Your Calm (or Stress) Is Contagious – Here’s How to Model Emotional Health to your kids

If you've been feeling stressed recently, you're not alone. We are living in a stress epidemic and you only have to chat to the other mums at the school gate or scroll through mums' Facebook community groups to understand how the mental load on mums has never felt heavier. But what can we do when our stress starts to affect our children?

Hollie Shannon, Clinical Psychologist at Sage Clinics, explains why children pick up on our stress even when we stay silent, and shares practical ways parents can model healthier emotional responses at home.

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Your child feels your stress even when you stay silent and children copy how adults manage emotions, especially during stressful moments.

Here are some tips if you'd like your child to react and deal with issues in a healthier manner...

Start with validation. One of the most powerful things we can do for our children and for ourselves is to validate emotions. Validation doesn’t mean agreeing with behaviour; it means acknowledging the feeling underneath it. For example:

• “I can see you’re feeling sad.”

• “That looked frustrating for you.”

  
  

When children feel emotionally understood, their nervous system begins to settle. This creates the conditions for learning, problem-solving, and regulation.

Label emotions; yours and theirs. Children develop emotional literacy through observing and hearing emotions named in real time. This might sound like:

• “I’m feeling nervous today because I have an important meeting at work.”

• “Your voice is raised and your body looks tense; I wonder if you might be feeling angry.”

Over time, this helps children build an emotional vocabulary and recognise emotional cues in their own bodies.

There are also some great (and free!) resources you can use to teach children about emotions. These include:

• Books about feelings

• Toys or role-play activities

• Visual supports such as an emotions wheel or feelings chart

Some families also find it helpful to create an “emotional toolbox”, a small box containing items like sensory toys, stress balls, or calming objects that a child (or parent!) can access when emotions feel intense.

Model emotion regulation strategies. Children learn far more from what we do than what we say. If you have strategies that help you manage emotions, make them visible. For example:

• “I’m noticing that I’m feeling frustrated. I’m going to take a few deep breaths to help myself calm down.”

• “I can see you’re feeling anxious. Would you like to practice calm breathing together or use a sensory toy?”

This teaches children that emotions are manageable and that there are different ways to respond to them.

As parents, we play a central role in shaping our children’s development. That includes their emotional world.

Emotional development doesn’t happen by chance; it is nurtured day by day through relationships, experiences, and the way emotions are handled at home.

If you find it difficult to identify, express, or regulate emotions yourself, it may be helpful to seek your own therapeutic support. Developing your own emotional literacy is not only beneficial for you, it directly enhances your ability to model these skills for your child.

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Dr Hollie Shannon is a Clinical Psychologist from Australia with over a decade of experience working with children, adolescents and adults with eating disorders and/or body image concerns. She is passionate about dismantling the stigma surrounding mental health and eating disorders in particular, so that people of all ages, genders, sizes and cultures can access treatment as soon as possible when they need it.

Find out more and get in touch at sage-clinics.com

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