Creating an Emotionally Supportive Home Environment
A child falls and scrapes her knee on the pavement. She grabs her knee and cries out, but her parent says, “You’re fine!” or “Walk it off!” While the parent wants to teach resilience, the child feels dismissed or shut down. She wanted comfort and empathy.
Being emotionally supportive means validating your child's feelings, rather than shutting them down. By supporting your child when they express emotions, you’re giving them a foundation for future growth and development.
Even though kids aren’t fully developed, they are still the best judge of their own feelings, and their emotions are every bit as real and valid as ours. Being emotionally supportive means accepting the fact that kids feel the full range of human emotion just like adults do. It also means acknowledging these emotions is the only way to help them grow into the emotionally supported adults we want them to be.
Creating an emotionally supportive space
What children need is a supportive space to share and a calming guide to listen and empathize. With those two pieces in place, they are able to open up and seek help. By establishing this space, you’ll be setting up a great foundation for more open and honest communication, trust, and better relationships.
If you want to learn how to be emotionally supportive for your kids, follow these steps to build an emotionally safe home for your family:
Listen first; talk second. All too often parents interrupt children to tell them how they’re feeling or comment on how a certain experience must feel. Try to remember this mantra: We are all the best judges of our own feelings – even children.
Instead of telling the girl with the scraped knee that she’s fine, try listening and providing physical comfort until she calms down. Words aren’t always necessary. More often than not, your physical presence and attentive listening are enough.
Avoid squashing emotions. How many times have you shushed a child or attempted to distract a crying preschooler to end a meltdown? Young children are often shushed or reprimanded for expressing emotion, and older children are often dismissed (e.g., “This is no big deal”).
What seems small to you might feel really big to your child. When kids are given the opportunity to express and work through their emotions, they learn how to regulate and cope with those big feelings. When they are shushed or dismissed, they learn to stuff their emotions. Like hot lava, stuffed emotions will one day erupt. The more feelings stuffed below the surface, the bigger the explosion.
By encouraging kids to let out their emotions as and when they’re feeling them, you’re fostering a healthier pattern for emotional expression that doesn’t lead to big outbursts and confused or misdirected emotions.
Don’t judge. Have you ever explained your late arrival to a party with an eye roll and a quick, “Sorry, but my daughter just had to find that perfect pair of shoes”? Kids don’t understand sarcasm, but they do pick up on voice tone and they know when they’re being criticized. When parents engage in this negative behavior, children develop negative core beliefs. What they hear is that they are the problem.
Don’t judge your kids and place blame on them to cope with a social blunder or some other issue. Being emotionally supportive means also considering your own emotions — for example, stress or embarrassment could be causing you to seek a solution by blaming your child for your feelings. It’s okay to feel these emotions, but give your child the gift of empathy by working through the problem together and moving on. This also brings us to our final step…
Express your own emotions. Parents have a tendency to hide their own emotions from their kids. While kids don’t need to be involved in the fine points of adult problems, it’s okay for them to see you sad, mad or overwhelmed. When you label and talk about your own emotions, you show them that we all have big feelings to cope with and that you trust them just as they can trust you.
Being an emotionally supportive parent doesn’t mean being infinitely patient, never feeling frustrated or experiencing concern for your child. But by expressing, labeling and accepting your and your kid’s emotions, you create a better environment for everyone.
Creating an emotionally supportive home environment benefits the whole family. When families work together to work through big feelings, they build trust and understanding. This strengthens relationships and shows kids that they have a safe place to seek help, no matter what.
The benefits of learning how to be supportive
Creating an emotionally supportive home environment benefits the whole family. When families work together to work through big feelings, they build trust and understanding. This strengthens relationships and shows kids that they have a safe place to seek help, no matter what.
Unlike a family where kids feel shut down or that certain emotions are off the table for discussion, an emotionally supportive household gives kids space to explore all the different ways they are feeling, and share these feelings without fear of blame or invalidation. As they work through smaller day-to-day feelings, they become better equipped to deal with the bigger emotions and issues that we all face.
In reality, by continuing to be emotionally supportive for kids, you’re creating a more healthy and stable environment that is happier, builds their confidence, and fosters resilience.
Watch it on PBS KIDS
Family is one of the central themes for the PBS KIDS show Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. In many episodes, Daniel Tiger and his family model or learn how they can best communicate and support each other. Watching these videos with your young child may give your family some new ideas for being emotionally supportive and taking care of each other.
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