Understanding Your Child’s Feelings

There's a connection between our emotions, the things we're feeling, and the godly virtues that the Spirit is working to produce in the lives of believers. As parents, we want to help our children understand that connection as they learn how to grow and walk in grace.

Here's Josh Straub. If you're growing in this fruit of the Spirit, if you're walking with God, we should be seeing ourselves becoming more kind to other people, being more loving of other people, stepping into the shoes of other people, and just being able to empathize with them in a conversation where it's not about me. It's not about my story.

It's not about what I can get out of this relationship. It's about your story. And how can I serve you? This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are David and Wilson. I'm Bob Lapine.

How can we help our children process their emotions and then know how to respond to those emotions in a godly way? We're going to talk about that today with Josh and Christy Straub. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. So, I want to kind of deal with an epic parent fail right at the beginning here. You had a confession? I don't think there was ever a time when my kids were growing up. I really cannot remember a time when I looked at them and said, so, how are you feeling right now? I mean, I don't know that I was even conscious of the fact that that was something I should be— Not one time.

I don't—I may have. I'll tell you what, Bob. You were looking across the table at the mom who asked that question every day to our kids.

That was—this was big for you. And she asked it to me a lot, too, and I didn't like it. I would always say, I don't know what I'm feeling.

I did ask Dave that a lot. Like, what are you feeling? And he'd say, I don't know. And then I'd say, I'm angry because you keep asking me. We would have our highs and lows of the day because we raised three sons. I would say, give me the high and low. So on the high and low, I would always ask a feeling word with it. What did that make you feel? And you can't say good or bad.

It has to be a feeling word. So where did that come from for you? I mean, why did that—is that something that happened in your home when you were growing up?

No, no, no. I think it was because I had sons. And marriage is such a big topic, and it's so instrumental to us, and it's so important for legacy and future. Because I had sons, I thought, they need to know what they feel and to be able to communicate. And I understood this very well when our nine-year-old, I was walking out of his bedroom at night. I said, love you, C.J., and he said, love you, too, Mom. But, Mom, you've told me one time you never have to tell me again.

And I thought, his poor wife, like, what is she going to do? And so I thought, I need to help them with their feelings to be able to communicate that for marriage. Well, hopefully, we're going to help a lot of moms and dads avoid my fail, because we've got Dr. Josh Strob and his wife, Christy, joining us today. Guys, welcome to Family Life Today. Thanks for having us.

Thank you so much. We're honored to be here. Josh has been here before. Christy, it's your first time here. And this is something that you guys are both pretty passionate about. Did it start with you, Christy, or start with your husband? I think it started more with Josh. Now, we're both counselors by trade and education, so I think we've already come from that angle of life.

But Josh is, well, you can tell your story of how you jumped into the research. Really, it was when we started having babies. Did your parents ask you that question? In my home, yeah.

No, definitely not. I had amazing parents, but we talked more about sports or, I mean, it wasn't necessarily about our feelings. So I was a counselor, and I've been working, you know, with juvenile delinquents and troubled families. And I had studied, my doctorate's in counseling, but it's in an attachment base.

So it's all about, you know, emotional safety and security and the importance of that for kids. And I remember when we first had kids, our early years of having babies was awful. Christy's pregnancies were terrible. That's putting it mildly. Give me a feeling word for how awful it was. Yeah, disappointed, exhausted.

Angry, grief. And what I realized was that there were so many decisions we had to make early on. So you can't even leave the hospital before you have to make a decision about whether or not you're going to immunize your children. You have the breastfeeding bottle feeding debates. You have the co-sleeping debates. You have spanking, not spanking, time-ins, time-out.

You have all of these, and we didn't even touch BPA-free products or gluten-free diets. And it's like when you first become parents, it's like so overwhelming. And so for us, we were like, no, wait a minute, we're a little bit older.

I was 30 when we got married, and so we're a little bit older having kids. We feel like we have counseling degrees. Like what?

Like how can this be so difficult? And so I went back into the research, and I just started looking at if I'm a 90-year-old grandfather or great-grandfather, and I'm sitting on my rocking chair and I'm looking back through the years, I want to ask myself, what would have really mattered? What did matter in raising those kids?

It's not going to be the bottle feeding or the breastfeeding or the spanking or not spanking, but what really would have mattered? And every research study that I looked at for every major outcome we would want in our kids linked back to emotional safety and the ability for them to be able to understand what they're feeling, why they're feeling that way. And the reason is because that leads to empathy, and it leads to relationships. And it was like, whoa, so we don't have to get so caught up in all these other little things.

Let's keep the end game in mind. And that's where it all started. You guys, and I should have mentioned this earlier, you've created a book for parents to read with their kids, to their kids. I'm thinking you could start this when they're two or three years old, right?

Absolutely. The book is called What Am I Feeling? And it's a kids' book. It's a giant-sized picture book with lots of color and not a lot of words in it. And at the end of the book, there's a chart. I saw the chart and I thought of those charts in the hospital, you know, where on the pain continuum. Right, on a scale of one to ten with the happy and the frowny faces. But this has got nine different feeling faces and words that go with it, all designed to help our kids be able to kind of self-diagnose what's going on in my heart, right? Yeah, and at the end of the day, I think one of the biggest goals for all of us is to raise kids who love God and love others well. And I can remember I was working with juvenile delinquents.

That's who I've worked with mostly in my counseling years. And the very first thing that I would do with any juvenile delinquent that I met with was I would give them a feelings chart because part of my counseling with them was to help them get to a place where they feel remorse for their victims. Well, the reality was, was most of these guys, pretty much every single one I ever met, didn't have a relationship with their dad, didn't know who their dad was, or there was just brokenness there at some level, and there was never feelings talked about. They couldn't even define what they were feeling. And so when Jesus says to love your neighbor as yourself, the reality was is these kids didn't even love themselves. They didn't know how to.

They didn't even know what they were feeling. And so for all of us to be able to truly know what we're feeling and why we're feeling that way, that's the beginning of empathy. It's the beginning of being able to step into the shoes of another person and love them well is for us to be able to recognize what it is we're feeling and take care of ourselves. And I think that was really where, if we can get this in our kids at an early age, I mean, as early as the preschool years, this is the foundation. You know, we get so caught up in the hard skills, like the math and the science. They'll learn those skills, but if you can set those soft skills early on, man, you're setting them up for a lifetime of success. One of the things you said is a sign of a healthy brain is being able to verbalize what we feel and why we feel it.

That was fascinating to me. Why is that a sign of a healthy brain? That's the beginning of being able to control your emotions. So, you know, we talk a lot about anger being a secondary emotion, right? Like, so one of the exercises we'll typically do, especially with someone who's in relationship, particularly marriages, is we'll do this chair exercise where you have two chairs sitting one in front of the other. And typically what ends up happening is the anger is what's being in the front chair.

That's what's coming out at my wife. Like when I'm mad at Christy and I'm coming out in anger, it's usually anger in that front chair. And so what a lot of times we'll do is we'll have couples say, okay, now that you've expressed the anger, I want you to go sit in that second chair and tell me what's behind the anger. And so a lot of times our behavior is what we say to one another, how we act to one another, because we don't understand what we're feeling. We don't know what we're feeling. And eventually long-term, as it relates to our overall health, our physical bodies feel when we're suppressing emotion. So, I mean, ultimately Proverbs 16 32 says, and I love this verse, patience is better than power and controlling one's emotions than capturing a city. You can't control your emotions if you don't know what your emotion is. So, Christy, I'm thinking about a three-year-old who is just raw emotion, right?

Anything's not going the way they want it to go. And it's pretty clear to everybody in the room that they don't like what's going on in that moment. And I've watched my kids do this with their kids. In that moment, they're trying to help their kids put words to what is it you're feeling right now, what's going on. Or they're saying things like, I know you're feeling frustrated.

They're giving them that vocabulary. Again, I'm thinking back, this is something I never did. Why is this so important? I think this is why, I mean, you look at a toddler, you know, throwing an epic meltdown and, you know, Target or something. And if you've had kids, you can relate because it's just pure raw emotion. Think about anger. We feel emotions viscerally in our body.

But until we're taught, I mean, just like colors, you know, this is the color red. We don't know what that feels like. We don't know what that is until we this, you know, my cheeks are hot. You know, your fists are clenched, your teeth are clenched. You feel like this almost hot rage go through your body.

Can you imagine? I mean, if we think back to as a toddler, that feels huge in a little body. It feels huge in our adult bodies. And they're learning to put labels.

It's like organizing and calming the brain. And that's why the feelings chart is so powerful, especially for young children. Really, even adults. So you'll see a lot of adults, men more typically, I'm not sure why that is, but men more typically who've maybe never been given emotional language. Or they grew up in a home where feelings were not talked about.

Certain feelings were dismissed or punished or maybe certain feelings are prioritized over others. And that's a whole thing that even, you know, us as parents of young children. I mean, so often we can inadvertently give our kids the message that I want you to be something, typically happy. It's a message that the child receives that happiness is the desired emotion that mom and dad want from me.

So what happens when they start to feel something in their body that's not congruent with happy? They can start to learn from a very early age to pretend. And this is where we start stuffing and we can learn very early on to these false senses of being, of not being our true selves because we are having to hide what is actually true of us. And so for a child to learn at an early age to look at a face, I mean, we talk about mirror neuron. Our mirror neurons are what basically the baby hears a loud noise. They look to their caregiver, mom or dad, to see, like, should I be scared or am I OK?

And when mom smiles, peace was restored to a child. Whereas if they see a big reaction, it's like, oh, I am to be scared. And so they react with fear. So what we're teaching kids to do early on is to look at another face.

This is what we do as parents, right? They look at us to start to mirror what joy looks like, what sadness looks like, what anger, what fear looks like. And when they can start to see what that looks like in another face, they can start to really organize as the brain. Well, it's interesting as I look through your book, especially the chart. Here's what I thought. Now, you're doing this. Is this true? I thought this is as much adult parent training as it is a child. I thought I need this chart in our kitchen.

You just blew their cover right here. Honestly, it's like I want when Anne and I get in a fight, I want to be able to walk over the wall and go right there. That's what I'm feeling. I want to point at angry or jealous or, you know what I mean? And so how much of this is the child learning how to process an emotion by watching mom and dad or mom or dad, understanding how they because I think a lot of parents don't even know how. And so that's what we're transferring rather than the opposite.

So you figured it out. We wrote a kid's book because parents have time to read a kid's book to their kids. But really, it's not just for the kids.

We all need this. And so many of us, we maybe just grew up in a home where there were certain emotions that took over. You know, it could be you grew up in a household that there was a lot of anger present. It could have been a lot of fear. There could have been a lot of grief or sadness if I mean, a lot of us have lived in homes where there was mental illness. So there might be anxiety, depression, there might have been loss of a sibling. We grow up feeling and being surrounded by a lot of feelings. And even as adults, we come kind of limping into parenthood, carrying our own stories.

And we're not always sure how do we organize that for ourselves. We were at a conference where a dad was talking about, he's a younger dad with younger kids, four kids. But he said, my kids are so emotional. He said, I come from an abusive past.

My dad was only in the home for a while, but it was abusive. I don't feel anymore. Those were his words. I don't feel anymore. So my kids are so emotional. I keep telling him, stop it. And I don't know what to do. That was his question. What do I do?

What would you say to that dad? Yeah, and I think one of the biggest things is just to not be afraid of the emotion. And I think that's where we have, as families, as adults growing up, I think a lot of us, at least my parents were divorced, we were just taught to not talk about emotion because it just didn't feel good. So it was dismissed.

It was as if it wasn't important. The thing to do is just not be afraid of it. I think when we as adults are afraid of the emotion, we pass that onto our kids to be afraid of it. The reality is you don't have to fix it. There's nothing to fix. All you're doing is listening to what is going on in the little heart and mind of that child and allowing them a place to feel safe enough to talk about it.

Bob Goff put in pretty much one Instagram post, what takes us an entire book to describe. He said, be the adult you needed when you were a child. When you're going through pain, when you're going through emotional pain, you've just lost, you found out you lost your job or your spouse is leaving you or you've lost a parent. What do you need in that moment? You need someone just to put their hand on your back or give you a hug.

Our kids, that's what they need too. And so when there's all this emotion just sitting with them and being that person that's right there with them and sometimes, sure, maybe something does need fixed or to be problem solved and you can problem solve through that. But until our brains are calmed down, our kids are living in fight or flight mode. And we know through neuroscience research that when you're in fight or flight mode, you're not thinking straight. And so to get our kids to think straight, that's why when our kids are overwhelmed, we don't want to give them a lecture because they ain't listening to us anyway. And so when we can be safe enough to help calm their brain, now we can enter into problem solving mode because they can think straight.

And so they feel safe to do that. You know, I can't imagine honestly what could have been different in my upbringing. Think about this. You don't know this, but my mom and dad married 25 years. My dad walks out, so divorced.

I'm seven years old. And my little brother, five and a half years old, dies about six months later of leukemia. And we moved to another state. It would have been wonderful if my mom could have put a chart up on a wall and said, David, what are you feeling right now? You know, I never processed it, never really even talked about it. It wasn't like you weren't allowed to.

And it would have been nice for my mom to be able to go, Yeah, imagine the pain she was living. Here's what I'm feeling. Here's what we're feeling. Because now it's sort of just us now trying to forge a new life.

What a resource. You know, again, not just for the children, but for the adults and for the parents as well. And there's an interesting quote I found in your book that I'd love you to talk about because it leads from the emotional stability to the spiritual maturity. And you make this comment, and I'm even thinking about my own life, about how to grow up spiritually and become mature when there's this brokenness emotionally in my life and so many people's lives. But you make this comment, you know, you don't think you can really be spiritually mature unless you're emotionally mature.

Talk about that. You know, it's interesting because, and I think I heard Pete Scazzaro talk about that a number of years ago in Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, that this idea that you can only be as spiritually mature as you are emotionally mature. You know, you think about the fruit of the Spirit, love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and gentleness and faithfulness and goodness and self-control.

But those are all intertwined together, right? You can have a personality that's, you know, gentle or you can have a personality that's, you know, patient. But to have all those intertwined together is a fruit of the Spirit. But that takes emotional maturity as well.

Like, if you're growing in this fruit of the Spirit, if you're walking with God, we should be seeing ourselves becoming more kind to other people, being more loving of other people, stepping into the shoes of other people and just being able to empathize with them in a conversation where it's not about me, it's not about my story, it's not about what I can get out of this relationship, it's about your story and how can I serve you. My thinking about emotions, I think, throughout my life has been emotional maturity means I'm in control of my emotions. I hear you saying it's more than just being in control of your emotions. You can be in control of them without necessarily diving in and understanding them and fully feeling them. And you're saying, no, emotional maturity goes beyond just being able to turn it down. Right, which is numbing.

I mean, essentially, and I think Anne touched on this, really what I think we're seeing in a generation of people, humans, especially this next generation that's raising, you know, our younger generation, is a lot of numbing. Meaning that it's whatever we can do to shut down emotion, and that is not emotional health. In fact, emotional health is the ability to feel the entire range of emotion, which is everything from the typically labeled positive emotions, you know, happiness, joy, to the typically labeled negative emotions, fear, anger, sadness, grief, the things we don't like to feel.

When I learned in my own personal journey that joy and happiness are no more important in my life than being able to feel anger, sadness, grief, that those negative emotions are just as important and the ability to come in and out of those, not to live there, but in order to be able to come in and out of emotion. And that's what we want for our kids, too. So typically, we get triggered by certain emotions. You were talking about this earlier, Anne. There's certain feelings that we do not like to see in our kids.

We don't like them. It's because it's triggering something in our story. And that's something to even just put a pause button on, just start to pay attention to.

Just put your finger on it. Man, why is it when my kid throws a, you know, gets angry, cries, if there's fear, I go to the roof. And, okay, where is that coming from?

You don't have to fix it. You're just starting to pay attention. I mean, that's the beginnings of it, where we're just starting to let them feel and ourselves feel and kind of just get a little bit curious. When I read my Bible and it says, don't be angry, don't fear. So you're saying I should embrace those things, even though the Bible is saying, no, don't? Well, I mean, look at Jesus, right?

He was a table flipper. And I think that's where, you know, as parents, we also need to teach our kids that with self-control, right? My favorite line in the book is a feeling is just a feeling.

It's not in charge of you. So it's one thing to feel the feeling and then we get to put on the brakes of self-control. And that's where I think our generation goes the opposite extreme today of if I'm feeling something, that means I can act on that feeling. And the reality is, is that's not biblically accurate. If you take a look at what am I feeling, the children's book, it really is Philippians 4 put into practice. So when Paul was writing from prison, by the way, which I'm sure not very good conditions comparable to America's prisons today, he's writing, be anxious for nothing, but by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving.

So your gratitude towards God alone and saying, God, thank you that you're a good God. Thank you that you care for me. Thank you that you love me.

Thank you that my security is in you. I'm anxious right now. I'm scared right now. I'm sad right now.

I'm feeling rejected right now. In prayer and supplication, make your requests be made known to God. So really what Paul is saying here, I talk about Paul being the first neuroscientist. Paul is saying voice, label your anxiety, label your feelings, give them over to God in thanksgiving and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

And it's not until after that. He writes finally brothers and sisters, whatever is true, pure, anything excellent, praiseworthy, what? Think on these things.

I think Paul understood that when we're overwhelmed in negative emotion, we don't think straight. And so I believe in a finite way, that's our job as parents is to be that peace that can calm our kids brains when they're emotionally overwhelmed. And that's what we hope that really you could do with this book is to say, what are you feeling right now? And then let's ask God, let's take a deep breath and let's ask God what to do with that feeling. Can you think of a time in the last two months with the Straub kids where you've had one of these let's process and work through this moment with your kids? Oh, my word. Which one? Yeah.

Okay, let's think. Was it yesterday, the day before? I remember we walked through this with our son. He was going through a really difficult time.

Actually, this is, well, this is going back a little bit because this is actually where one of the stories in this book came. He was going to a new school and just experiencing a lot of fear, but he didn't know how to put that in words. So it was coming out in, he was shutting down.

He was acting completely out of character. I would have to take him into the bathroom literally every single morning at school as I'm dropping him off. I mean, the nervous, which I didn't know at first. I thought it was something funny. I'm like, oh, you have breakfast, we're driving you to school.

It's working its way through your system. And then come to realize, I mean, this is, I mean, he's, I mean, you're physically seeing the effects of this. But he couldn't, he would cry. He was, there was acting out, there was anger.

I mean, it was covered this whole mess of stuff, which is what emotions often come out like. And I remember one morning, this was months into school, we encourage him every morning and we're cheering him on and encouraging him. And I said, buddy, what does it feel like? And he said, mom, I just feel so flippy in my tummy. And I was like, oh, but that's a great description of fear. Like, I know what that feels like.

So we use that description in the book. I feel flippy in my tummy. But it was when he started to figure out what he was feeling was fear, that it started to at least put it in a box where it was like, I'm afraid to go to school. That's what this, all this is, all this, because it can come out sideways often, right? When we're not dealing well with an emotion, it will come out sideways somehow. So then once that's identified and you can say, you know what you're feeling is fear.

And he goes, yeah, that is what I'm feeling. Now what do you do to help deal with that? I think this is where we as adults get to be sort of their mentors. We get to be their models and we get to show them we are bigger, we're stronger, we're kind, and we're not putting our emotion on our kids. I think that's sort of an extreme parents can sometimes go to, not meaning to, but where we actually put the weight of our emotion on our kids. So if there's tension in the marriage, if there's sadness, if there's depression, and the kids start to carry what mom and dad are feeling, that's not this.

But it's showing our kids that we feel too. So I remember in that I was like, there was one day, actually same kid, he had a test at school and he was real nervous about it. And I said to him, we were actually going to speak that day. And I was speaking to, it was a big group of people and I was nervous.

And I said, buddy, mommy has to go do something today. And I'm honestly really scared too. So how about you go to school and you do your test and you do the thing that scares you. And I'm going to go and I'm going to do the thing that scares me. And then maybe when we come home tonight together, we can talk about it. Maybe we'll feel a little more brave.

That's good. And I think in those moments, you know, they start to recognize, I'm never going to outgrow fear. I'm never going to outgrow sadness. It's never going to go away. It's just a part of life, but it doesn't get to be in charge of us.

I was thinking, you were just saying adults still have flippy in their tummy. I mean, what a great phrase and we all have. I mean, and what you just shared, even Josh, when you walked through Philippians 4, I thought, what an action step for somebody listening to this program right now. What if right now you had named it, you say in your book, name it to tame it.

Yeah, yeah. You know, you can't really get control of an emotion until you identify it. And Philippians 4, 6, and 7 is sort of that process. You're right, Paul's in neurosciences. It's like he's a PhD counselor saying you got to speak this out loud to God, the anxious, the worry.

What if we did that right now? You know, tonight, before we did it with our children, what would that look like to say, God, I'm going to speak this out to you. I'm going to thank you in all things. It's a form of confession as well. And walk through that process, what you walked us through earlier, what a beautiful, beautiful way to name it and process it with God and then model that with your children. And you know how it is with kids' books. I mean, this is not something you will read to them once, but you're going to read this book, What Am I Feeling, over and over again. I mean, I don't have kids at home, but when my grandkids, dinosaurs love tacos, did you know that?

Oh, my goodness. We still read that book. Why is that so popular? Every time I read it, I'm like, this doesn't even make sense. And they love it. They love it and they say read it again and read it again. And so What Am I Feeling is that book that they read it again, read it again. And what you're doing here is not about whether dinosaurs love tacos. It's about your feelings and putting words to it and learning how to tame it.

And we get a lot of testimonies from parents saying that this is the book their kids want to pick up, which is very humbling to us and very exciting because we just see this as, man, our heart would be for that next generation of kids to love God and love others well. Dinosaurs that love tacos is never going to change a kid's life, but this is. Dragons. Dragons. Dragons. That's right. Sorry, I got the animals wrong. Dragons love tacos.

Same thing. We do have copies not of dragons, but of What Am I Feeling in our Family Like Today resource center. You can go online to find out more about the book or to order a copy.

Again, the title is What Am I Feeling by Josh and Christy Straub. The website is familylifetoday.com. You can also call to order 1-800-FL-TODAY. So again, the website familylifetoday.com. The phone number 1-800-FL-TODAY.

That's 1-800-358-6329. And the book is called What Am I Feeling? Helping Kids Learn to Manage Big Feelings in Little Bodies. Now, we hope that your celebration of the birth of Christ tomorrow is a great time for you. Hope you're able to be together with friends or with family to celebrate the holidays.

I know this is hard this year. Lots of families who are normally together are not able to be together this year because of health and safety concerns. Our hope is that you will find your joy and your peace and your contentment in Christ and that there is a way to connect with your family this year. And let me just say thank you to those of you who have prayed for us and who have supported this ministry throughout the year. We're grateful for your financial support and this is the right time of year to say thank you for how you have supported us and what has been a tough year for all of us. So we appreciate you and we are grateful and we hope you have a Merry Christmas. And we hope you'll have some time tomorrow when you can tune in and hear part two of our conversation with Josh and Christy Straub as we continue talking about how our kids can identify exactly what it is they're feeling, put a name to that and process those emotions, learn how to do that in a God-honoring way. Hope you can join us for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back on Christmas Day for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today, hope for tomorrow.