time out Leaving the slime behind
One mom’s quest to help her daughter learn to recognize and express emotions LEA HANSON
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ow that my daughter is 8 years old, she’s a bit more emotionally robust. Or at least she ought to be. I have noticed the past year or so has been a bit of a transition when I think about the balance between providing emotional support and emotional challenge. Frankly, it’s probably been too long of one. My bad. When she was little my approach wasn’t much different from that of other parents. She’d fall and get “hurt” and cry. I’d hug, snuggle, and say, “Oh honey, that must have been scary. How can I help you?”… on the outside. Meanwhile on the inside I’m saying, “Good lord, you’re fine.” That’s because she was little and completely unable to name her feelings or express them in a way that made much sense. It seemed to be the options for emotional reaction included a very short list: laugh, cry, neither. Now, her ability to name emotions is stronger and she’s able to delineate what type of sadness she’s feeling. Is she lonely, guilty, depressed, hurt? If she’s angry, is she frustrated, humiliated, embarrassed, mad? Let me clarify: Being able to decipher these different types of feelings is my expectation. Is it too much? Today, I picked her up from afterschool care and they were in the middle of making slime. I arrived and they were experiencing some mixing difficulties. As a result, I was only able to delay departure a few minutes and she didn’t get slime to bring home. TEARS. I called her out: “I feel as though tears might be too big of a reaction in this situation. I can see you’re disappointed you didn’t get the slime, but I don’t think tears are the best way to show me that.” She gets it. I know she does. And, after a few minutes she was able to acknowledge that and we talked about what a better and more productive response would have been. Yet, I still felt a tinge of mom
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guilt as though I was slighting her feelings and making them seem unimportant to me. But they are unimportant to me. Well, the tears are, at least. See what I’m doing here? I’m talking (writing) out of both sides of my mouth. But it’s tough and I know I’m not alone. We also all parent quite differently and as a result (of this and a million other things), our children turn out to be extraordinarily different people when they become adults. We all probably
know an adult who may throw a bit of a fit because their partner wants to leave a fun place before they’re ready to leave. And we all have different reactions to that situation. Teaching my daughter to be emotionally robust is important to me. I want her to have grit and persistence. I also want her to be kind and considerate. Am I part of the double standard that expects women to be everything? Maybe. In the meantime, “I’m sorry you didn’t get to make the slime.”