0:11 - Why it’s a very personal subject to me
1:30 - How you can help yourselves avoid these types of situations
2:23 - Frustration - teach your children this method as well
2:55 - Sadness - work through it with talking
Hi, everyone. My name is Harper Jones with Bow-Tiger and you're watching Saturdays With Harper. And I wanted to touch on a very personal subject today and now it's personal to me today because this actually just occurred with my five-year old daughter. I was frustrated over some work things earlier and I kind of outwardly expressed that, just in the way that I was a little short with answers with her and kind of hurried her along during her day doing different things. Now I noticed that I did this but I didn't notice it in time.
When I noticed it was when she actually portrayed those same frustrations and that same attitude back towards me. So my happy little girl went from a happy little girl to a frustrated little girl and was outwardly showing this by being a little rude back to me. I want to teach you guys or show you guys different ways that you can one, fix this for yourself so you do not have to catch it after the fact, and two, how you can teach your children to properly express their emotions. Everybody has emotions of frustration, sadness, happiness, shyness; all these different things are emotions that all of us have. But we can really teach our children how to properly express these emotions so they don't come out as being seriously aggravated or overly upset, etc.
So the first thing I wanted to do is, it does start with the parent, so I want to tell you guys how you can maybe help yourselves avoid these types of situations. And I know some of this is going to sound funny but I promise you it really does work and had I used it today, I probably could have avoided this whole situation myself. The first thing is just the 1 through 10 method. If you feel yourself getting frustrated over a situation and it doesn't or does have to do with your children, simply sit quietly, even if there is distractions going on. Take some deep breaths and breathe as best as you can and count from 1 to 10, just slowly and quietly in your head or out loud if you want to. And I promise you it actually has been clinically shown that this will decrease your stress and kind of just give you a little bit of peace of mind so you can come back to where you were and you can deal with the problem in the proper manner. Now when our kids see this, hopefully they'll pick up on this because this is a great way for us to handle a frustrating situation, sad situation, anything, to kind of take a moment to ourselves, kind of take it all in and then express our emotions how we want to. So we can teach our children this method as well for if they are frustrated at school or maybe they play at different activities. They can use this method as well to kind of help them gain some clarity on what they are frustrated about and just so they can outwardly express it properly.
Okay, with sadness too. Being sad is an emotion that we all have and this is not something that we want to completely suppress. If your child is upset about something or if you're upset about something, you should express that. But one of the best ways to express that is to work through it with talking. We don't want our children to think that because they're sad they need to stay in their room and away from other people because everybody else is happy and we don't need that. We don't want them thinking that. So if your child is sad, let them tell you, let them express their sadness to you, but you also want them to tell you why. You want them to be able to explain. And the more they explain to you as to why they're frustrated, or sad, or upset, the better they are going to understand themselves. And this will actually help them work through the issue or the problem that they're having.
Of course happiness is an emotion as well that we all have and we want as much happiness as we possibly can have. So that's not one that we really need to work on. But as parents it is our responsibility to teach our children how to properly facilitate different emotions that they have and how to express the emotions in a manner that is not hurtful to other people and also not hurtful inwardly to themselves. And these are a couple of ways that you guys can do that. Now if you're watching this video on Facebook or YouTube, I'd ask that you please be sure to check out our blog on Bow-Tiger.com and we'll see you next Saturday. Thanks.
