Is it Ok to Cry in Front Of Your Child?

When it comes to our children, parents are assigned the role of protector, a pillar of strength, always knowing the answer and in complete control of the situation. So, when something becomes overwhelming, or we get frustrated, sad, even angry, there’s almost this panic to hide those emotions from our children. It's a borderline taboo and for a lot of parents it feels wrong. I don’t think parents outright hear someone tell them “don’t let your kids see you cry” but the idea that showing “negative” emotion in front of our kids is a bad thing is subtly suggested. How many movies have you seen where the mom smiles as she waves her kid off to school, double checks to make sure no one else is around, and then falls apart behind the closed door? Or silently crying in the drivers seat and insisting everything is okay to shield the children from their sadness as if it’s this dangerous thing? And if we’re brave enough to dig a little deeper here, maybe you’ve learned it from you parents or other adults in your life when you were younger. There are so many adults who can’t recall seeing adults be vulnerable when they were children. Besides anger (or happiness), there aren’t many millennials who remember seeing their parents openly share other emotions, much less witness how they navigated or resolved that moment. The fear is > crying or showing strong emotion in front of your kids is going to harm them in some way. So the message current parents learned from that > don’t cry in front of your kids. I want to explore that a little bit. In this week’s mudroom we’re going to have a heart-to-heart about crying in front of your kids. We’ll dig a little bit deeper into how our own experience as children may have shaped our view about expressing emotions now that we’re parents. How showing feelings in front of your child can actually help them with their own emotions. And the important part of this process that kids need to see- because yes it’s okay to express emotions, but we also don’t want to constantly be losing our $hit in front of them either. There’s a caveat (and I’ll admit, it’s not something that comes natural for a lot of us). Grab the Scripts to Manage the Top 10 Crazy-Making Behaviours: prnt.link/scripts Watch the video recording here: Join the Parenting Posse: prnt.link/group the Mudroom is recorded live every Wednesday at 1:30pm ET/ 12:30pm CT/ 10:30am PT on Facebook: facebook.com/arfamilyservices