The Conscious Parent

own and that of others.
If we want our children to master their emotions, we have to teach
them to surrender to what they are experiencing. This isn’t the same as
getting sucked into our emotions or reacting. Surrender means we first
accept whatever emotional state we are in. Thus we encourage our
children to experience their feelings. We invite them to open a space up
to allow the pain already present in them to have a presence in the room.
An example of what happens to a child when we don’t allow our
children’s pain to have a presence is an eight-year-old, slightly
overweight little girl with thick glasses, who was often teased or
ostracized by her classmates. Acutely conscious of her looks, she tried
hard to fit in by convincing her mother to buy her the latest clothes, bags,
and shoes. Her mother, a fashionable young woman, was only too ready
to indulge her. On those days this little girl came home and cried in her
room for long periods, often refusing to eat or do her homework, her
mother couldn’t bear it. She felt shame herself for her daughter’s
physical appearance, which motivated her to buy her daughter a
treadmill and hire a nutritionist, pushing her to exercise and eat fewer
calories. She took her for regular hairdos and bought her contact lenses.
Calling the school, she demanded a meeting with the teachers, asking
that her daughter no longer be ostracized by her peers. Along with hiring
a therapist to help them both cope, she started taking pills to calm her
anxiety.
This mother’s inability to handle her child’s pain, let alone to help her
child handle her own pain, denied this little girl the opportunity to feel
her emotions. Instead of being allowed to feel hurt and disenfranchised,