Encouraging Your Kids to Discuss Their Feelings

Hey, Jim Daly here. If you like the Focus on the Family broadcast and haven't grown tired of this voice just yet, you'll love my Refocus Podcast. On Refocus, I take a deeper dive with a respected thinker on different aspects of culture.

I ask those hard questions that maybe they don't get that often, and I don't shy away from challenging topics to help you share God's grace, truth, and love with others. So listen to Refocus with Jim Daly on your favorite streaming app today. So when our kids are overwhelmed, our ability to be emotionally safe helps calm their brain so they can think straight, and it's thinking straight that leads to every major outcome we desire in our kids. We all want our children to thrive, and you'll hear some great ideas about how to do just that on today's episode of Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. Today's guest, Dr. Joshua Straub, is an author, family coach, and an expert in emotional intelligence, and he has some fascinating insights on how to help our children process their own emotions by making your home a safe place to share those feelings. Really good stuff.

I'd agree, and without any further ado, here's Josh Straub speaking to a gathering of our staff at Focus on the Family. Not long ago, Christy and I had gotten the mail, and there was a bill, a very unexpected bill in the mail, and I took it in, and I laid it down in front of Christy, and I looked at her, and I'm like, what are we going to do? And she looked at me, and she's like, what do you mean, what are we going to do? And I said, well, you realize, like, I don't know how we are going to pay this bill.

We were not expecting this bill. Like, I don't know what we're going to do next. And she's like, Josh, why do you always get like this? And I said, do you realize how much food our kids are eating these days?

Like, we've got to figure this out. And she said, Josh, you do realize that I manage most of our finances. Have you seen our bank account? And I said, I don't care.

Can you tell? People are out to get us. Like, they don't want us to have a family and earn a living, and they're out to get us. And she said, Josh, you're absolutely losing your mind. I said, yes, I am losing my mind. So I go into my prayer closet because I'm losing my mind. Meanwhile, Christy's on the phone getting the bill reconciled and figured out so that my mind can calm down. But isn't it true how often we as adults get worked up over things because fear and anxiety start to enter into our minds, and we start taking it down a road that we never need to take it down?

And then now it starts to impact our relationship with one another. You know, Christy and I experienced this early on with our kids. You know, we were both, we thought we were pretty well set when we got married. I was 30 by the time we got married.

Christy was 26. We had our patterns figured out. And then all of a sudden, our greatest opponent came into our marriage weighing eight pounds and one ounce. And you want to talk about, I mean, you talk acid reflux, colic, stomach allergies we couldn't figure out. By the time Landon, you know, is two, we thought we were doing a little bit decent, and we thought that once you had a hard baby, you were going to have an easy one. Well, Kennedy, our daughter, came into the world, and she was more difficult than our first one.

Easy and baby were not synonymous in the Straub household. And so what I started to do is while we were in this season of our lives, our brains are out of sorts. We're not getting any sleep. It's kind of like the bills are, you know, a bill comes in the mail or whatever it is, or a baby's not sleeping at night.

You can't figure life out. And all of a sudden, you start to take a criticism from your spouse, and you start to take it personally. And next thing you know, rather than becoming teammates in your marriage, you're each other's enemy. Because your brain isn't calm, it's overwhelmed, you don't know what to do, you're feeling more and more alone. Imagine we as parents, imagine we as adults, feeling so overwhelmed in our brain, not knowing what to do, how much more that is as it translates into our kids' brains, who don't even know how to label emotion yet. And so the talk today, what we're talking about, how do we set the tone for an emotionally safe environment?

Because when we were in those early years, I went back into the research, and I started to look at the data. I wanted to see what will have really mattered when our kids are older, when we've gotten them out of the house, to raise kids who love God and love others, to raise kids who get married, stay married, and really enjoy their marriage, to raise kids who have a career that they love and that they feel like they have meaning and purpose in life. And then even today, to raise kids who thrive in their extracurricular activities, who get good grades and who have great social skills with peers and can build healthy friendships. And every single thing, every single outcome that I looked at came back to this one primary factor, and that was emotional safety. The ability of us as parents to be able to enter into our children's world and help them tell their story. And so today, what I want to do is I want to just walk through five key ways that we can do that, five key ways that we can establish an emotionally safe environment. And the reason that this is so profound is because I want you to think about this for a second. What happens is that when our kids are in an emotionally safe environment, when their brains are overwhelmed, when they're feeling worry or fear or sadness or grief or anger, when their brain is in overdrive, our ability as parents to be able to enter into their world and help them write their story has a calming effect on the brain. So when our kids are overwhelmed, our ability to be emotionally safe helps calm their brain so they can think straight, and it's thinking straight that leads to every major outcome we desire in our kids. So how do we do this?

What does this look like? How do we enter into our kids' worlds and help them tell their story? Number one, we lead in grace and we follow in truth. We lead in grace and we follow in truth.

I want to anchor us in Scripture because I believe Paul was one of the very first people who understood the power of neurobiology. If you look at Philippians chapter 4, he says this, he said, let your gentleness be evident to everybody. The Lord is near, therefore be anxious for what? Nothing but in everything by prayer and petition with thanksgiving. Got to have gratitude. The reason gratitude is so important is neurobiologically it's actually been found that gratitude actually pushes anxiety out of your brain. Gratitude and anxiety cannot coexist at the same time in the brain. And so Paul understood with thanksgiving, present your request to God and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. What happens is we go to God in prayer, and even though he might not answer our prayer requests the way that we want him to, he will answer them in the way that's best for us because he knows what's best for us.

And we can thank him for that. And then the peace of God which surpasses all understanding keeps your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus so that finally brothers and sisters, verse 8, finally brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is excellent, whatever is noble, whatever is praiseworthy, what? Think on these things. I think Paul understood that when we are anxious and overwhelmed we can't think straight. I can't think straight about the bills coming in. I can't think straight about our kids acting out. I can't think straight when all these things are happening until I am calm, until I experience the presence of the Lord Jesus and can calm my brain. Which is why all of this major research points to this idea that for our children to be able to, in a finite way, I genuinely believe we as parents in a finite way are a peace that can help calm our children's brain when they're anxious and overwhelmed and can't think straight.

We enter into their world to help them tell their story. I remember working with a dad of a 14-year-old and she really wanted to go to a Friday night football game and her dad said no. And so she came home and she looked at her dad and she said, Dad, I hate you.

And she went storming to her bedroom. Now you can imagine as a parent, how is your brain doing right now? How is your fight, flight, and freeze, how is your amygdala doing in this moment towards your 14-year-old? Because I know for me, a lot of times what we end up doing is we tend to overreact and we'll lead in truth rather than in grace. So what we do is we say, don't you ever speak to me that way again. You go to your room, I'm taking your phone for a month, and no, you're not going to that Friday night football game.

Do you understand me? But the posture of emotional safety, the posture of speaking to our kids, leading in grace and following in truth is our ability as parents to be able to enter into our kids' worlds and saying, Honey, what is it about that Friday night football game that matters to you so much? And what that dad found out about his daughter is that she had been rejected by a group of friends that she used to hang out with in the school year prior. And she would see them posting pictures on Instagram and Snapchat of them hanging out without her.

And this was the first Friday night they invited her to be a part of something and her dad said no. You see, when our kids are anxious and overwhelmed or they're behaviorally acting out, usually there's a deeper emotion happening within, underneath. And our ability to lead in grace, as Jesus did with the woman at the well, as Jesus did with the woman caught in adultery, as we see throughout the gospels, the way Jesus shows up in grace and putting relationship first, lead in grace and follow in truth has a calming effect on our kids' brain so that they can problem solve about what is the right thing to do, whether or not I should go to this football game or not. And what this dad did was he entered into her world, he gave her a consequence for the way that she disrespected him, but they were able to come together and problem solve for whether or not she was going to go to that football game that night. And so as we think about how we can enter into our kids' worlds, my dear friend and mentor, Dr. John Townsend, wrote this. He wrote that truth without grace will always lead to condemnation.

Truth without grace will always lead to condemnation, and you know as an adult what that feels like. And so think about even the environment we're raising our kids in, how that translates into our children's brains, which leads us to number two, talk about emotions. Allow emotional vocabulary to be the norm in your home. I remember working with juvenile delinquents years ago, and one of the very first things I would do when I would meet with them is I would give them a feelings chart. And the reason I would give them a feelings chart is because it was my job to get them to feel remorse for their victims.

But the reality is you can't feel something that you yourself were never allowed to feel to begin with. And so a lot of these juvenile delinquents never had a father figure or an adult figure in their lives enter into their world and allow them to feel anger or their sadness or their grief or their fear without punishing them or dismissing them or minimizing that emotion. So talk about emotion in your home. We just had this issue not long ago where our daughter had come home from being with her friends and we were with the adults and the kids were all together and Kennedy came home and she was just overwhelmed by emotion that day. She was acting out, she was disrespectful, and she's our sweet little girl. Like this is just not in her character to be acting like that. And so one of the things that we were doing is we were being normal adults in our busyness and we were just disciplining her and coming down hard on her and saying, don't you treat us like that and why are you acting like this because that's what we do and we want to manage everything.

And so we're actually not practicing what we preach, we're leading in truth and not in grace. And so later that evening, as my incredible wife does, she is tucking Kennedy in the bed and she pulls out our What Am I Feeling book. And in that book, at the end, at the back, there's a pull out feelings chart and she said, honey, did anything happen today because her behavior was just out of character. And she said, honey, what are you feeling?

What are you feeling right now? And Kennedy's little finger went to anger and Christie asked her, she said, is there anything else that you're feeling right now? And Kennedy started moving it and she went to embarrassed and then to sad. And Christie said, honey, what happened today? Did something happen that allowed you to be embarrassed or that made you feel this way? And that was the moment which Kennedy described where two of the girls she was playing with wanted to go into a bedroom and play by themselves.

And they let Kennedy outside and said, we're just going to play by ourselves and you can stay out here for a little while. Kennedy got rejected, but it would be very easy if we didn't have emotional vocabulary in our home to not have a place for our kids to describe that. And we instead come down hard in truth and in discipline rather than giving them a space to be able to feel like they can talk about what really happened to them. And so allow emotional vocabulary, whether you use a feelings chart or the like, allow emotional vocabulary to be an important part of your day. Use this in your marriage as well. Practice it in your marriage. We tend to say if you can, instead of doing highs and lows for the day, do one positive emotion and one not so fun emotion, an uncomfortable emotion that you might have had that particular day and use that around the dinner table. Use that as an opportunity to really enter into the heart of your spouse and also into the story of your children so that they have the ability to be able to talk about emotions, which leads us to number three. Celebrate who they are.

Don't mourn who they're not. This is one I remember a number of years ago, my friend Frank had come in to visit us in Tennessee. He was living in California at the time and he was working on a book and he wanted me to help him with it, so he flew in on a red eye and it's like 7.30 in the morning. He lands, he gets to our house and at this time, our son Landon was three at the time and Landon's dancing around the house and he's got this, I think he was four at the time, I'm sorry. He's got this guitar, he's dancing around the house, he's singing as loud as he can at 7.30 in the morning to the top of his lungs, making up these songs and of course, my friend Frank is there after a red eye, you know, being up all night, trying to get a cup of coffee and I'm like, I'm apologizing for him.

I'm like, it's like, I was like, Landon, you've got to relax and Frank, I'm so sorry that this is happening. He said, Josh, hold on a second. He said, what we tend to find annoying in our kids' behavior is the very thing that they're passionate about or they're strong in and we tend to look at it as annoying behavior. He said, you've got to start paying attention to these things. He said, I've never seen a four-year-old make up songs and run around and dance and play the guitar the way that your son does.

Don't shut him down with it. And at the time, I had him in T-ball because guess what? I played baseball. I didn't play guitar, so I was having him play baseball. Well, later that fall, I asked Landon, I said, hey buddy, I have a question.

Would you rather play T-ball or take guitar lessons? And his face lit up like a Hallmark Christmas tree, you know, in a Hallmark movie. He just lit up and he said, Dad, I want to take guitar lessons. So often what we end up doing though with our kids is we end up impressing our own parental fears onto our kids because we're afraid that they're going to turn out not smart enough, not talkative enough, not athletic enough, not musical enough, not whatever enough it is that we tend to think that our kids are going to turn out. And we allow our fears to drive and dictate how we're parenting them. Celebrate your kids for who God has created them to be. In Proverbs it says, Raise your children in the way they should go, not the way you want them to go. And when they're old, they will not depart from it. I had a mom of a 12-year-old son come up to me after speaking one time and she said, Josh, my son is learning how to rap and I have no idea what to do.

And I looked at her and I just went through a list of questions. You know, 1 Corinthians 15 says that bad company corrupts good character. You know, is he hanging out with kids he shouldn't be hanging out with? And she said, no, he's hanging out with youth group kids. They're good kids.

I know their parents. I said, okay, is he listening to lyrics that are, you know, degrading to women or that are violent or that he shouldn't be listening to and consuming? She said, no, he's listening to Lecrae. And I said, and I'd just gotten done speaking so I got down on my knee in front of her and I said, I only have one piece of advice for you. Learn how to rap. Because if you don't, your son will learn how to rap with other kids and it will build a wall between your heart and his. So for myself, I'm, you know, entering into playing the piano as much as I can with my kids, entering into their world, practicing soccer, which I've never played before in my life, entering into their world so that I can build what they love doing and pursue the heart of who God has created them to be rather than mourning. Which leads us to number four, right your wrongs.

Right your wrongs. I remember coming home from work one time and this was a night where our kids had not napped that day. They were overwhelmed.

They were in school. Christy was done with them and she just said, Josh, they're yours now. And so she went into the laundry room to do laundry therapy because at least it was the only thing she did that didn't have to involve trying to talk to somebody who didn't know how to tie their shoe. And so I am, the laundry room's across from my son's bedroom. I had it all under control.

I promise I really did. But their decibel levels were getting higher and higher and they're running all over the place. And I wasn't apparently moving fast enough for Christy because she steps out. So the kids' decibel level is about here. Christy steps out and has to go here with the decibel level to, you know, get above them to get to me.

And she said, Josh, are you going to do something with them, which the kids then go up to here. And I'm the type of guy that likes to drive down the road with no listening to nothing because I get very overwhelmed by a lot of noise. And so now all of a sudden decibel levels are up to here and up to here. My amygdala is going off and I just yelled, stop.

Everybody stop. And I looked over and I saw our son's bottom lip start to quiver. And I knew in that moment I had made a mistake. And I got down into their little world.

I got on my knee and I just said, I am so sorry for the way Dad just yelled at you. You see, John Gottman found in emotion coaching kids in his research that if you can get this emotional safety thing right just two out of five times, that you can still get the outcomes you're looking for in your kids. Guys, Shaq shot better than 40% from the free throw line. Forty percent.

Why? Because the research said that a word called repair is the ultimate of relationships. Do you know what the Bible calls it? Forgiveness. And it tells us to practice it a lot. When we mess up as adults, our ability to enter into our kids' world, apologize for our specific offense, and ask our kids how we can make it right, it models for them, number one, that we're not perfect. It shows them what to do when they're not perfect.

And it also helps them understand that we do not expect them to have perfection, but to be able to know how to seek forgiveness when they have been wrong as well. Now, I was able to make that right. I had to go make it right with my wife after that. How well do we enter as adults into our spouses' worlds as well to make things right? We have to right our wrongs.

Which leads us, by the way, I hope that's a guilt-free drop for you all, two out of five times. As parents, we can still get the outcomes we desire in our kids. Number five is this. Prioritize who you're becoming as an adult. Prioritize who you're becoming. There was a meta-analysis done a number of years ago that looked at the top ten parenting strategies to get the outcomes we most desire in our kids.

And a meta-analysis is where you take a whole bunch of studies, and you put them together, and you look at what does the data show overall in all of these studies. And then they asked parenting experts what they thought the data would show. What are the top parenting strategies to get the outcomes we most desire in our kids?

And all the experts got it wrong as well. Of the top three parenting strategies to get the outcomes we desire in our kids, number one was love and affection. Number one was love and affection. Number two was a parent's ability to manage his or her own stress. A parent's ability to manage his or her own fight, flight, or freeze or amygdala in overwhelming moments. Number three was a parent's ability or how you treat your spouse. It was how you treat your spouse or how you treat a co-parent in a divorce situation.

I would argue of the top three parenting strategies to get the outcomes we most desire in our kids, not one of them has to do with a direct relationship with our kids. They have everything to do with who we're becoming as adults. Even love and affection.

What's the Bible say? We love because he first loved us. There's a reason that when you go to therapy, one of the very first things that you're talking about is your relationship with your parents, how well you were loved. When I met with the juvenile delinquents and I had helped them feel remorse, I had to help them feel loved, that they are loved, to know that they are loved. And a lot of times what ends up happening is we have to get back into step understanding how well we are loved because, listen, if we want to raise kids who don't yell, we can't be yelling. If we want to have kids who aren't on screens, we can't be on screens. If we want to raise kids who experience the love of Jesus, we have to show them what it's like for us to experience the love of Jesus.

I can sum up all of parenting research into one primary conclusion, and that is this, that our kids become who we are. And so what Christy and me do, or Christy and I do, get my grammar right, what we do is we go to therapy on a regular basis because I don't genuinely believe that therapy is for crazy people. I think it's for broken people, and I haven't met one person on the planet who's not broken in some way. We have to find people that we can talk to, whether it's a therapist, whether it's a coach, whether it's a pastor, whether it's friends around a campfire, sitting in circles with people who will listen to our emotion, who will affirm who we are. But then also, it doesn't just start there. It also starts with experiencing the love of Jesus.

It starts with a rule of life. What is your prayer life like? For so many years and throughout my life, I understood God's love for me. I had the knowledge of God's love for me. But it's only until been recently that I'm learning to experience the love of God for me.

Through prayer, a daily examine, silence. And I don't know what it is for you, but I just genuinely want to admonish all of us that to experience, to create emotional safety, the top parenting strategy to get the outcomes we most desire in our kids is love and affection. And we love because He first loved us.

Because just as our children deserve somebody to love them and enter into their world to help them tell their story, so too does every parent. What terrific insights from Dr. Joshua Straub on today's episode of Focus on the Family. I found this topic to be fascinating. And while I think Gene and I did a pretty good job of helping our boys express their feelings, we might have been able to do a little better job if we had had this wonderful advice. And if you're a parent, a grandparent who would like to implement the ideas we've heard from Josh today, let me recommend that you get a special bundle of three books that he has written to children ages four to eight. The bundle is called What Do I Do With My Feelings? And these books will provide a biblically grounded way for children to verbalize their feelings while developing empathy and self-control.

That sounds pretty good. It does, yes. And this is an exclusive bundle that we're offering. Two of those kids' books deal with anger and worry.

That's a big issue these days, especially in the past few years. Request your book bundle plus a free audio download of the entire message by Dr. Joshua Straub with extra content when you call 800 the letter A in the word family, 800-232-6459, or you can donate and request that bundle online. We put the link in the show notes. And please donate to the work of Focus on the Family when you request those resources. The best way to contribute is by making a monthly pledge. That really helps us even out the budget over the entire year. And we'll send that three-book bundle to you for a pledge of any amount.

And if you can't make that monthly commitment right now, we understand a one-time gift works too. We just want you to have these great books for your children or grandchildren. Yeah, the book bundle also includes an illustrated feelings chart, so you can have that on the fridge or somewhere else in the house, so your child can easily point out whatever their mood might be. Request that bundle when you call 800-A-FAMILY, or we've got details in the show notes. On behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team, thanks for listening to this Focus on the Family podcast. Take a moment, if you would, please, and leave us a rating in your podcast app and share about this episode with a friend.

Maybe you know someone whose children would benefit from this kind of insight and this kind of parenting approach. I'm John Fuller inviting you back next time as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. 1-866-875-2915. We'll talk with you, pray with you, and help you find out which program will work best. That's 1-866-875-2915.