Kids hold it together during the day at school and camp and daycare and grandma's house because they instinctively trust you to hold their tenderest emotional states. It's called RESTRAINT COLLAPSE.
Your attachment relationship is the place they feel the most comfortable expressing their strong feelings.
So many things happen during their days that they don't have the time or the secure place to feel and process, so those things come out at the end of the day with you.
But not always directly. Sometimes they go sideways about something seemingly small because they just don't have executive functioning skills to connect their emotional state to something that happened hours before.
When your kids get home and start melting down, offer them compassion and a safe place to be emotionally messy. And a protein snack. And be kind to yourself, you're not failing, you're their safe place.
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Learn how to support your child when they feel jealous with these 3 essential steps - empathize, regulate, and guide - to help them understand and cope with this normal and complex emotion, in this insightful video.
Hey there! In this video, I'm sharing a personal story about how I learned the importance of fixing things in parent-child relationships. I talk about owning up to my mistakes, listening to my kid's feelings, and making things right. Remember, it's okay to mess up; just be patient and don't be too hard on yourself. We're all in this together!
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Avoid focusing too much on fairness when teaching kids, as it can create a belief that good behavior is always rewarded and bad behavior is always punished, leading to the dangerous belief that they deserve any trauma they experience, instead use relational motivation to guide them towards making good choices.
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