The Conscious Parent

“bratty,” I proceeded to lecture her on the importance of gratitude. As I
did so, I felt guilty. The more I reprimanded her, and the more guilty I
felt, the more I sought to make her feel guilty. When sanity finally
returned, I asked myself, “Why was I so threatened by her comment?
Was I so attached to her having only feelings of gratitude that I stripped
her of her genuine disappointment?” I could have taught her these
wonderful lessons after she had cooled down. Instead, I didn’t give her
the opportunity to calm herself, choosing instead to alleviate the feelings
of inadequacy she triggered in me with her “mean mommy” comment by
making her feel guilty.
Our tendency is to reprimand our children when they are in the grip of
strong emotion. Hoping that through the power of our wanting, our
children’s emotions will magically disappear so we won’t have to deal
with their rawness, even ugliness, we counsel, “Don’t be angry,” “You
shouldn’t be jealous,” or, “Snap out of feeling depressed!”
By making such statements, we seek to banish our children’s shadow
emotions to the recesses of their mind. Consequently, our children grow
up disconnected from their emotions. They then pay the price of living in
denial. If not in their teens, perhaps years later, these buried emotions
get resurrected by an event or relationship, and our now-grown children
find themselves overwhelmed because they are ill-equipped to navigate
such emotions.
Our inability to show empathy for all of our children’s emotions
teaches them to live in fear of such emotions. For example, when I went
to a water park with my daughter for the first time and she saw how steep
some of the rides were, she said, “I’m scared.” I noticed my first reaction