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When a Friend Moves Away
Help Your Child Cope
By Margaret Risk
In his seminar, "Stress and the Family: Creating a Generation of Children that Can Cope With Stress," Marcus teaches parents how to create what he calls a Soothing Presence that can acknowledge and tolerate the intense emotions their children are experiencing. Preteens are old enough to learn how to use common emotional language to explain those emotions. One helpful technique to encourage them to share emotions is mirroring, repeating back what the child has said. The child hears her own words repeated and believes that she is being understood. Another technique is validating. A parent can tell the child, "You have the right to feel that way." Sometimes a parent may discover that her own emotions interfere with helping her child. But, Marcus says, "what upsets one parent might not upset the other." In this situation, the other parent can take on the role of the Soothing Presence, validating and mirroring back.
"Whether a son or daughter, more than likely they've got lots of feelings," says Ellen Rosenberg, M.Ed, author of Get a Clue! What's Really Going on with Preteens and How Parents Can Help. "Just because they don't share doesn't mean they don't have those feelings."
Rosenberg maintains that even if it's hard to imagine communicating openly with your preteen, it's worth the effort. She suggests several techniques that parents can use to start a conversation. One is relating their own experience, if they had a similar one in childhood. By expressing how they felt, they can model using those feeling words, such as sad, lonely and depressed. If a child is reluctant to express emotions, a parent can help the child by guessing what his feelings might be. For example, "You must be sad since your friend moved away." Even if a parent guesses wrong, the attempt could generate conversation and open the doors to further communication.