The Ultimate Holiday Emotions Tranquilizer

Posted on November 30, 2012

With the holidays around the corner, BUSY ENERGY is on the rise! Busy-ness in

malls, parking lots, traffic, demeanor, and facial expressions: they’re all clearly

responding to the busy minds with long to-do lists. As we know, hyped emotions

and feelings looking for an outlet are also linked to busy-ness.

And yikes! The kids are almost out of school! So here’s an emotions tranquilizer

from my upcoming book, The Perfect Parent. It guarantees tranquility and harmony

for emotional outbursts and uproars.

DEALING with the FEELING:

1. SPOT it and SAY it:

Spot the feeling that your child is feeling and say it. Put it in words.

LIKE THIS: ”I can see you’re angry (or hurt, or sad…)

Benefit: this helps your child (and you) identify the emotion and put it in words

which will start to turn the volume of the noise down. This is a research-proven tool

2. OKAY IT:

Offer approval and validation for the feelings.

LIKE THIS: ”It’s okay. I can understand why you’re feeling like this,” or ”It’s okay to

be angry,” or ”I would be angry, too, if my brother did that to me.”

And if you’re a man (or a woman!) of few words and/or if your kids are older, you

can ”spot it, say it, and okay it” all in one breath, like this: ”I can see you’re angry

and I can understand that. I would be angry, too, if my brother ripped my poster.”

Benefit: This validates and acknowledges the child’s feelings and behavior which

is another huge step toward promoting noise reduction and tranquility.

Dealing with the feeling using “spot it, say it, and okay it” will automatically and

naturally open the doors to the next step: conflict resolution. Now that you have

dealt with the feelings, you can glide into resolving the issue as your parental

instinct guides you!

Try it with your kids this week when the opportunity arises. Then, next week, tune

in for some trigger words that can help when YOU, the parents, are having trouble

dealing with YOUR feelings!

In Joy.