Learning coping skills

When talking about coping skills we need to know that coping skills are important because now is the time to teach kids how to (step by step) deal with inevitable ups and downs in life.

There is no such thing as positive or negative emotions. Emotions are just that – emotions. But we tend to label, for example, anger as a “negative emotion”. Why do we? We should be teaching our kids to express all of their emotions and to teach them that anger, as well as happiness, is permissible, not something to hide, suppress or feel like is unwanted.

The important thing about “negative emotions” is to find a safe way to express them. For example, if a child feels anger we are going back to the well-known script: validate feelings, set boundaries, and (if in danger) make sure our child is safe. While anger is still present, we should teach our child how to deal with anger in an appropriate way: hit the pillow, count to 10, make an angry drawing, breathe in and out, and do some exercise. And we can apply this one to sadness or any other emotion we label as negative. These strategies for handling unpleasant emotions will guide children through their emotions and help them understand better their feelings and understand that this is a normal thing.

Hand in hand goes our mental state. We have to offer our calmness in order for our child to truly accept those unpleasant feelings. Because if we normalize and accept their “negative emotions” they will also accept them and understand that they are loveable even when their behaviour is at its worst. They will feel loveable even when they exhibit the negative side of their personality and that will teach them that do not have to hide their true selves in order for someone to like them.

Learning coping skills is not an easy job because it takes time and patience. It takes time for our kids to come from toddlers with very poorly developed prefrontal cortex to resilient adults who will be able to cope with all challenging situations in their life.

Here are some guidelines for teaching coping skills:

1. we must first be able to cope with our own stressors in an appropriate way so that we can teach our children how to do so
2. we don’t take our child’s beahviour personally – because it is not the root of their problem, they actually don’t blame us or think we are bad parents and their unwanted behaviour is not a measurement of how good a parent we are
3. we need to find our calm to offer them calmness when we want to teach them appropriate behaviour (when kids are yelled at, their brain simply cannot process information because they are feeling attacked and in “fight or flight” mode, in this state, their rational thinking is not working and we cannot reach the “upstairs brain” – part of the brain where rational thinking occurs, where they pay attention, reflect and solve problems and this is also known as executive state of the brain).