Understanding Your Child's Emotional Needs

Being a parent can be both beautiful and complex, and it certainly doesn’t come with a handbook! For many, when we become parents, we reflect on our own childhoods and start to formulate ideas about who we desire to be in this role. For some, this may look very similar to what they experienced, and for others, they may choose a very different path. Whatever that road looks like for you, it can be helpful to have an understanding around the varying needs of children, and how as parents we can help to meet those needs effectively. This can be especially helpful for those that felt their emotional needs were unmet, neglected or discouraged in childhood.

What are Children’s Emotional Needs?

Safety and Predictably

At the very foundation and core of childhood, providing children with a safe, consistent and predictable environment is essential. Children thrive on routine, consistent patterns and predictable interpersonal relations with caregivers. When things feel chaotic within the home, children may feel overwhelmed and learn to focus their attention outwards on the management of others. This can reduce a child’s capacity to build an internal sense of their own needs and a strong identification of who they are as a person. In adulthood, this often presents as people pleasing, difficulty with establishing boundaries, trouble identifying and expressing needs, and a less secure sense of self.

Emotional Validation

Children need to feel that their emotions are both recognized and acceptable. Acknowledging and validating a child’s emotional response doesn’t always mean agreeing with certain behaviors that may be being displayed, but it does mean we can help a child to feel understood; even if we need to hold a boundary in place. For example, if your 5-year-old struggles leaving birthday parties, we can validate the big feelings that may come with this transition, whilst still keeping the boundary in place that it is time to go. Validation helps children learn that their emotional experience matters, and that the caregiver is attuned to their experience. This sets the foundation for building healthy emotional regulation skills to take into adulthood.

Support with Emotional Regulation

Anyone with children will know that young children lack emotional regulation skills, and they require co-regulation from caregivers to soothe their emotional response. How we respond to our children when they are experiencing big feelings builds the blueprint for how they will regulate emotions in adulthood. A caregiver who is attuned to their child’s emotional state, sits with them and helps them soothe and regulate is teaching their child those skills. Children internalize this co-regulation with the caregiver, eventually learning to apply these skills by themselves.

Autonomy

As children grow older, they naturally develop a healthy desire to make choices for themselves. Anyone with a toddler knows this can be challenging to manage, however, allowing the child to make age-appropriate decisions can be really beneficial in allowing the child to feel heard, whilst developing their internal sense of trust. If you find yourself in constant struggles with young children, offering little choices can help immensely. It can be something as simple as avoiding the bedtime routine meltdown by asking ;“do you want to brush your teeth first or put on your PJs?”, or the times when your child is busy playing and doesn’t want to stop; “We have to head out now, do you want to hop to the car like a bunny or leap to the car like a frog?”.

Parenting can be immensely challenging, and the reality is, being perfectly attuned to our children’s emotions is not a goal any of us can likely meet, but it is also not what is actually needed. What we can do is name it when we feel we could have handled things better and offer repair. This process of naming a rupture and offering repair not only helps restore the connection in the present, but it also helps teach the child what healthy rupture and repair looks like, providing them a template for future relationships in adulthood. If you’re struggling with parenting and feeling overwhelmed, you don’t need to navigate this alone. Therapy can provide a

safe, supportive and non-judgemental place to unpack your experience.