Some parents have a child who is loud and wild, sensitive and emotional. What is the reason for the extreme emotional outbursts and tantrums? And how do you deal with it as a parent?
Every child is different. It is unique in the world, the personality develops with time, influenced by parents, siblings, friends, the environment and the genes.
Now, some parents have a quiet child who can do well alone, watching rather than commenting, retreating instead of screaming. Other parents, however, are confronted with a child, which is the exact opposite: it is defiant, receives tantrums, cries from the bottom of their hearts, laughs full-time and is active throughout.
If you ask yourself “What’s better?”, That’s the wrong question. Because every kid is perfect the way it is. Each character is individual and lovable – in his own way.
A wild child is not “sick”
A wild child is certainly not the same sick. It is characterized only by something very special: emotional strength. This term goes back to the author Nora Imlau ( So much joy, so much anger , Kösel Verlag). Her book, published in 2018, is about these very emotional children.
Every emotion they experience twice as strong. Whether joy, anger, grief, love, longing, desire or aversion. “People used to say that they are difficult, behavioral, or ill-behaved children, and it was important to me to write about these children and find a term for them that is appreciative and that does not immediately put them in a problem drawer “, Explains Nora Imlau in an interview with the Huffington Post .
Many parents blame themselves when their child is “too” active, louder than other children, more emotionally responsive “than usual”. You wonder why other kids can sit still, but not theirs. Why other kids can follow the rules, but theirs is beyond the scope.
Parents feel guilty for their child
The fact that outsiders blame parents for the behavior of their children is not without blame. They give them advice on how to set boundaries for children and be more consistent. About every seventh child worldwide is affected by this personality structure.
Author Nora Imlau, herself the mother of an emotional child, calms the moms and dads with a single sentence: “Nobody is to blame for giving birth to a child with extreme emotions.” According to Imlau, emotional strength is innate. It is a personality trait that parents can at most address, but can not change. Because emotional children take their environment basically more intense.
“Emotionally strong children perceive with all their senses, what they feel on their skin, what they smell, what they see and hear – everything is perceived as very intense,” says Imlau. Parents can help their children cope with this emotional power and grow in it.
All emotions in the extreme version
Often parents notice shortly after birth whether their child is emotional and has particularly pronounced needs. “Unlike my other children, my emotional child had a hard time adjusting himself from the start, screaming and crying so much and having extreme emotional ripples in every direction, most babies have periods in which they bum in satisfaction My baby, on the other hand, knew only exuberant joy, utter despair or deepest anger – and nothing in between, “says Imlau.
The intense environmental perception can lead to a stress level in the children. Because they rarely feel a middle. Instead, they commute between the extremes: extremely happy or extremely sad, extremely angry or extremely in need of love. Dealing with these emotions is still difficult for parents.
Nora Imlau tries to explain to the parents the feeling of having a strong child: “Everything you feel, your child feels a hundred times as strong, every noise is like an explosion, every normal light is like lightning, you have to do everything in the extreme version. ”
Why are the children like that?
But why are some children like that, others are not? The reason for this lies in the brain structure of emotional children. The so-called amygdala, a part of the limbic system, is very sensitive to them and becomes very active in the children even in the lowest stress level. Meaning: Very quickly, it sends a signal to the brain stem to switch to emergency mode. When a little thing goes wrong, it already feels like a disaster to her. Anyone who has no idea would call it “overreacting”. But for these children it is a normal reaction.
How can parents handle these big reactions? The answer is: patient, loving, close. Instead of ranting, one should embrace the child instead of being stressed, waiting patiently. Especially young children must be taught how to deal with these strong feelings. You need affection instead of rejection.
Creative, curious, courageous
“For me it was a very important realization to understand: My child does not do this on purpose, my child does not want to annoy me, but it can not be my job to permanently regulate the feelings of my child work and find out how my child can develop strategies to deal with these overly strong emotions, “reports Nora Imlau. “The most difficult balance for parents of emotional children is to stay connected, but still maintain their own boundaries: I’m there for you, but I’m not letting myself into this great feeling.” Emotional children are not bad. On the contrary, they have extremely beautiful qualities, are above average often creative, curious, courageous, persistent, passionate, empathetic and enthusiastic. At the same time, every extreme emotion is a chance to grow and use it.