Navigating the Teenage Emotional Pressure Cooker
by Katherine Wu | Grade 9 | Scholastic 2024 | Critical Essay| Honorable Mention
President Franklin D. Roosevelt puts forward the idea that “We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future” — indeed, parents can and should prepare their children for the future — emotionally. Tense dinner conversations and cold shoulders are a staple in the repertoire of teenagers’ lives. Teenagers are often consumed by the balancing act of school work, activities, social circles, and existential thoughts as they mature into young adults. This naturally results in an emotional pressure cooker that often boils over in the comfort of their homes. However, when parents retaliate against their children’s expression of emotion, this breaks trust in the familial bond, causing children to withdraw and withhold their feelings from their parents. Therefore, parents should strive to create an environment in which children can express themselves freely and experience emotional growth without punishment.
One avenue for parents to foster an emotionally safe home environment is by allowing children to worry about their own problems, while simultaneously shielding them from worrying about their parents’ trauma and stress. This protects children from unnecessary trauma, which forms an emotional response to a stressful event that an individual does not have the skills or tools to cope with. A recent study in 2023, conducted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), found that a child’s health is significantly influenced by their parent’s mental health. The study showed that “1 in 14 children aged 0–17 years had a parent who reported poor mental health, and those children were more likely to have poor general health.”[1] A parent’s own mental health needs to be maintained in order for their children to lead healthy lives. Children are not equipped to support their parents’ mental health, nor should they have to take on this burden; parents should actively take care of their own mental health in order to protect the health of their children. Since parents shape a child’s understanding of life, their expression of serious problems, worries, and mental health issues can dramatically impact a young person’s experience of their childhood.
Parents who blur the line between child and companion in sharing their troubles with their children, have more difficulty caring for their children, which negatively affects a child’s mental and physical health due to neglect. Showing care for the emotional wellbeing of others takes energy, and when parents dedicate their energy towards expressing their own emotions, as opposed to listening to the emotional needs of their children, this can result in neglect. Whereas parents who prioritize both their own mental health and that of their children, by educating their children on coping mechanisms for strong negative emotions, are able to form closer bonds with their kids. John M. Gottman, an American psychologist, wrote his famous book called ‘Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child: The Heart of Parenting’ in 1997, where he talks about how parents can build a healthy relationship with their children, and finds that: “When parents offer their children empathy and help them to cope with negative feelings like anger, sadness, and fear, parents build bridges of loyalty and affection.”[2] Supporting children in understanding the emotions they are experiencing creates closer familial bonds and teaches children to manage changes in their emotional states. Furthermore, until their late teens, children are not equipped to support their parents’ emotional well-being and have not yet developed the emotional intelligence to process any complex issues that are being shared with them. While it is valuable for parents to share some personal challenges with their children, such as interpersonal conflicts at work, as an educational opportunity and a maturity exercise, parents should not be depending on their children to be pseudo-therapists to, for example, provide support during burnout or depression. A child’s healthy development depends on their parent’s ability to share valuable learning moments while censoring traumatic events until a child has developed the emotional maturity to understand them fully.
Children are growing beings who need a safe environment to develop themselves and to do so, parents need to create comfort by absorbing their children’s emotions. A study conducted by the Journal of Family Psychology found that “a child’s ability to regulate their emotions is significantly impacted by a parent’s approach to punishment (emotionally controlled vs. emotionally charged), emotionally charged punitive measures resulting in a child’s aggressive behavior at school.”[3] Healthy homes are created when parents control their own emotions and accept their children’s emotions, as this creates a sense of peace and comfort for the child and demonstrates that expressing emotion is acceptable and even valuable in certain situations. As children need to be able to experience emotional trial-and-error in the home. This allows them to learn appropriate responses to situations like compassion, active listening, and confrontation, which they would not be able to do if they were not permitted to express their emotions to their parents, or if they were shouldering the emotions of their parents and muffling their own. Children are sponges: they learn through absorption, and the home environment their parents craft for them is reflected in their personalities and behavior. Disturbing the emotional ambiance of a child’s home influences the trajectory of their emotional maturity. Parents need to give children a safe zone for emotional experimentation by absorbing their emotions, however challenging to their own emotional states.
Not only does emotional expression allow for emotional development in children, but it also facilitates the growth of healthy relationships. These form between a parent and child when parents don’t retaliate against normal human emotions and allow their child to express themselves. A child’s relationship with their parents is their first experience of an interpersonal connection, which will inform how they interact with, and treat other people in their life later on. The study, supported by NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD, suggests that: “adolescents who grow up in positive family climates with effective parenting are more likely to have healthy romantic relationships as young adults.”[4] Children feel at ease when parents accept their feelings. This understanding creates a stronger bond between the parents and child, building trust and confidence, which are critical to all relationships. As the emotional bonds between parents and children are the primary factors influencing a child’s growth, retaliating against a child’s expression of, for example, anger, frustration, or sadness, drives them to fight against their emotions instead of processing, understanding, and reflecting on their reactions to different circumstances. Normalizing a child’s feelings decreases the stress of learning to express themselves appropriately. Allowing a child to express their emotions develops a healthy acceptance of their feelings and strengthens the parent-child bond, which will form the bedrock of the child’s future interpersonal relationships.
A healthy relationship starts by bearing a child’s emotions and allowing them to develop from them. Emotion can be a disorienting and disarming force for people of all ages. It is easy to adopt the emotions of people around us, be they happy, angry, or sad, but it is a challenge to recognize the emotions of others without allowing them to affect us. Being emotionally resilient is a critical life skill, and also a behavior that is nurtured over time and through experience. Parents can help build up children’s emotional skills, but they need to respond calmly and accordingly during a sudden outburst. Parents’ ability not to react to a child’s outburst of anger sets an example for the child to emulate in other environments, such as at school, with friends, or with siblings at home. Demonstrating an ability to be level-headed in heated situations, and remain focused on priorities is very important to a child who observes human ecosystems in different scenarios.
Although it’s important for parents to share some of their personal challenges with their children, they should not rely on their kids to hold emotional support. Parents need to be able to communicate educational experiences without revealing traumatic information to promote their child’s healthy mental development. A culture of emotional suppression in the home disrupts a child’s pathway of emotional growth since children are developing beings who require a safe environment to thrive. Not only does emotional expression allow for emotional exploration in children, but it also facilitates the growth of healthy relationships. People of all ages may find emotion to be confusing and disarming, but parents can support their child’s emotional growth by absorbing their everyday stress and providing guidance on how to respond to emotional experiences.
