A child psychologist has explained the one thing parents should never say top their children, and it is a common mistake many of us make. Professor Sam Wass is an expert in child stress and has previously appeared on the Channel 4 show The Secret Life of 4 and 5 Year Olds.
Speaking to The Mirror, he said the worst thing you can do is tell your children not to feel their emotions. Speaking in partnership with Virgin Media O2's Connected Playground, he said: "Inhibiting emotions doesn't work, it doesn't work for adults and it definitely doesn't work on a child, you can't just tell someone to cancel an emotion.
"So for example in September you always see all these parents marching their children to their first day of school, dragging them by the hand and their child is in floods of tears and the parent is walking along and saying in a really cheerful voice 'it's going to be fine, you're going to have a lovely time, don't be scared'.
"And that is exactly what not to do as it just doesn't work."
He said you should try and explain to your child what their emotions are. "What we think does work is just describing what a child might be feeling, we call this building metacognitive awareness and it's the awareness of the inner child and what they are feeling,"
Professor Wass added. "It's something we never teach children in schools but it's something we have to learn. Children aren't aware of what they're feeling, they can't describe it and that's because they don't know it themselves.
"It's only by you describing to them what they are feeling that they gain that self-awareness of what it is."
He added: "Something about being self-aware of what we're feeling helps us to manage that emotion and helps it to reduce.
"What I would do as a parent is just to help my child gain self-awareness about what they are feeling, so putting it in non-judgemental terms, saying something like 'it seems to me you are feeling this' and putting a verbal label on it to help them understand better and learn what their own emotions are."
