How to Encourage Teens' Emotional Awareness as a Parent?
Alexia Eller, LCSW, specializes in working with teens and adults who have experienced trauma, anxiety, and other mental health challenges. Drawing on her extensive background with first responders and crime survivors, she offers compassionate advice and actionable strategies in her writing.
Being a parent can come with various ins and outs that can be predicted and some can be curveballs. When it comes to teens, they experience a wide variety of emotions on a daily and weekly basis with circumstances that impact their thoughts and actions. Encouraging emotional awareness in teens as a parent is crucial for helping them understand and manage their feelings, build empathy, and improve their relationships. (3)
Here are some strategies that can help: (2)
1. Model Emotional Awareness
Be open about your emotions: Teens learn a lot by observing how their parents handle emotions. Share your feelings appropriately with your teen, saying things like, "I feel frustrated because..." or "I feel proud of you for...". This helps normalize emotional expression.
Practice self-regulation: When you experience stress or anger, demonstrate how to stay calm and work through those feelings, showing them that it's okay to experience strong emotions as long as they're managed healthily.
2. Create a Safe Environment for Expression
Validate their feelings: When your teen opens up about their emotions, listen actively and respond with empathy. Avoid minimizing or dismissing their feelings, even if they seem exaggerated or trivial to you. For example, "I understand that you're feeling frustrated about your grades. That can be really hard."
Encourage open communication: Foster a space where they feel comfortable talking without fear of judgment. Let them know that it’s okay to express anger, sadness, or even vulnerability, and that you won’t be angry or upset with them for having those emotions.
3. Teach Emotional Vocabulary
Help them expand their emotional vocabulary beyond basic terms like “happy,” “angry,” or “sad.” Introduce words like “frustrated,” “anxious,” “disappointed,” “excited,” and “hopeful,” to help them identify more distinct feelings.
Utilizing reflective listening from a daily situation to talk about their emotions regarding nervousness about a test may help them open up about more concerns or thoughts they may have.
4. Use Reflection and Active Listening
Reflect their feelings: Paraphrase what they say to help them recognize and understand their emotions. For example, “It sounds like you’re feeling left out because your friends didn’t invite you to the party.”
Active listening: Show them you're listening by nodding, making eye contact, and asking follow-up questions. This can encourage them to explore and articulate their feelings further.
5. Encourage Empathy and Perspective-Taking
Encourage your teen to consider how others might be feeling in different situations. Ask them to think about what might be going on in a friend's or sibling's life that could explain their behavior.
Ask reflective questions like, “How do you think your friend felt when you said that?” or “What do you think might have been going through your teacher’s mind when they said that?”
6. Foster Problem-Solving
Help them reflect on difficult situations. Instead of solving problems for them, guide them through the process of thinking about their emotions, the situation, and possible solutions. This promotes self-awareness and helps them understand how they can manage their feelings constructively.
7. Be Patient and Supportive
Emotional awareness doesn’t develop overnight. Teens are still learning how to navigate complex emotions, so it’s important to be patient and understanding when they struggle to articulate or manage their feelings.
Celebrate small successes, like when they name a feeling or express their emotions calmly.
By providing a supportive environment, offering tools to understand and manage their emotions, and modeling emotional awareness yourself, you can help your teen develop better emotional intelligence, which will benefit them throughout their life. Along with benefiting their emotional awareness, it shows the parent’s vulnerability with the child and creates a bond that carries on into other conversations or allows them to come more openly to the parent. If you are interested in learning more about how to navigate parenting a teen by providing an emotionally aware environment and creating more of a place to “chat” with them instead of them feeling “scruntized or punished,” feel free to reach out to a therapist at our Arlington, TX office to learn more. (1)
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