3 keys to helping your child tolerate frustration and pain

Just as there are sunny days and other days when clouds cover it, there are also days or moments where we feel joy and others in which it is frustration, sadness or pain that floods.

To achieve mental health it is essential to prepare for all these situations. For years, positive psychology has done a lot of damage in this regard, encouraging and directing us to bury the pain deep within us. as if there was a place where unpleasant emotions could magically disappear without further ado.

All emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant, involve a change in the electrical frequency of cells and their chemical composition. This process is essential for survival and for adaptation to life. Unpleasant emotions, which are not negative, cannot be buried in the underworlds of our interior without more; on the contrary, this leads in the long run, a high probability of presenting pathology.

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The importance of managing unpleasant emotions

It is not, therefore, that it does not hurt, but about accepting and learning to handle ourselves in pain.

Maybe everything would be easier if from a young age we knew the world from a prism and a real look, to show us the world as it is, helping us and providing us with healthy channels to handle this type of situations to which each and every one of us will be exposed throughout our entire existence.

Our children look at each other, know each other, and know the world through their primary caregivers. Their brain is born unconformed, and it is through learning, through their caregivers, that they acquire these beliefs and knowledge about themselves and about the world around them.

We are your companions and your guides on a path of wonderful discovery, we are teachers of teachers where most of us have probably never looked at the world this way but where thanks to brain neuroplasticityInstead of anchoring ourselves in the world of guilt and error, we can learn, we can incorporate this information into our networks and provide our children with beliefs and channels to face the incredible challenge of life from the security.

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1. Explain that emotions are important and necessary

Each and every one of our emotions is our most precious messenger. They bring us very valuable messages, sometimes pleasant, sometimes not so much, but all are necessary and natural and all of them have a function. Accompany him in each of them and provide a model of acceptance and support from calm.

If as an adult you are dysregulated or tired, first allow yourself your time and your care and only when you are calm provide this accompaniment.

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2. Tell them from a young age that suffering is part of life

And tell him so that he can understand. Use examples from the animal kingdom and nature.

I am going to tell you a great secret that you can keep in your heart forever and it is important that you listen carefully: suffering is part of life and it is natural. Just as trees bear fruit and sometimes shed their leaves... just like a butterfly, before it can fly, it suffers the darkness of the cocoon, and the effort of breaking it... Just like the bear stays still, asleep and protected in winter before running around in spring... just as the tree breaks its structure in order to grow ...

Like the eagle, when he is 40 years old he has to make the decision to let himself die or to renew himself and if he decides to renew himself he will have to take refuge in a nest and hit its beak and it will spend five difficult months until it has a new beak and new feathers that allow it to fly from new...

You know, just like all this, human beings also have pleasant and unpleasant moments, that's the way it happens to us and it happens to you too, and you It will happen and it is natural, and I love to be by your side in your joy, when your sun shines and I also love to accompany you in your pain, when the clouds they cover it.

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3. Act as a role model, practice it with him and offer him an outlet channel

We are going to lie down on the grass or on the beach or on a park bench, Face up looking at the clouds, and we are going to imagine that the cloud is pain, that it is suffering, discomfort. Doesn't seem like it is moving right? It seems like it will never go away.

The truth is that if we look we can observe how slowly, little by little, the cloud follows its natural course and moves until finally it always ends up leaving.

Remind him of this story every time he feels pain and accompany him by reminding him that he or she is always bigger than his cloud, greater than his discomfort, that the sun will eventually rise and that, in the meantime, you will always be happy to remain by his side.

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In conclusion...

If we accompany the child in both pleasant and unpleasant emotions, we naturalize them, we help them to identify them because they do not know them, we label, we give it a physical form, we give them examples and we give them a model and tools to handle each of these situations, and we do it from joy and love, the wonderfully plastic child's mind will develop with resilience, able to face any frustration or pain from self-love and of course let's not forget that together with this great challenge we will make millions of mistakes as caregivers because that is the human being and because the error is inherent to learning, and this too it's natural.

The fact is that, although as caregivers or guides there are situations in which we deregulate ourselves, if most or at least 30 or 40% of these occasions we can accompany, support or even repair, this will be enough for the child to incorporate these tools that, without a doubt, will be the best inheritance that we can leave both to our children, as well as to our own humanity.