How Can Parents/Teachers Teach Their Children To Manage Their Emotions?

I was inspired to respond to an article I read today in the Guardian Professional entitled 'We Must Get Serious About Tackling Mental Illness Among The Young.' This piece of writing talks about how parents and governments across the world need to understand the importance of the mental health of children. A view which I totally support of course. In the first paragraph the writer states;  'we must seriously re-evaluate how we raise our children, care for them, teach them to take up supportive and loving relationships, and protect them,' and it is this sentence  that I would like to take issue with.


In order for parents/teachers to help children 'manage their emotions' they really need to be able to manage their own. I have spent many years as a counsellor and often receive phone calls from parents who wish send their children to me for Emotional Therapy. As I run a private practice, parents have to pay for their children's therapy, but they often choose to come to me as the waiting list may be as long as 6 months for a child to see a therapist on the NHS.


The parents come to see me first without the child in order for me to fully understand the situation  from their perspective. After a short while of talking to the parents I can usually begin to understand why the child  may be behaving in the way he/she does. More often than not the situation has come about because the parent/s are having trouble handling their own emotions and the child is reacting to the parents' behaviour. Of course this is a very delicate situation and I have to be very sensitive how I approach this. It is often the norm, that parents send their child to 'therapists' in order for the child's behaviour to change not thinking that they themselves might be the reason for the behaviour in the first place. After suggesting that a solution might be that we work as a team, giving the parents, siblings and the child in question, some different ways of understanding and managing their emotions, I am often met with resistance. As parents we really need to acknowledge our responsibility for our own inept emotional aptitude in terms of the way we deal with our emotions before we can expect any lasting change in the way our children handle their emotions.


There have been times when I have agreed to work with a child when the parents have declined my offer for them to be involved in the therapy. My heart sinks when this scenario plays out, as the child usually responds well to the therapy and then goes back into a negative environment, only to slip back into his/her old pattern of behaviour. Then the parents believe the therapy is is not working because the child's behaviour shows little improvement.


I can't say strongly enough that there needs to be an 'Emotional Revolution' in the way we think about our emotions and how we 'react' to them. I believe this has to happen in order for there to be any real lasting progress made in helping to reduce mental health issues in children.