Minimum Viable Parenting

Our children express a range of emotions. Sometimes we are not sure how to deal with them. Sometimes we get afraid of a scared child, or we get angry at an angry child, and we get anxious about an anxious child... Sometimes we may wonder who is on a roller-coaster, right? When we get closer to our child's emotions and learn to be with them, we give priceless lessons to our children about their own inner world. It is not something to run away from, to be mad at, or feel hopeless about. It is a rich environment full of information, because emotions are very telling. Besides serving as clues to the quality of our experience, emotions have social value as well. For children, in particular, emotions is the way they communicate with us, and so dismissing the child's emotions would be equivalent to ignoring what the child is communicating. But when we try to understand the message behind their emotions, the children are being seen and heard.