Bonus Eps: What Your Children Learn When They See You Cry

As parents, many of us instinctively try to shield our children from our own difficult emotions.

We wait until they're asleep before we cry. We put on a brave face. We tell them, "I'm fine."

But what if, in protecting them from our sadness, we're missing an opportunity to teach one of life's most important lessons?

In this week's Heidi at Home Mini, I share a very personal experience following the loss of our family dog, and why allowing my children to see my grief became a powerful reminder that emotional resilience isn't about hiding our feelings, it's about showing our children that it's possible to move through them.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why children learn just as much from watching our emotions as they do from how we respond to theirs.
• The difference between sharing emotions in a healthy way and expecting our children to carry them.
• Why modelling sadness, grief and disappointment helps children build emotional resilience.
• How children learn that difficult feelings don't last forever.
• Why being emotionally authentic can strengthen, rather than weaken, your relationship with your child.

Our children don't need perfect parents who never struggle. They need adults who show them that all emotions are welcome, that it's safe to talk about them, and that even the hardest feelings become easier to carry with time.

Looking for practical ways to help your child understand and talk about their emotions?

My Feelings Out Loud mini offer is designed to help families build emotional literacy together through simple, engaging activities and conversations that fit into everyday family life.

It's a gentle way to help your child recognise, express and manage their feelings, while giving you the confidence to support them along the way.

Find out more here

If you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you followed Heidi at Home, left a review, or shared it with another parent who might need to hear this message today.

Transcript

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Welcome to Heidi at Home Minis. These shorter episodes are just me sharing my thoughts, advice and reflections on some of your biggest parenting questions. Let's get into it. What your child learns from watching your emotions. So when it comes to emotional intelligence, which is what I think we want for all of our children, it's not necessarily just what we teach when it comes to emotions, but it's very much also what they watch us do. And when it comes to emotions like frustration or stress or upset, they start to learn what happens to them, to us, when we feel sad, and can we move through it safely and build resilience to come out the other side? Okay, so essentially what we're saying here is you are role modelling how to move through emotions for your child or children. Feels really big, feels really powerful, and that is because it is. Now the reality is for so many of us as parents, we will have grown up hiding emotions, feeling like our emotions were controlled or stopped in the moment, and also feeling like we suppressed a lot of emotions. And that all comes from essentially how we were parented, and that will be for some of us how we learnt to regulate or move through our own emotions based on our sort of childhood patterns. So that in itself is something to really, I think, reflect on and think about. And we have some big powerful transformations when we do this in week five of our coaching programme, where we focus on emotions because we're not only looking at how to teach emotions to our children, we're also looking at whether or not we as adults even know how to feel our own emotions. Now, the reality is lots of us will know how to feel happy or excited, you know, job promotion or um holiday coming up. But my question to you would be: how do you as a parent know how to show up and feel sadness or anger or frustration? Because for lots of us, and often also more likely mothers, we suppressed a lot of those different emotions as children. So, therefore, me saying show up and you know feel all the emotions in front of your children can feel really difficult. There's lots of inner work to do on this, so it's not going to be solved in a mini-episode. But what's really important is that we don't just teach our children that we're calm and happy all of the time, because that's not realistic and that's not what life will go on to be either. Okay, so it's okay to show them different levels of emotions, and children can actually cope brilliantly well with seeing us feel feel angry as long as obviously we were repair afterwards, feel sadness. I was going to offer up an example of how I've done this with my children very recently, and that was through the loss of our pet dog, which was only a few weeks ago, so it is still very raw. And I massively underestimated the grief I would feel around losing a pet dog of 11 years, and I realized also that I hadn't really ever been very lucky not to lose anyone very, very close to me. We've definitely lost grandparents when we were in our teenagers as a family, but I'd never really been able to learn how to feel grief properly. I didn't feel like that was role modelled necessarily to me. And through doing all the work that I do on this in my coaching programme, my parent coaching sessions, I gave myself permission to fully feel the grief if I needed to. And that meant that my children saw me cry for about five days straight for most of the day. But I made the decision not to keep busy, I made the decision not to hide it and run upstairs if I needed to cry. Quite often it would be when they made comments over the dinner table, and it was actually incredible to see how they responded to it and the little hand, you know, arm round me for support, or the sort of touching my arm of my seven-year-old to say, Mummy, it's okay. And they were coming out with lovely phrases. It's like, it's okay, mommy, it's okay to be sad. And the point is here, I chose as a parent to show them that it's okay to feel sad, and actually, grief is hard. And for me, I then believe that moving forwards now, they will take that and they will be able to feel it in the same way should anything come along where they have the same feelings. So that is a really good example, I think, of role modelling emotions. Like it's okay to show our children that we're sad, it's okay to show them that we're really upset about something. It's equally okay to show them that we're angry. Importantly, though, obviously, if we do end up shouting or doing something that is not desirable in terms of the behaviour outcome, we always repair. So going back to them and saying, Mummy felt really angry earlier, I shouldn't have shouted you like that, is perfectly powerful in itself in terms of that repair piece. So we want to show up and we want to role model. It doesn't have to be as serious as the grief example. It was very heavy, and that's sort of a, I suppose, end of spectrum example. But it's also really important just in your daily life to say, Oh, I'm feeling really frustrated right now. I'm just gonna take a minute because I just can't work this thing out on my phone or laptop or piece of work or whatever I'm doing. Or I felt really disappointed today. I heard something at work, or I heard a story from a friend, and I just felt really disappointed. Start to vocalize your emotions daily. Not only is this a learning curve for you as a parent, but it's really powerful for your children to see that it's okay to feel. People are not perfectly calm all of the time, and there is no such thing as a bad emotion. So try role modelling that I'm feeling ex piece. Okay, we do a lot of work on this, like I said, with my one-to-one coaching clients, and that can include for some learning to feel yourself, learning what different emotions mean. Quite often, lots of us only have our kind of eight to ten core emotions, but there are so many outside of that. You can buy packs of emotion cards, you can look at an emotion wheel, for example. All of that lovely stuff can really, really help. And I'm going to leave you with a question that I think is really, really important as a parent if you do want your children to be able to have what we call this emotional intelligence piece as they get older. So be able to feel their own emotions but also recognize others, and that is, are emotions allowed to be felt in your house? So maybe doing some journaling, reflecting on the fact that you know, in your house as it stands currently with your children, are emotions able to be felt, both by you as parents as well as by the children. So when we shame or we like fear our own emotions, essentially our children are learning to do the same. So my task to you is to start to name a couple of times a day very calmly. This is the emotion I'm feeling. When I say calmly, it doesn't mean that you can't put some into it if it's like a frustration or disappointment feeling. What we're doing slowly is building there our emotional ability to feel, our repertoire of ability to feel, and theirs too. And it's small steps, but it's really, really powerful, and it slowly starts to build that emotional resilience that's going to be so important and so powerful for our children in the future. For more mini episodes and for my longer form episodes too, don't forget to like or subscribe the Hide You at Home podcast wherever you get your podcasts, whether it's Apple, Spotify, or any other players. We'll see you next time.