Kids Mirror Parents Unprocessed Emotional Material

It can be hard to grasp the degree to which our children know our inner worlds. They may not know it in their minds but they can feel exactly what’s going on. If the adult is fearful, the child will play out that fear in some way. It isn’t always absolutely linear, which might make the dynamic less obvious to the parent.

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For example, let’s say the father is going through some financial stress and is feeling fearful. The child will feel the fear and it may come out as trouble falling asleep, clinginess to mother or restlessness. Nobody would make a correlation between the father’s fear and the child’s behavior. After all, the father didn’t say anything that the child could hear.

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Children don’t need to hear the words to absorb their parents’ underlying emotions. Children are so tuned into their parents’ state of being. They are absorbing all the time. Sometimes children can digest the stress and discharge it through their play because they don’t have the mental obsessions that make it harder for adults to let go.

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The degree to which the child can let go depends on his/her strength and resilience, physically and emotionally. It also depends on the degree of stress in the adult and the way the adult is managing it within him/herself. .

There’s no need to be perfect as parents. We all have our stressors. My hope is that you will look at your kids as mirrors and consider that what they are experiencing is not separate from your experience, most of the time.