Cultivating Healthy Emotional Habits with Your Children

Monsters under the bed. Being teased at school.

Fear of the dark. A best friend moving away. You know, kids are no strangers to big difficult emotions, and these can be really challenging for parents to navigate. Welcome to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly.

I'm John Fuller, and today we hope to give you the tools you need to help you and your child manage difficult emotions and ultimately take them to God. I think I was afraid of that one. That was a big one.

Every bed had a monster under it. It's funny how you can get under the covers and feel safe. But the good news is, I think I grew out of that by 18.

I'm glad for that. But you know, these things do affect children. And on the one side, we can laugh at it now because we know as adults, older adults, that those things have no power.

Those are all imaginary things. But oftentimes for some children, I mean, they both battle the imaginary fears, but also some true fears. And we want to equip you as a parent.

Maybe you're a grandparent. You could pass this along to your adult children to talk with their kids about. But this is an area that I think more kids need tools to be able to navigate these emotions.

And they're not too young. You know, my mom died when I was nine. And I can tell you guys, it was so important to hear more. Everybody cut me out of the information loop. But you sense it. Children have far more insight than adults realize. And you need to help them manage those insights. Yeah.

So the goal of today's show, as you said, Jim, is to give parents the tools so they can equip their kids. And Michelle Niedert is with us. And she's a professional counselor and author, speaker, podcaster, wife, mom of two. And her podcast is called Raising Mentally Healthy Kids. And she's written a couple of books that we're going to talk about today. The titles are God I Feel Scared and God I Feel Sad. And of course, we have details about Michelle and these great books at our website.

The link is in the show notes. Michelle, welcome to Focus on the Family. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's good to have you. And from Texas, we have many friends in Texas. Yes.

Yeah, and that's good. And you're living right outside where? Well, the Counseling Center is in Allen outside of Dallas.

And then we live in a little town. Well, it used to be a little town. Now it's gotten a little bigger called Wiley, Texas. Wiley, Texas. I just love it. Everybody knows where Plano is.

Wiley, Texas. It just sounds right. It's got a sound to it, doesn't it? Let me ask you, you know, as adults, we aren't always comfortable with our emotions. Some of us, I think especially men, that's one of the clubs we get hit with.

I definitely have been hit with that club. You know, it just takes a lot of energy and thinking for us to get our emotions out there in the table. Then at the end of the day, we're going, why did I do that? But for kids particularly, we can be a little more honest as children. We do say things kind of just out there, don't we, as children. We do because children's filters aren't as well developed a lot of times.

The world hasn't started blocking some of that in their lives. And so therefore, they are more apt some to express their emotions and really especially in the, you know, the preschool years to show you all the different emotions and all the different intensities of them. And then they go through these different hormonal spikes and their brain changes and then they continue to just oscillate between different levels of emotional intensity for sure. When do you, I mean, you're clinically trained. You're taking care of kids all the time in your practice. When do kids begin to kind of express these emotions and then when do you see as a clinician when it becomes an issue?

How do you diagnose that? I mean, any three-year-old I'm sure might say, I'm scared of that. Is that what parents should worry about? Is that normal development?

And then how do you go about managing that? Well, I teach our counselors two words, frequency and intensity. So those are the things we want to look at at any age.

We love that kids are saying I'm scared because they're developing emotional vocabulary, which we want. And you're right. Previously, generations didn't want emotions to be on the bus. Even psychology tended to lean towards logic.

Even Christian work did. And then we moved into this area where we are now where emotions are almost running our bus. Right. But what we really want to do is like empower kids to let God and them drive the bus, but have emotions on the bus. And it's really, really important that we do that. And so we want to help kids getting perspective for sure. You know, on a scale of one to 10, how scared are you is a great question for a parent to ask.

Those are really good. I do say a scared on purpose. I think I use that as a grammatically incorrect as a child. You are scared. I don't know why children lean to us scared. But let me ask you this. Some common mistakes that parents make trying to help their kids process their emotions.

What are they? The mistakes that we make. The first one is to ignore emotions or try to shut them down. And granted, you know, sometimes we're in a hurry and we don't have time for the full meltdown.

What does that sound like? A lot of times it's just we got to go. I don't care if you're sad, if you're in a hurry or it may be you don't even know what sad is.

Let me tell you what sad looks like. So discounting. Yes, discounting it. And that is if we do that young, this is the one thing I really want parents to understand. You will lose the opportunity to be the emotional compass in your child's life, because if they realize that you don't care about that and you're not approachable about that, they're going to find other sources to be their emotional compass. Well, that's powerful. And you don't want that.

Yeah, that is so powerful. And in that regard, I mean, we discount kids so much. You know, as parents, what they have to say can be, you know, the kid. We this kid, John, that ask why all the time. Why does it work that way? Why does it do that? Why does it ring?

Why does it I mean, it's just that annoying kind of thing. And if we're not careful, especially as Christian parents, if we're not careful, you do drive your child away because you don't feel safe to them. And as adults, we don't even realize that that we're promoting that kind of distance in our relationship with our child. So let me ask you for the moms and dads right there. I mean, what is a better way when you're pressed with time? You got to get out the door and your child saying, I don't feel good right now.

All right. You know, I feel sad right now. What should they say? Well, the first thing I think we need to do, depending on the age of the child, is get on their level and give us do a parental pivot, because we're usually juggling a lot of things, too, and trying to get ourselves out the door if it's morning time and I'm working with families.

So we want to get on their level if they're little and say, first, just validate the feeling, recognize what they've said. I know you feel sad and I understand that, but we still have to get to preschool school. You know, sometimes I think, but you still have to go to work today. Right.

So and that's happened. I mean, I lost my dad last year to cancer and I still had to do some things even when I was feeling sad. So I think it's also important that we let there there's a time and a space to I took a break, you know, and we want to not let emotion shut us down, but let us take some space. But then we also have to teach our kids the resilience of learning not to white knuckle it all the time, but to learn how to push through emotional distress sometimes to be able to do things and then come back to that emotional distress at a more appropriate time.

Sometimes parents never come back. And that's the issue. We can get them moving forward. But especially if there's something going on.

The other thing real quickly I want to say is that we want to name it. And then we might want to ask them, where are you feeling that in your body? And then lastly, ask them, what would you like to do to let go of some of that?

And then we're empowering them to to manage their emotions or sometimes how could God be involved in your sad and help you through it? That's a great parental question. A good way to connect that because that feeling is going to be there throughout their life.

Yes. Given circumstances that will pop up. You had an experience with your own family loss where your husband's brother and sister in law tragically passed away of cancer. I'm sorry that that happened. They had to be young. They were.

They were. Well, she was in her 40s and he was in her 50s. We all had our kids young. I mean, old.

We had we were old when we had our kids. 40s and 50s are young. They're young to me now.

It's kind of changed. But yeah, Jen was actually Drew's twin sister. And within two weeks, she and Dwight were diagnosed with cancer and they died two years apart with cancer, leaving behind three kids under 10. And my children spent the first four and a half years with them moving in and out of our home as they were.

Sometimes they just need to care for themselves. So we actually bought a bigger car because we needed more space for five kids. But it was really hard on my youngest son, Nolan, who didn't have a lot of language at that point. And I you know, the enemy can do really disastrous things in kids minds during that time. And that's why we want to ask good questions to them, because Nolan thought that it was common that both parents died.

So he had this he was having these horrible nightmares. I found out after we went to the doctor with a stomach issue and the pediatrician teased me. We're on a small town. We're on boards together. She's she usually tells me take my counselor hat off and put my mom hat on when I walk in the door. But this time she's like, oh, I can't believe I'm doing this with you. But can you put your counselor hat on? Take your mom hat off.

I'm going to read you a case. And she's reading him her notes. And I'm like, he's got separation anxiety. And I looked at him and I said, are you afraid mom and dad are going to die? And he said, Mom, almost every night I dream. My husband was traveling at the time. Dad's plane blows up.

You have cancer and I can't find Sophia. Oh, wow. That's devastating. And so we begin to pray about that specifically.

And I, you know, I normalize the fact that most parents don't die. And then we had to work on that separation anxiety. He was leaving school due to these stomach issues. And so the school counselor called me and she said, I used to be the crisis counselor for school district. She goes, this is kind of embarrassing because you're the parent, but you're the person I'd call in a situation like this. What do you want me to do? And I said, I want you to give him a job when I drop him off, because when he sits in that gym, he thinks about leaving us. Instead, could he be your door holder or something where he's interacting with kids? And that way he won't start thinking about, you know, us dying or anything else. And then if he has and my son's pretty quick with his work. So if he gets downtime in the middle of the day and this starts when he goes to the nurse, I need the nurse to send him to you. I need you to read him a book, do an activity with him, and then let's see if we can get him back in class.

Unless he's running a fever and then let's send him home. No, those are the good practical things you need to be mindful of. In fact, you encourage parents to listen intently, which can be a short stick for parents because we don't always have time to listen intently to our kids because we're not sure they're going to say anything that we think is important. But you want to challenge that to say if they're expressing themselves, you need to hear it. I think we need to listen with our eyes. And that helps a lot because that directs our attention and our affection a lot of times, too, because the eyes are the window to the soul. So that's a lot of times what my even my children will even give that back to me now.

Sometimes as teenagers. Mom, can you listen to me for a moment with your eyes? You know, and that means give me your full undivided attention. And let me tell you what, if we want kids to feel significant in this world and confident, one of the ways we do that is we see them. And that's when we listen with our eyes. We tell them, I see you. Yeah, just like the Lord does with us. And we help them understand that, that the Lord always sees them, too. And we're the vessels and the source of that in their lives until they have that experience more maturely with him.

You know, Michelle, we sit at this table, John and I, we talk to some smart people, some PhDs and counselors and psychiatrists. And so much of who we become is rooted in our family of origin. And what we're talking about here are things that these children are going to learn that we actually learned, too, when we were kids. And that becomes embedded in us. It's kind of our wiring.

If you use a computer term, right, it's our programming. And some of life becomes how to undo those things that have been done. Most of the time, I would say, without thought, parents aren't trying to set up a young adult for failure. But that ignoring them, not listening to them, not counting their comments as worthy to be heard, those are devastating signals to a child.

And that will become part of their fear structure, most of the things the enemy will use spiritually against them as teenagers and young adults, right? Well, I actually experienced some of that in my own home growing up. While my dad was a deacon and elder in the church and, I mean, his last job was they had a pastoral development for MAF. He was a very godly man, but he had a horrible temper. And it was really out of control when he wasn't walking with the Lord very closely when we were young. And so I did have a huge impact with that in my own life. I was a very sensitive child and he did not appreciate that always. And so we did have a lot of conflict when I was young and even, I would say, to go so far as to some verbal and physical abuse. One thing that parents do that's one of the biggest mistakes is when a kid is upset, we're projecting future failure through that on our kids.

We need to be real careful with that. Who we become as we move into adults has a lot to do with our family of origin. But especially in the family of Christ, and I'm a great example of this, my parents at the mission field in young adulthood, who we become can be greatly influenced by the family of Christ becoming new creations in our lives.

And I do not think ever, one of the things I say even with mental health is our diagnosis doesn't have to determine our destiny. I think in that context, though, the fair thing is that these things potentially can be the shackles that you have to find the key, hopefully through a relationship in Christ, to unshackle your emotional heart so that you can grow in the Lord. And my dad said the best thing in the kingdom is watching your kids raise your grandkids. Because he told me all the time, I'm so proud of you. Even though, and he knew this, I spent more time in mommy time out than my kids ever spent on a calm down step. Because I inherited his fiery spirit. But there's not anger in our home.

And I married a man that didn't have that family legacy as well. And our home is a very safe place. In fact, we're hoping our kids are going to leave it now. Because they love being there. They love being there.

It's a safe place. You know, at 14 and 17, it's a pretty good sign. I tried to leave the home in that age range.

I worked starting at 14, 20 hours a week up to 40 hours a week, just to stay away from just walking on eggshells in my home growing up and not knowing who I was going to meet in him. He could be this wonderful, warm person or could be this angry person. So I do think what we this is what I tell in the podcast all the time. Mentally healthy parents raise mentally healthy kids. So parents who learn to deal with their own emotions help their kids deal with theirs. And that's where I started was even in my own life, dealing with my own so that I would not pass this general. I mean, this goes way back to a great granddad that would hold a gun to, you know, kids heads. So very severe legacy of of anger and abuse and really was intentional about breaking that generational curse. Even before I had kids in my 20s while I was, you know, training to become a biblical counselor.

Yeah. This is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. And today we're talking to Michelle Niedert about mental well-being for parents so we can raise emotionally and mentally well kids. And she's written a couple of books that we're talking a little bit about today. These are great tools, especially if you have younger children or grandchildren. God, I feel scared and God, I feel sad. As Michelle shared, this is a way for you to really give your kids permission and grandkids permission to talk about their emotions and gives you a common language. Get these books from us here today at Focus on the Family.

We've got details about them in the show notes. Michelle, let me ask you this. I mean, this is a serious topic.

We've kind of put a cloud on some of this discussion. The lighter side of this, I think you have a Taco Bell meltdown experience. This is so funny because this is where I lived when my boys were small with the store and the candy checkout or, you know, whatever. Yes. So my my daughter still doesn't eat breakfast regularly, which is I always ask her to. But, you know, and this is part of what we learn as parents.

There are battles to fight and there are battles not to fight. There are things for our kids to learn on their own. And so I was I told her, you know, we're you know, I'm always telling the kids the plan because I'm that kind of personality. So we're I'm going to drop you at school. We're going to go to Taco Bell. Your dad's going to take your brother from the soccer field. We're going to meet at home and then we're going to go see your grandma.

This was Sargent Logistics right there. This is all diagrammed out. I'm moving this path along. Go, go, go, go. I go to pick her up. And as I'm literally in the parking lot, my husband calls and says, Mom is headed to the hospital. We are not allowed to leave children unattended in Texas on a soccer field.

So that changed what I needed to do. So I picked Sophia up and I was like, hey, you know, we can't go to Taco Bell right now. We've got to go. We're going to end up at the hospital, but I'm going to we got to go get your brother. And she acts like I said, your grandma has just died. You know, she is like, I'm starving.

I'm going to be a little dramatic here. I'm starving. I can't make it that long.

I can't go all the way to Wiley and then to the soccer field and then you'll talk to people. We've got to get home. And I just, you know, I just listen. And then I calmly said to her, it's only Taco Bell. Well, I said on a scale of one to ten, how big is this really?

And she says, I know it's a two, but it feels like an eight. You know, and that's true in our lives. Don't we have things that happen? And we're like, you know, perspective wise, this is not the way my emotions feel, but our emotions can get ahead of us sometimes. And that's why that's why we can't let them drive that bus.

And we've got to teach our kids that they're going to have them, but they just can't run their lives. Yes. You know, one of the things you're saying that's so funny, if you do marriage counseling, for example, as a as a patient, no, as a recipient, the counselor always says, you know, Jim, you might want to say it to Jean this way. You know, the other day you said something to me that really impacted me in a bad way. Can I express that to you? And you're going, oh, that makes perfect sense. But in the moment, that's not how you're responding.

Well, let's talk about why that is. So we work a lot with John Gottman, who's a theorist who actually uses heart rate to kind of manage that idea. So he takes the baseline heart rate. I train all our new couples therapists on this. And then if your heart rate gets so far above that level, then you stop talking. Right.

Until then. And so my husband loves this idea because he thinks our house would be very silent. I mean, literally in marriage counseling, in the love lab for him, a beeper goes off and you don't talk. Can you imagine that?

Can you imagine? Having a beeper going off. So it's strapped.

The heart rate on it is strapped. But here's the thing with that. You want to be talking with your children with a wise mind. And that means that you are not hyper aroused. Let's get into a little neuroscience here that your brain is functioning well, and that your hippocampus and your frontal lobe where self-control happens is working. Now, I also want to remind you, your children's frontal lobes aren't developed, you know, and so that's going to make a big difference in their ability to manage their emotions. So what I ask of parents and family therapy is hard. It's hard for me to do in my own home sometimes. And that is my expectation of you is you will be the calmest person in the room.

And that means you must co-regulate with God because you need his peace that passes all understanding to anchor you so you can anchor them. And that's when you were saying that when you said to your child about Taco Bell and you said, well, on a scale of one to ten, how important is this to you? That's a brilliant comment. And it's just so funny that we as parents, we don't go there. I told you, we're not going to Taco Bell.

Let's get down to a fight. And guess what you just did? You mirrored the emotion. Exactly. I instead kicked in the left side of her brain into the numbers so she had to think. And that shut down part of that right side of the brain that was over aroused and over emotional. Right.

It's kind of irrational. Like, you want to go here? You want to have a fight? Don't you know I'm your mother? Don't you know I'm your father? I'm going to win this fight.

Let's go. Yeah. And I grew up like that. But here's the thing.

I do love one thing and it's silly. Dr. Phil says this. He says, do you want to be right or do you want to be in relationship? Well, that's a great parent.

I want to be in relationship. I'm usually right. But I'm going to manage them in such a way that either I direct that well or we take a break. So our brains calm down or I let them learn a little bit and let them.

Because that drives them to the Lord to the last thing we want to be. You know, we used to have helicopter parents. Now we've got lawnmower parents just plowing ahead.

And I have really struggled with this with my daughter, who's about to go off to college. But I'm watching the fruit of this. You know, she and this is their thing.

We all these things that we want for our kids emotional control. They're fruits of the Spirit. Well, a two year olds barely a seedling, you know, and a 14 year olds.

What? They've got a couple of grapes starting to bud. But sometimes we expect them to be vineyards. Oh, yeah.

And they're not. And I'm not a vineyard yet. So it's tough. And I think especially as Christian parents. Yeah.

Because we have high expectations of our behavior, of their behavior. And so we better see a vineyard, even though you're two. I want fruit of the Spirit.

That's right. And the fruit of the Spirit is something we sing about in preschool. And we learn to live out hopefully well as we age.

It's one of my. I'm grateful now, even though we went through a lot of fertility treatment, that I am an older parent because there is hopefully more fruit. And when I start when she and I or he and I because I want to be each start rubbing on each other. That's an indication to me that they need to go more to the Lord. I need to go to more the Lord. I need to be because here's the thing I want to do. I want to plug into the spirit so I can be an extension cord of him to my kids and plug them in.

Yeah, that's so good. Right here at the end, Michelle, let's just cover this one thing. It's important to pray with your child and specifically pray for those difficult emotional experiences.

How do you do that with your child? Not to freak them out or panic them. But first of all, short and sweet. I'll give you an example.

OK. And the enemy can be really twisting with our words. One time my daughter looked at me. She was probably about eight. Like I punched her in the gut and she was headed up the stairs and I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, come back here, you know? And I said to her, what did you hear Mommy say? And she said that I'm the worst kid in the world and I never do anything right.

Wow. And I said, oh, honey, do you know what I said? I said, these shoes have been here for five days. Do you think you could take them up with you?

Because I'm sick of looking at them. But isn't that funny that my tone of because ninety three percent of everything we say is nonverbal. So what she received from that and what the enemy twisted, I said, first of all, those two thoughts would never enter my mind. You are God's gift to me. And I delight in being your parent. And then I said to her, let's pray about this right now, because I want to break this idea in your mind. And so I just said, God, I am frustrated. And I know Sophia felt the full weight of my frustration in this moment. But I pray that in Jesus name, she would know how loved she is, even when I'm frustrated with her.

At the angriest moment we will ever have together, Sophia will know that I am proud of her and that she is loved because she is your gift for me. And Lord, help us to live that in Jesus name. Amen.

Short, sweet to the point. And it is still emotional today. But it affirms that child. That's what's so beautiful about it. And it really makes that distinction between I'm not attacking you as a person. I'm trying to shape your behavior.

And that's different. And I think we as parents, we fail to make that distinction for them so they know we're not attacking them. Especially when we're emotional.

And they're emotional. I think we miss that information. Totally. Totally. This has been great.

And thank you so much. You know, I used to draw the scared, sad, happy faces. I didn't know you could get a chart. I'm serious.

I'm that dense. But I used to draw these out with the boys and say, how do you feel right now? And they'd circle one and we'd talk about it.

Yes, we do that a lot. But you've got these great books. God, I Feel Sad. God, I Feel Scared. And you could probably just keep releasing these books into every emotion that children have.

We're looking at that. And we actually have one for older teens called Managing Your Emojis, which covers all four of the emotions. That's a clever way to say it. And the thing I love about these is I have grandparents who are telling me, like, I call my granddaughter.

Because they're latchkey kids, a lot of them. And so I call her and we read one of these on FaceTime when she gets home together. But she said to me, I'm learning things I never was taught. And I think that's so beautiful. I couldn't ask for the Lord to use this material in a better way. Think of that. I mean, thankfully, we're contacting hundreds of thousands of parents every year through Focus on the Family. If we just do that job together, you being here, the books, the other resources that are here, our counseling department. And we help hundreds of thousands of parents do that job better, connecting.

I mean, I can sleep tonight and sleep very well. But Michelle, thanks for being with us. Thank you. And if you can make a gift of any amount, we'll send you this two-book bundle, a great way to get started.

God, I feel sad. God, I feel scared, as always, saying thank you for being part of the ministry. Man, share these like hotcakes with your own family, but others too.

These are great resources for churches. And what a wonderful discussion we've had today. I'm looking forward to having you back, Michelle. I think you've got a lot more to say about parents and children. So thank you again for being with us. Thanks for having me. And as Jim said, call today or stop by the website and make a generous donation of any amount, either a monthly pledge or a one-time gift, and we'll send you that two-book bundle of Michelle's books, God, I Feel Scared and God, I Feel Sad.

Our number is 800-232-6459. 800, the letter A, and the word family. You can also donate and get Michelle's books when you click the link in the show notes. And coming up on Monday, Dr. Barry Corey offers some perspective on showing kindness to others. It's easy to be kind when there's harmony in your family, but try kindness when there's dissension. Try kindness when you have a strained relationship with your husband or your children. Try kindness when you're not getting along with your neighbor.

It's a lot more difficult. Thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. Your marriage can be redeemed, even if the fights seem constant, even if there's been an affair, even if you haven't felt close in years. No matter how deep the wounds are, you can take a step toward healing them with a hope restored marriage intensive. Our biblically based counseling will help you find the root of your problems and face challenges together. We'll talk with you, pray with you, and help you find out which program will work best. Call us at 1-866-875-2915.