Parenting young children feels a little like nuclear fission. Take a child and an unpleasant stimulus and one has instability, complex emotion and possible entropy. Wounded ones, terrible twos, threenagers and fournadoes are how we describe this state of being in relationship with young children. Yet, what looks like entropy on the outside is just the brain doing what it can on the inside. If they could, they would, but they can’t.

Children have big emotions and they lack the memory, language and cognition to make sense of it all. Freya is adapting to life with a new baby sister, George’s mom is traveling for work this week, and Maya is working through a transition from a crib to a toddler bed. These situations and many others produce simple and complex emotions that can be unwieldy and uncontrollable to young children.

Like learning to read, children acquire a shared language of emotions and develop strategies for perceiving, decoding and expressing feelings. As children negotiate emotions, they create internal working models to help them regulate, interpret, filter and predict behaviors of the self and others in relational experiences (Murphy & Laible, 2013).

Emotional competence — the regulation of emotional expressiveness, and knowledge of one’s own and other’s emotions — is crucial for social and academic success (Denham, Bassett & Zinsser, 2012). A baby is born with all of the neurons he will ever need, but they are very poorly connected. As his brain builds from the bottom up, it will take time to open up the windows of opportunity to connect emotion and cognition. Brain research concludes that emotional responding in early childhood is impulsive, involuntary and primal and more thoughtful and deliberative when children begin to connect lower and higher regions of the brain through complex thinking at around age three. (Nagel, 2008).

Given the premature impulses that drive young children, the lion’s share of the work in developing their emotional competence comes from adult caregivers. Parents and teachers alike are socializers of emotion. They teach children how to perceive, regulate and express the emotions they feel. As Rachel Simmons writes in her book Enough As She Is, “There is no one with more access to her enoughness than you.” Modeling emotional expressiveness, regulating reactions to emotions, and explicit teaching about emotion (Denham, 1998) have been found to be the most effective strategies for building emotionally competent children.

Children observe the emotional states of their influencers, therefore, parents implicitly teach children about acceptable emotions, expression and regulation. This is in essence teaching children an alphabet from which they will string together a language as a base for future communication. Additionally, adults’ expressiveness shows children which situations evoke certain emotions and the corresponding behaviors related to those emotions. These observations lead children to a knowledge of emotions that will serve as a resource for understanding their own language of emotions.

If you are looking for a place to start, contemplate your own memory patterns and consider replacing them with a new script. When fission is festering, repeat “behind every behavior is a healthy impulse.” This may keep you from looking for a deliberate root cause, when in fact, your child is only doing what he is capable of in that moment in time. Phrases such as these will help to temper your reactions. Next, model emotion regulation. Consider a strategy developed from Rogerian theory: Problem Ownership.

• 1)  Figure out who owns the problem, the child or the adult (Whose needs are thwarted? Who is upset? Who is afraid?)

• 2)  Listen actively when the child owns the problem

• 3)  Deliver an I-Message when the adult owns the problem. An I-Message includes four elements: give observable data (what you saw, heard, smelled touched), state the tangible effects, say how you felt (not how the child MADE you feel), focus on change.

A young child’s development is not always explained by ontogeny or the universal truths of science. Social constructs, cultural influences, family systems and school systems are protons with great magnitude.

Remember that children are not broken nor are they deficient adults. They are self-organized, competent learners. Walk alongside them for a while and be their traveling companion. As Rudolf Dreikurs cautions us, “Children are keen observers, but poor interpreters.” They need parents, teachers and caregivers who are emotionally available and ready to give language and meaning to the complexities in their developing world.

Denham, S.A. (1998). Emotional development in young children. New York: Guilford Press.
Denham, S.A., Bassett, H.H., & Zinnser, K. (2012). Early childhood teachers as socializers of young children’s emotional competence. Early Childhood Education, 40, 137-143.
Murphy, T.P., & Laible, D.J. (2013). The influence of attachment security on preschool children’s empathic concern. International

Journal of Behavioral Development, 37(5), 436-440.
Nagel, M.C. (2008). It’s a girl thing. Victoria, Australia: Hawker Brownlow Education.
Simmons, R. (2018). Enough As She Is: How to Help Girls Move Beyond Impossible Standards of Success to Live Healthy, Happy, and Fulfilling Lives. Harper: New York.