Emotional Support

Most parents now know that providing emotional support is an essential parenting task. It strengthens the parent-child bond as the child learns that the parent is on her side: caring, seeing, understanding, and helping. It also models the skills of nurturing and supporting others. And it helps the child to process and relieve distressing and painful events so that she remains as mentally healthy as possible; growing up with a mountain of unprocessed hurt piled up inside creates a heavy emotional burden that can take many adult years to unravel. But how, exactly, do parents provide emotional support?

Components of Emotional Support

Support starts with uninterrupted listening. It’s important to let someone “tell their story.” You can ask questions when the speaker is finished relaying what she thinks is important.

Sometimes, listening is the only form of support needed. The story was told, the feelings were released, new ideas popped into consciousness, and “processing” was completed. The parent will know that listening was sufficient if the child pops up after telling her story with some sort of new resolve or a happy demeanor and with a quick “Thanks!” (hopefully), dashes off.

Often, the second component of emotional support will be needed as well. This is the naming of feelings. The trick with this step is to ask yourself, “What does the speaker seem to be feeling?” and then offer a few guesses in that regard, as in, “Wow, sounds like you felt left out and hurt.” Naming feelings helps shrink them and release them. “Left out,” for example, is more specific than the open pit of pain that it was before it was named — and now that the child knows what she’s feeling, the emotion has served its purpose and can begin to drift off and diffuse, leaving the child intact.