Helping My Kids — and Myself — Handle Big Emotions
Featuring “Anger Issues: How I’m Helping My Kids…and Myself,” a FamilyLife article by Laura Way
Children often experience strong feelings, including anger. Their anger can trigger physiological responses in parents — an increased heart rate, flushing, or even the fight/flight/freeze response — along with emotions like rage, sadness, or fear.
Like physiological responses, emotions themselves are neither wrong nor sinful. However, the way we express those emotions, especially as we contend with our children’s anger, can either steer us closer to God’s will or push us farther away. How can we as parents nurture our children through emotional moments while dealing with our own anger issues?
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We’ll be more likely to respond helpfully — rather than to react unhelpfully — when acknowledging our own responses to our children’s anger. This prevents our natural responses from controlling our outward behavior, which in turn sets the example for our children to follow.
In this excellent article from FamilyLife, writer Laura Way helps parents learn to recognize their own emotional responses and shares ideas for how to change one’s home from an emotional battlefield into a nurturing garden.
Click here to read the article!
About Laura Way:
Laura serves with FamilyLife (a Cru ministry) as a writer and lives in Orlando, Florida with her high-school-teaching-husband, Aubrey, and their two vibrant young daughters. She and Aubrey lived in East Asia for seven years until relocating last year. She enjoys writing about becoming more fully human while sojourning through different places, seasons of life, and terrains of mental and spiritual health at hopeforthesojourn.com.
But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.
James 3:17-18
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