Your Children Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You

positive emotions that the family can experience. So they created two catchphrases, borrowing from Dr. Seuss, to capture the emotional highs and lows of family life: When their children are down, their catchphrase is “There is no joy in Whoville,” to reflect and empathize with the current mood, andwhen they are up, their catchphrase is “There is once again joy in Whoville!” to get their children to acknowledge the upbeat mood.
    An essential lesson that Ike and Lisa want to teach their daughter, Kaylie, is that how she responds to her emotions is a choice over which she has control. So their catchphrase for Kaylie is “Your emotions, your choice.” When Kaylie is confronted with a potentially “combustible” situation, they gently say their catchphrase. Though when Kaylie was young, her emotional reactions were far from under her control, with this catchphrase and consistent emotional coaching from her parents, she has gradually learned that she actually can control her emotions and choose how to respond in emotional situations.
ROUTINES AND RITUALS FOR EMOTION
     
    One of Catie and Gracie’s favorite games is what we call Funny Faces. At least once a week, usually after dinner, the four of us sit around our kitchen table and take turns choosing an emotion. Then each of us gets to make a face that expresses the emotion. We run the gamut of emotions from sadness, fear, anger, frustration, and disgust to happiness, excitement, contentment, and pride. Even when we are making faces for the most unpleasant of emotions, we always end up with a very different emotion as we quickly dissolve into hysterical laughter because of the fun we are having.
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    ROUTINES AND RITUALS FOR EMOTION
     
Play “Funny Faces.”
Breathe deeply
Center on the heart.
Rate emotional situations.
Recognize teachable moments after upset.
Talk to your children about emotions.
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    But this ritual isn’t just for grins and giggles. Research has shown that children are wired to be attuned to facial expressionsand practice at this can actually teach children empathy and emotional understanding by helping them feel different emotions in themselves and recognize different emotions in others. This game also strengthens our girls’ emotional vocabulary and connects the vocabulary of emotion with others’ expressions and with the feeling of making those expressions themselves.
    Marcy and Cameron are Zen Buddhists who meditate every day and attend evening and weekend retreats as a means of finding an enduring state of inner peace and family harmony. Zen meditation, which includes deep breathing and centering exercises, is a regular part of their family life. To begin dinner, they and their two daughters, Sami and Jessie, hold hands, close their eyes, take several deep breaths, and center their focus on their hearts. Before reading books, taking naps, and bedtime, they share deep breaths and centering with their girls. When their lives get busy and stressed, Marcy and Cameron use deep breathing and centering as their mantra to calm down and be in the moment. When their daughters are upset, Marcy and Cameron encourage them to take deep breaths and center themselves to settle down. Marcy and Cameron have woven this ritual into their daughters’ lives because they believe that if deep breathing and centering can become habits, this will provide their daughters with a powerful tool for regaining control of their emotions and their physical state when they are feeling out of control.
    Dave’s daughter, Patrice, is one sensitive gal. It seems just about anything that doesn’t go her way can set her off, no matter how unimportant it seems from the outside. When Patrice turned four, Dave felt she was ready to start learning how to judge what was worth getting upset about and what wasn’t. He read about a strategy in which he would ask Patrice to rate the importance of the situation causing the upset on a 1 to 5 scale (where 1 is not very important and 5 is very important). He introduced Patrice to the “Upset Scale” and made it one of their emotional rituals to help her gain perspective on her distress. Though it was certainly not a panacea for her sensitivity, Dave noticed that over the ensuing months, Patriceseemed to get upset less often, and when she did, and applied the Upset Scale, she would settle down more quickly.
    Debbie and Armand believe in teachable moments, and, when it comes to emotions, they have experienced plenty from their