Have your emotions ever overwhelmed you? To the point that you blow up in front of or towards your children? What kind of feelings follow after that? Guilt, embarrassment and resentment may be a few. A child’s brain is made up of millions of cells or neurons. Neurons communicate by passing chemical messages which turn into pathways. The more a message is repeated, the more pathways that are created which allow for development to occur. At Tiny Hoppers Richmond East, repetition and positive reinforcement help build patterns for learning. Educators ensure to utilize any situation as a learning opportunity by describing what is happening in detail, and how we can act to address or resolve the situation.
When you are at home, you can foster similar pathways by saying something like, “I need space to calm down, we’ll talk about this later” to your child. By doing this, you have just created a method for dealing with hard emotions (resilience in self regulation).
When you have had a chance to collect yourself, revisit the situation by explaining why you felt frustrated and how you calmed down. And with that, you have just modeled a step-by-step tutorial for your child to learn how to express their feelings in a productive and respective manner (resilience to heavy emotions).
Now repeat that process and you are on your way to building strong pathways for development to occur; creating healthy foundations for your child’s brain to function. Children need to face adversity in order to become resilient. Your emotional outburst can be that adversity and your repair will create resilience. Remember, you do not have to be a perfect loving parent. Instead, you can perfectly love your child just by being who you are. After all, aren’t we all learning and growing through life, no matter how young or old?
Your partner-in-learning,
Fiona Abbas-Lee
