Growing up, there may have been times when you felt confused or baffled by your own emotions. You may not have acknowledged these feelings at first, considering as children we don’t really understand the concept of emotions and their complexity, but it is important for parents to identify these feelings and emotions and acknowledge them so that a child can feel more in touch with their own emotions as they grow older. This fails to happen if the parents lack emotional intelligence. What does this mean? Emotional intelligence can be defined as the ability to identify, assess, and control one’s own emotions, as well as other people’s emotions. As a parent, it is important to respond to a child’s emotional needs and support them, because failure to do so can lead to difficulty in handling emotions for the child, as they grow up.
When raised by parents lacking emotional intelligence, or just the ability to handle emotions and be aware of them, one struggles a lot in many ways. For example, if you were never taught how to be open with your feelings, no matter how big or small they were, you don’t learn how to be self-aware of your own emotions. If there is a death in the family, and no one talks about it; instead, you are taught to put it all behind you and move on without actually dealing with the grief, then you don’t learn how to express your emotions. It can also be small things like having a bad day at school, and not having your parents listen to you. If something embarrassing happens then it’s better to not talk about it rather than open up and understand what you’re feeling. All these instances only lead to the child feeling like their feelings aren’t important, and this happens because the parents themselves don’t know how to identify their own emotions, so they learn to not speak the language of emotions at home.
If a parent’s first response when a child makes a mistake is to yell at them instead of asking what happened, or explaining how it could’ve been done differently, then it is likely that the child grows up not knowing how to manage or control their emotions because all they’ve seen is bursting out and impulsively shifting blame when in danger. The child doesn’t learn how to handle situations, and sometimes doesn’t even have a sense of what is right or wrong.
Parents not understanding emotions can also lead to them giving you wrong messages about yourself as well as the world through their actions and words. Maybe you grew up with anxiety, but because you didn’t feel comfortable trying new things, your parents just called you lazy. Or if you cried a lot because that’s the way you were comfortable expressing your emotions, you were called a crybaby and it was looked down upon. All these signs lead to the child having wrong voices in their heads, constantly putting themselves down for everything they do wrong, even if it wasn’t that big of a deal. Feeling embarrassed of their own emotions because nobody taught them how to understand them.
Unfortunately, the only thing that can be done if you did grow up this way, is to learn skills and abilities of emotional intelligence on your own. Look at the world around you and understand that you are not alone, and it’s never too late to change the way you think about yourself and the world around you. It takes time, there’s no denying that, but it is time that is worth investing in yourself so that you don’t treat your children the same way in the future, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
