Children’s emotions play a fundamental role in their well-being and growth. Understanding how to deal with them is essential, both for parents and for the youngsters themselves.
Back-to-school is the perfect time to address the challenges children and teenagers face on a daily basis, including the emotions that come with them. Doubts, fears and worries are common feelings that can affect children and their families. Sometimes, these emotions can become so overwhelming that they prevent parents from giving their children the support they need.
In our interview, Pauline De Falco guides us through the complex world of emotions in childhood and adolescence, and gives us valuable advice on how to manage them and help our children overcome the challenges of everyday life. Happy reading!
In your experience with children, what are the main concerns a child faces when starting a new school year? How can you help them?
For most children, the start of a new school year is more a mixture of excitement and fears, which are perfectly normal and adaptive when faced with an unfamiliar situation such as starting kindergarten or a new school. In fact, it’s often at these two stages that parents come to see me with their child to discuss difficulties in adapting to the school environment.
I’ve worked in many structures where adults worked in teams, and the fears were the same when changes were envisaged by management… This gave rise to very strong emotions and a period of adaptation. The human brain is wired to minimize risk, and consistency provides a predictable environment that reduces uncertainty. The brain is a bit lazy, and prefers to stay thrifty: this is even more pronounced in children, whose wiring in the prefrontal cortex is still under construction.
Some children are more attached to their routines, and find this separation very difficult, even to the point of feeling “punished”, and experiencing it as a real injustice. If the parents also feel this is an injustice, the child’s anger will increase, and he or she may tend to victimize themselves over and over again, to criticize the teacher or the activities, when the real subject is the friends they’ve lost. Other children socialize more quickly, turning away from their former friends, who don’t understand what they’ve done wrong. In such cases, it’s important to help the child to socialize, by inviting children from the new class, for example, and quickly making friends with other parents, in a way setting an example for them. A few minutes in the park next door can be all it takes to meet new people. The idea is to teach them to adapt to change, because they’re bound to experience it in life..
We can help them to become aware of their resources, for example, by asking them about activities they had been afraid to perform and which they finally succeeded in, and by proposing small challenges to them rather than avoiding confronting them with their fears. Cultivating avoidance means demonizing emotions. But emotions are harmless! All it does is inform us about the changes we need to make in our lives.
The canteen is also often a major preoccupation for parents. Not eating is sometimes a sign that children are “stuffed” with all the stimulation to which they will gradually become accustomed. So you’ll have to be patient and not worry too much if they don’t eat. I see a lot of parents whose first question on leaving school is “What did you eat for lunch? And children often answer “nothing”, or “I don’t know”. Which is a real turn-off for parents! Children need to have confidence in the social environment in which they evolve in order to eat properly. Some will need time to do so, and except in the case of a particular pathology, they won’t suffer from deficiencies. I think we need to calm down on this subject.
Sometimes they haven’t understood that they’ll be going to school every day either… They think it’s a day like a pottery activity! So sometimes, after one or two days of school that have gone really well, the child starts refusing to go to school..
Sometimes, too, we’ve told our children that school is a great adventure, and that they’re going to do lots of things that are just too good to convince them. But the reality is not necessarily so enchanting..
He had to wait his turn, the canteen wasn’t to his liking, painting when he doesn’t like it… I’d like to tell parents not to make a big deal out of starting kindergarten. You can prepare him calmly by installing a small visual aid for the school days, go and see the school before the start of the school year, re-establish clear routines and rituals at home, buy an alarm clock, rearrange the room a little by sorting out baby’s toys, allow him to choose from 2 or 3 school or snack bags, draw his future school and how he imagines it will look inside, install a visual aid until the day of the start of the school year, etc. The first year of nursery school is a very special time for your child.
The first year of kindergarten is above all a year of discovering a rhythm with numerous routines, learning social rules, respecting collective instructions and sensory-motor development.
This is not yet an age of great socialization! Children are still very solitary at this age. So don’t worry if they don’t talk much about other children or criticize others. At this age, they are asserting their individuality, and others are an obstacle to the fulfillment of their desires, since they have to share, wait… all this is very demanding!
For children entering first grade, the big issue is reading and writing… There are those who already know how to read before they start, and those who don’t seem to be interested yet. But each child has his or her own pace of learning, and the teacher will be vigilant and call on you if there’s a problem. Each child has his or her own area of predilection at different times of life: some will have an overflowing imagination, others will do antics like real gymnasts, still others will draw incessantly, or be very chatty!
Homework is a big change for parents, and it’s often a source of stress for them, especially when the child doesn’t seem to take to it with enthusiasm, or when his rhythm isn’t as fluid as his big sister’s…
Again, this in no way predicts success at school. Remain calm and confident, and talk to your child’s teacher if you feel that something is going wrong. He or she will be able to give you advice on how to help your child become more independent.
Another common fear among children starting a new school year is that of the teacher… They may have heard some of their elders or classmates criticize their teacher, saying he or she was too strict, or even mean. When you have several children in the same school, it’s important to remember that they may all have the same teacher at some point. If the eldest child has been very critical of him/her, and the parents have not picked up on it, or have even acquiesced, it will be more difficult for him/her to trust the teacher, and the die will be loaded.
But if a child confided in me his worries about the start of a new school year, I’d want to ask him how he imagined it would go… “What games do you think there’ll be in the classroom? What books will there be? I also suggest a betting game: “I bet there’ll be a little girl named Louise…I can’t wait to hear if I win…what about you? What do you bet? This makes the event less dramatic by creating a diversion. I’ll also ask them to draw how they feel about going back to school. Sometimes they’ll draw a doodle, animals, the school… It’s not that important, the idea is to put the emotion at a distance. I won’t try to reassure him, but rather to empathize with his fears, because expressing an emotion and being heard is already halving its intensity!
What if we What if we made it out of modeling clay? ”.
Anything that enables him to visualize his emotion through his five senses is welcome… By making it concrete, this gives him the opportunity to act on this emotion: “What color would you like it to be, so that it seems more comfortable? What size would you like it to be?…and would you like us to add something to make it less annoying? Now that we’ve changed all that, how do you feel? ”.
I often give children the metaphor of an airplane: sometimes, pilots navigate in automatic mode when everything is known in advance. But they take control again when faced with a new situation or a threat. We are the pilots of our brain! It’s up to us to remind it that a back-to-school is harmless, and that it doesn’t need to react as if facing a tyrannosaurus.
Because, quite simply, children sometimes don’t know why they feel certain emotions at school… and these emotions come home to them without understanding why. Storytelling is a way of “revealing” events that they may not have been able to talk about. Storytelling tackles certain issues in a more symbolic way, without any direct link to situations in the child’s everyday life. They often have a timeless, universal character, with an imaginary power that appeals to all children. Their aim is more moral, and just as important for children’s psychic lives: there’s often a hero who encounters difficulties far greater than his or her own, but who emerges at the end of the story grown up, loved and respected by dint of courage and willpower. As Gilbert Keith Chesterton said, “fairy tales are more than real; not because they teach children that dragons exist, but because they teach them that dragons can be defeated”.
In addition, listening to stories develops creativity and increases the desire to read when the time comes, as the child realizes that he can offer himself this opportunity and finds greater meaning and motivation in learning to read.
Music, for its part, not only sweetens the pot, but also encourages the development of language and speech by reinforcing auditory perception and the understanding of sounds and rhythms. It’s also a wonderful opportunity to develop emotions and relationships with others: some music soothes us or makes us sad, others bring us joy, still others make us nostalgic or make us think of special people or memories.