Understanding and Responding to Feelings and Behaviours

UR FaB

Program in Schools

Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services

In the last newsletter we spoke about emotion coaching. Emotion coaching is helping children understand the different emotions they experience, why they occur, and how to handle them.  Accepting your child’s feelings does not imply accepting his/her behaviour.  The message is all feelings are acceptable, but not all behaviours are acceptable.  The UR FaB program emphasises the need for clear boundaries and the use of emotion coaching. Combined, these generally help children to feel emotionally supported and reduces challenging behaviour.

Often emotions such as hurt, jealousy, sadness or fear can lead to angry expressions.

It’s important to notice and label the emotion underneath the behaviour, to understand it before setting limits or going over the rules. Using labels to describe your child as naughty or bad etc., or using criticism, sarcasm or contempt does not help your child follow the rules or feel confident or competent.

Some strategies for responding to challenging behaviour:

• Family/household rules – each family needs to have their own rules, for e.g. no hitting, no name calling, no destroying things.
• Loss of privileges – it is important that this approach is non punitive, immediate and short lived to be effective.
• Cooling down time (for parents and children) – this is not time-out; rather it is when an individual chooses to cool down by removing themselves from the situation or by being prompted to leave the situation by someone else. By doing this and engaging in a strategy that reduces the intensity of the emotion (such as by breathing deeply), the parent or child is better able to think through how to respond.
• Reassuring and gently holding the child when they are angry can help, but only if it is clearly understood and felt by both parties to be reassuring and non-abusive and not threatening. When holding a child parents should say soothing words in a calm voice, or say very little.
• Talking after the event: repairing and saying sorry – parents should talk to their child about ways of managing anger at times when the child is not angry. Parents provide an important role model for their children about how to repair after a conflict and how to say sorry to each other.

 The UR FaB Team

 For more information on emotion coaching:

Gottman, J.M., & DeClair,J. (1997). The Heart of Parenting: Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Tuning in to Kids’ – Authors Sophie Havinghurst & Ann Harley, University of Melbourne