How to Talk to Your Kids About Negative Emotions | Dr. Becky Kennedy & Dr. Andrew Huberman
Chapters
0:0 Should parents express negative emotions like sadness in front of their kids?1:50 Most people cannot mask their emotions well, especially around kids
2:29 Information doesn't scare kids as much as the absence of information
3:13 How faking, denying or masking your emotions around your kids might destabilize them
4:24 Humans need stories to understand each others' emotions
5:23 Specific sentences and tools to use with your kids when discussing negative emotions
6:36 Lack of transparency or narrative coherence is what can cause psychological harm to kids
00:00:00.000 | Let's talk about emotions, both theory and practice.
00:00:07.440 | And if we can place it in the context of parenting, that would be great, but I'm certain that
00:00:11.760 | this has a broader theme that pertains to everybody.
00:00:15.240 | So I love the theory of emotions or how we would theoretically respond to something,
00:00:20.600 | but then there's the reality.
00:00:22.160 | So as a parent, let's say you have a stance in your home and in your family that it's
00:00:29.320 | okay to be sad, like sadness is normal, it happens, it passes, etc., but let's say you're
00:00:36.200 | feeling particularly sad about something.
00:00:40.620 | Do you express that and show that in front of your kids?
00:00:43.520 | Because I've also heard that young kids, in particular younger than eight or nine, perhaps
00:00:49.960 | shouldn't be aware that their parents are experiencing, say, extreme sadness because
00:00:54.800 | it can be scary to them or they might feel like their world is destabilizing.
00:00:58.640 | And then we also hear a lot about kids feeling like they had to parent the parents, and then
00:01:03.320 | this whole thing becomes pretty complicated.
00:01:04.760 | So while there's no perfect world where one knows what to do every single time, how do
00:01:10.800 | you look at this business of modeling emotions and also encouraging kids to be able to experience
00:01:17.520 | and express their emotions?
00:01:19.000 | Yeah, and I think everything I'm about to share applies in the workplace, right?
00:01:23.800 | Can a boss be, you know, really upset in front of the person they manage, management, right?
00:01:28.500 | So it's all the same stuff.
00:01:30.080 | So I guess zooming out as a start, emotions are normal, emotions are unstoppable.
00:01:39.520 | You can't not feel sad just because you have your five-year-old in the room, right?
00:01:44.480 | And I think the other thing that kind of forms my perspective is it's really hard to not
00:01:51.120 | show someone that you're sad.
00:01:53.320 | You might think you're doing that well, but kids are extra perceptive.
00:01:58.240 | They are actually built to be more perceptive than we are because their survival depends
00:02:03.320 | on adults.
00:02:04.320 | So they have to always notice, "Is my adult around?
00:02:07.120 | Is my adult okay?"
00:02:08.240 | So they really attune to what's going on for us, right?
00:02:13.080 | And so I think the kind of question is less, "Do I show my emotions to my kid or not?"
00:02:19.600 | And it's more, "Okay, if I'm sad, my kid is going to notice.
00:02:23.980 | What do I do then?"
00:02:26.920 | And as a principal, one of the things I think about often is information doesn't scare kids
00:02:32.080 | as much as the absence of information scares kids.
00:02:36.560 | So let's say there's something really awful.
00:02:39.400 | I don't know.
00:02:40.400 | As a parent, you're a family member.
00:02:42.960 | Someone died of cancer.
00:02:43.960 | I don't know.
00:02:44.960 | There's something really horrible that you just found out, right?
00:02:48.440 | There's wildfires.
00:02:49.520 | Right now, let's say you evacuated and you found out your house burned down.
00:02:54.360 | You're sad.
00:02:56.160 | Your child is going to notice that, and you want your child to notice that.
00:03:01.320 | You don't want your kid to be a teenager, an adult, who goes around the world unable
00:03:08.400 | to pick up on emotional cues from other people.
00:03:11.920 | That's not adaptive.
00:03:13.240 | And so the patterns we set with our kids when they're young inform their view of the world
00:03:20.000 | when they're older.
00:03:21.000 | And so here I am.
00:03:22.920 | Let's say it's the situation of somebody dying and I'm upset.
00:03:26.080 | First of all, as a parent, tell yourself, "It's not my kid seeing me sad that's going
00:03:32.000 | to destabilize them.
00:03:34.320 | It's seeing me sad and me making up a bogus story or denying it, because then my kid goes,
00:03:41.680 | 'I'm pretty sure my mom was upset.
00:03:43.680 | Oh, she's not?
00:03:44.680 | Oh, she's pretending like nothing happened?
00:03:45.920 | Oh, she looks sad, but she's saying she's not sad.'"
00:03:49.520 | That is really upsetting.
00:03:51.200 | It would be like hearing your boss say, "Oh yeah, 20% layoffs.
00:03:55.920 | What are we doing?
00:03:56.920 | I don't know.
00:03:57.920 | Oh, hi.
00:03:58.920 | Everything's great.
00:03:59.920 | How are you?"
00:04:00.920 | Like, what is happening?
00:04:01.920 | It's scary.
00:04:02.920 | What you'd want is your boss say, "You just heard something.
00:04:04.600 | You were right to hear that."
00:04:07.240 | We are about to go through a really tough time.
00:04:10.280 | I'm stressed about it.
00:04:11.280 | I yelled, "You might be stressed.
00:04:13.120 | Here's what I know.
00:04:15.040 | This is going to be hard, and we're going to get through it together."
00:04:17.560 | Now all of a sudden, that emotional experience has a container.
00:04:22.380 | It has a story.
00:04:24.120 | Humans need stories.
00:04:25.320 | We like stories.
00:04:26.920 | And so often we think it's the emotions that dysregulate a kid.
00:04:31.280 | It's the lack of a story to explain it.
00:04:34.320 | So let's say this really did happen.
00:04:36.760 | People always say to me, "Okay, but Dr. Becky, my kid is four.
00:04:39.960 | I'm going to say that their aunt died.
00:04:41.680 | They don't even know cancer, right?"
00:04:44.480 | We don't have a better alternative.
00:04:45.480 | I can't even tell you how many parents I've seen whose kids have all of these issues because
00:04:49.840 | of the made-up stories.
00:04:50.840 | "I just said she went to sleep for a while six months later.
00:04:53.880 | My kid has a lot of trouble sleeping through the night."
00:04:56.200 | Yeah, they haven't seen their aunt who went to sleep one time, you know, creates a huge
00:05:00.560 | issue.
00:05:01.560 | No matter what bogus story you make up, kids can handle the truth, and they can handle
00:05:06.720 | the truth when it's told to them from a loving, trusted adult.
00:05:10.640 | It's kind of like me and you.
00:05:12.440 | Someone can tell us a hard truth, but it's from someone you feel safe with and that you
00:05:16.160 | feel like also believes in you and says it honestly.
00:05:19.760 | It might be hard, but it doesn't feel awful.
00:05:22.880 | So it's about saying to your kid, "You saw me crying."
00:05:27.560 | One of my favorite kind of sentences to say to kids around this, because I think it really
00:05:31.960 | builds their confidence, is just, "You were right to notice that I was crying, and I'm
00:05:38.120 | feeling sad.
00:05:39.200 | And look, you saw that?
00:05:40.440 | I'm going to tell you why."
00:05:41.440 | I'm making this up.
00:05:44.240 | "Aunt Sally died."
00:05:46.280 | Do you know what dying means?
00:05:48.960 | Dying is when someone's body stops working.
00:05:51.640 | Then I pause.
00:05:52.640 | All right, so I'm going to just be a monologue.
00:05:54.920 | I'll see how my kid responds.
00:05:56.320 | I might add, "I'm not dying."
00:06:00.240 | Kids actually really need to hear that in hard times.
00:06:02.560 | "I'm not dying.
00:06:04.840 | No one else is dying.
00:06:07.040 | I'm safe.
00:06:08.040 | And you know what?
00:06:09.440 | I'm sad.
00:06:11.380 | And I'm still your strong mom who can take care of you."
00:06:15.320 | That sets the stage for such resilience and is kind of the opposite of, "Everything's
00:06:21.840 | fine.
00:06:22.840 | My kid keeps seeing me crying.
00:06:24.320 | They keep hearing words they're not used to hearing, 'die,' 'cancer,' 'Aunt Sally,'
00:06:28.400 | 'uncomfortable,' whatever it is."
00:06:30.200 | That situation is what makes kids feel really, really uncomfortable and unsafe.
00:06:36.160 | So it's the absence of information that causes the harm.
00:06:41.440 | And it's the lack of coherence between what they're observing and feeling and kind of
00:06:47.440 | this like open loop, if I kind of place it in neuroscience-y terms, I feel like the brain
00:06:53.960 | does think in terms of stories, stories have a beginning, middle, and an end, and they
00:06:58.840 | kind of want to know where they are in that story.
00:07:01.720 | That's exactly right.
00:07:02.720 | And the terms I would use to match your terms are coherent narrative.
00:07:08.080 | What is therapy?
00:07:09.080 | Why does therapy help people?
00:07:10.080 | It's interesting.
00:07:11.080 | Therapy doesn't change what happened to you.
00:07:12.680 | Therapy doesn't change your past.
00:07:14.000 | Therapy does not take away the pain.
00:07:16.520 | But the pain was never the thing that really got in our way.
00:07:21.240 | It was the pain plus a lack of a coherent narrative and support.
00:07:25.660 | And so early on, when kids have painful experiences from witnessing you or something else, giving
00:07:30.640 | them a coherent narrative is what they need.
00:07:33.520 | And without that, the way I think about it is they have what I call "unformulated experience."
00:07:39.120 | It's just affect and experience that kind of free floats in their body, unformulated,
00:07:45.740 | that tends to later show up as triggers, right, and kind of other things in adulthood.
00:07:51.080 | And so, yeah, that's what we want to try to avoid when we can.
00:07:54.680 | [Music]