when they're in that heat of that emotion because their nervous system is heightened. What we're going to do is we're going to problem solve at a different time when they're feeling more relaxed, when they're more likely to have a conversation with us and more likely to access that part of the brain where that logical, rational reasoning is coming from. And what we want to do is we want to problem solve what the current thinking is around that threat. So whether that's environmental, situational, or we're just reflecting back on something that has happened that may, in essence, be part of our child's temperament. So we want to kind of have a conversation around what is it about that situation that made you feel so out of control and so in threat. And obviously our child is not going to say, well, I felt that I was in danger because my child, my brother was walking over my newly created village. It's more a case of just talk me through why that made you feel so angry. What were you thinking? Because that will help you then have a bit more of a conversation around, again, post-event validating and labelling the emotions and then encouraging them to think through, with your help, alternative paths of action which they could have taken and could try next time. And the key thing to remember here, it's about trial and error. It's all about experimentation. There is no right answer and we don't want to encourage our child to feel that there is a right answer. There is simply alternative paths that they could have taken and which one do they feel like trying next time? And remember, we're building on baby steps for progress. We'll talk again more on this in number five. So we validate the emotions, we're labelling, we're focusing on bridging the skills gap and not just the problem. We're building now, we're moving into building a set of go-to tools. So we've thought about what they could do differently, but what we also want to look at is building these set of go-to tools to help manage those big emotions when they come. Because they will come. Yep. You may not have them for a while, you may have them every day, but what we know for sure is those big emotions will come and they will come repeatedly. Now, usually describe these go-to tools as part of a toolkit, but you can call it something else because the term toolkit doesn't resonate with all children. It's whatever that might be. And it's about, again, this is trial and error. What are the things that we might be able to put into our toolkit, into our happy place, into our go-to box, going to our go-to tools, whatever it is that you call it, that your child is willing to try to use. So if you've got a child who's very physical, you may want to consider putting things in their go-to tools that allow them to expend some of that physical energy that they would usually use on lashing out with a sibling in some other way. A pillow, a stress ball, just anything, Play-Doh, something that allows that physical, you know, where you can see that their fists are really tight. And they're just don't know what to do. And so that can be a really helpful. So we're really, the go-to tools are going to be so bespoke to your child. And it is just simply about trying different things. And that, you know, it's about them trying them and seeing what works and what doesn't work. And then number five, and I think this is a really crucial bit because I think this is the bit that gets us really disheartened. I can remember so often with my children, whatever age and stage that they were going through, they were going through a lot of and I was having a particular challenge and I would have, would, was devouring books around parenting is that often I might try, I might've tried something and then dismissed it because of, oh, that's ridiculous. It didn't work. And actually it's much more around. I just didn't give it the time that it needed, the consistency that it needed. And the benchmark that I set in terms of my expectations was unrealistic because I was expecting an entrenched behaviour. To change overnight. So I want you to set realistic expectations. And this is where it works so brilliantly. If you've got a tribe that you can go to, because when you're feeling despairing, when you're feeling you're pulling your hair out and you've had enough and it's not working and you're not going to do that again. And I'm not going to listen to Mary Han ever again. That's where your tribe comes in and says, well, how long have you been doing this for? Come on, we're here. I know it's really hard. And you've got that validation that others are going through a similar challenge. So when we're looking at setting these realistic expectations is that we are rewiring the brain and this will take time. It is not going to happen overnight. Typically, the younger your child is, the easier the rewiring because their brain is most plastic and potentially they have had less opportunity for that behaviour to become super hardwired and super entrenched. And the older your child is, the less plastic they're going to have. And so I think it's really important that their brain is. And the more likely it is that those patterns of behaviour have been going on for longer. So it's going to just take a little bit more. So it's really much more down to the length of time that that pattern of behaviour has been going on for rather than the age itself as to how long it's going to take to change that pattern of behaviour. So let's set realistic expectations. Let's put our support system in place so that we're not feeling so exasperated. What's that phrase you put? Throw the baby out with a bathwater or something or throwing your toys out of your pram. Whatever it is, is that we don't throw the towel in too early when we just haven't given that particular techniques and tools long enough to work through. And it's that consistency that is so, so crucial. So validate the emotions, label the emotions, focus on bridging the skills gap, build a set of go-to tools and set realistic expectations. Now, before I send you on your way, there are just three things I want to talk about very quickly that are wise to avoid. So the first one is we want to encourage our children to be able to problem solve and to fix things in the moment with their feelings. Remember, we're distinguishing the emotion from the behaviour. So we want to try and avoid creating a dependency on us for the fix. So this is an idea about we're trying to, it's that whole hot potato, we're trying our child to have it rather than us. Young children, it's a process of getting them there, but we should be always thinking, ultimately, I do not want to be creating a dependency on me for that fix. The other thing that I would avoid, which I sort of mentioned at the beginning, is about labelling. And that might be explicit, it might be covertly, but we don't want to be labelling them and say, oh, you're so sensitive. I understand it is helpful, our brain operates best when it can label, when it compartmentalises, where it can put things into groups, because it makes its life so much easier to process. Ah, you're like that group, I can put you in that group. And oh, you are like this one, I can put you in that group. It is the way that our brain likes to be. I just feel that we become the person that everyone talks about and behaves with us in that particular way. And I think particularly, there can be deemed to be a lot of shame around how we manage our feelings and how we manage our emotions. Just think about it as an adult. If you're listening to this and you're someone who's, I mean, I cry everything. I would describe myself as sensitive because I'm a high empath and I do. If I watch a film that could be the worst film going and I will still cry. But when you then label someone in that sort of way, you limit them and then you create potentially, especially around emotions, the shame that you are someone who cries or that you are someone who feels an emotion particularly intensely. And it's often, from a societal perspective, it's often deemed as something that is not a superpower. It's actually not. It's a bad thing. So I think avoid the labelling. And the third thing is avoid rewarding the behaviour, whether that's with attention or your time. And that's not that children are doing this because they are attention seeking. It's simply what you don't want to have is that when our children feel an emotion intensely and we then have to drop everything in order to then help and support them, you don't want that to then become a pattern of behaviour that they revert to as a way of redirecting your time and attention, particularly if what may well be causing it in your family is situational or environmental. And so what is happening is your child is then able to avoid that situation or that environment through an intense response in their feelings. So I hope that that was helpful. It's a pretty thorough episode. We've covered a huge amount of content. So I would really highly recommend that you maybe listen again to the specific areas that really resonate. Remember, we're just working on one thing at a time. We're not going to overdo it because that usually leads to us being less consistent. As you know, my goal and my emphasis for 2025, the year 2025, is to grow the podcast tenfold. And if you're willing to join me on that journey and to help me, then I make just one simple request, and that is to follow the podcast and to share this episode, if you have found it helpful, with two friends, two colleagues, two neighbours, two people that you know who may also benefit. And if everyone is willing to join me on that journey, then I make just one simple request. If you're willing to join me on that journey, then I make just one simple request, and that is to follow everybody does that, then I will reach my goal to grow the podcast tenfold before the end of the year. So as ever, if you can follow and review this podcast so that others can find us and we can spread the love. So until next time.
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