- Julie Barris | Crisis Counselor | Therapist-in-Training
- Nov 22
When we learn to respond to kids’ big emotions with presence instead of punishment, we teach them that their feelings are safe to express rather than something to hide. Responding to kids’ big emotions with connection today becomes the foundation for their emotional resilience tomorrow.
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For generations, parents and caregivers have relied on sending children away when emotions became overwhelming — a slammed door, a quiet “go to your room,” or the all-too-familiar “come back when you can behave.” These actions were rarely meant to harm. More often, they came from a belief that distance would help a child “calm down” or “learn control.” But for many children, these moments of being sent away didn’t teach emotional regulation. Instead, they planted a quieter message: your feelings are too much, and you must face them alone. And those early lessons don’t fade with time — they linger into adulthood, shaping how we respond to our own emotional storms.
A Culture That Fears Big Feelings
Most parents don’t distance themselves from their children to be hurtful; they do it because they were raised in a culture that treats emotional intensity as dangerous or unacceptable. This cultural messaging runs deep: crying is weakness, anger is disobedience, fear is overreacting, and vulnerability is something to hide. When a child expresses big emotions, many adults feel their own anxiety spike — not because the child is misbehaving, but because the parent has no internal map for handling these feelings.
So the instinct becomes: shut it down.
Quiet it.
Remove it.
Distance it.
But emotions aren’t threats. They are signals — powerful indicators of unmet needs, sensory overload, fear, or frustration that a young nervous system doesn’t yet know how to manage. A child in emotional distress isn’t trying to cause trouble. They’re trying to communicate in the only way their body knows how. When adults misinterpret these signals as defiance, disrespect, or manipulation, children learn that honesty about their internal world is unsafe. This is where emotional avoidance begins.
When Distance Feels Like Rejection
Adults may intend distance to be helpful, but the child’s brain processes it very differently. What feels like a neutral decision to the adult — “Take a break in your room” — can feel like abandonment to a child whose nervous system is already overwhelmed. Young children are wired for closeness; emotional safety is fundamentally tied to proximity to caregivers.
So even well-intended actions can translate into painful internal messages, such as:
My feelings drive people away.
I’m only lovable when I’m calm.
When I struggle, I’m alone.
Connection disappears in my hardest moments.
These messages don’t stay in childhood. They echo throughout adulthood. The person who learned as a child to “go to your room and calm down” might later struggle to express their needs, fear being a burden, bottle up emotions until they burst, or become hyper-independent. Emotional isolation becomes the default response, not because they want it — but because it was modeled for them as the only acceptable way to handle big feelings.
What Kids Actually Need
Children do not learn emotional regulation through isolation — they learn it through co-regulation. This is the process where a calm, present adult helps a dysregulated child reorganize their emotional state. Safety, not separation, is what helps the nervous system settle. Being present doesn’t mean allowing unsafe behavior, nor does it mean letting chaos take over. It means offering an anchor — steady breathing, grounded communication, gentle language, and openness to being near the child without forcing conversation or control.
Sometimes it looks like sitting quietly in the same room.
Sometimes it’s saying, “I’m here when you’re ready.”
Sometimes it’s helping name the emotion: “That was really overwhelming, wasn’t it?”
When a child knows they are not alone during emotional overwhelm, they learn one of the most valuable lessons for lifelong mental health: feelings are manageable and relationships remain safe, even when emotions are big.
Breaking the Cycle
Many adults today feel torn — they want to respond differently to their own children, but they never had that modeled for them. Their emotional blueprint taught them that overwhelm equals isolation, and now they’re trying to rewrite that map in real time. This is hard, courageous work.
Breaking the cycle doesn’t require perfection. Children don’t need flawless parents — they need present ones. Parents who pause, breathe, and choose connection even when their own upbringing taught them to disconnect. Every time a parent stays instead of sending a child away, validates instead of dismissing, or supports instead of shaming, they’re doing more than soothing a moment. They’re creating an entirely new emotional legacy.
It’s not just the child who heals.
The parent heals, too.
Because responding with compassion to a child’s big feelings often illuminates the parts of ourselves that never received that same compassion.
And So Here’s the Question…
If so many of us learned to fear big emotions because we were sent away in our hardest moments, what might happen — for our children and for our own healing — if instead of retreating, we learned to stay?
💬 Ready to start your own healing journey?
Book a session with one of our compassionate therapists at Moody Melon Counseling. We’re here when you’re ready. 🍉
