Question: How do I help my son control his emotions?
Well, I wish I knew a little bit more information—what are the emotions that he's experiencing? Let me give a couple of examples. It's not uncommon for growing children to have a wide range of emotions. That’s extremely common.
Teenage boys or girls are typically going to be more emotional. As you go through puberty, your body is producing more hormones, so part of what we have to understand is that this is normal. That’s a very common theme.
Second, we need to understand how to educate our child on emotions. As a parent, you might pull out a "feelings wheel." There are six core emotions we have—anger, disgust, sadness, happiness, joy, and fear. We can look at those emotions and ask: which are most common for our child?
Maybe it's anger—but anger is actually a secondary emotion. If you’ve heard that phrase before, it means there’s usually something underneath the anger. Our challenge as parents is not to focus on the anger or the misbehavior. Our challenge is to create an environment where we can ask: what's driving that emotion?
We want to educate our children. We want to teach them how to understand their emotions so they’re not afraid of them. This is important for all of us—emotions are not things to be scared of. Emotions are things to teach us.
If I’m experiencing an emotion, it’s my body’s way of saying something. It might be happiness bringing satisfaction, or something creating fear or disgust. As someone trying to help a child, we want to be informed on emotions and not afraid of them ourselves.
One of the biggest mistakes we can make as parents is to ignore, avoid, or shut down an emotion in a child. Emotions are to be learned from. If we suppress them, we’re going to have both physical and mental health problems.
So, someone saying, “You need to calm down,” might do much better by saying, “This is obviously important to you. Help me understand what you’re feeling.” Contrast that with, “You’re too angry—you need to calm down.” Those are very different responses.
We want to create an environment where our children can understand their emotions. If they can work through the emotion, they gain emotional resilience and emotional control. They learn how to process their own emotions, rather than someone else just telling them what to do when they feel something.
So, I might teach them how to understand their emotions. I might do a breathing exercise, help them look inward, and help them see that emotions are not bad—they’re to be learned from. That’s what I would want to emphasize.
If a child is throwing a temper tantrum, we should be asking: what’s actually driving that? It may be simple—they’re tired or hungry. Or it may be more complex—they got bullied at school and don’t know how to talk about it. So now they’re frustrated and taking it out on a younger sibling.
Unless we ask questions—“What’s happening? What’s going on?”—we might make the wrong assumptions. Taking the time to try to understand what our children are going through, being there for them, educating them, helping them understand their emotions, and helping them learn how to process their emotions—that’s a really valuable step.
And that’s where I would start.
