Don’t Teach Your Child To Suppress His Emotions

Emotions are the most important part of us and understanding them is necessary to live in harmony with others and with oneself. It is necessary to understand your own emotions and also those of others, assertiveness and empathy are important to be able to live in coherence with the world around us and to be able to interact with other people. But to achieve all this it is necessary that you do not teach your child to repress his emotions.

Repressed emotions will only cause your children to suffer serious consequences inside. Emotions exist, there are neither good nor bad, because all of them teach us to see what we really want or need in life. Emotions are our teachers and repressing them is denying the opportunity to understand what is happening to us. 

Consequences of repressing emotions

Next we are going to explain some of the consequences that a child can have when repressing their emotions, or feeling that having them or feeling them is something bad. At no time is feeling emotions bad, to be able to channel and manage them you have to understand them, but what happens when this does not happen?

• The child will think that showing their emotions is a bad thing
• You will learn not to cry and to show your emotions in another way, such as through anger
• Mental health problems will exist in the future
• The child will feel confused when he wants to cry and will not know what to do when he feels sad
• They will hide to cry and think they are weak if they do
• The child will grow up without emotional intelligence, he will disconnect from his heart. This will create disease and health problems
• The lack of creativity and connection with your emotions will not allow you to be authentic or show your true self

• You will be an immature person and will have difficulty connecting with and understanding other people
• You will be more likely to blame others for how they feel instead of looking for a solution to feel better
• Will lack empathy, compassion, and assertiveness
• You will be prone to developing anger problems or know how to handle all these problems
• The child will grow up not knowing how to express their emotions constructively or without hurting others
• When they experience serious circumstances such as the loss of a loved one or when the child does not have emotional support, they may be more likely to commit suicide.
• As an adult, when a romantic relationship ends, you will not know how to handle your emotions and you will think that life is meaningless. This can cause a high tendency to commit suicide or to kill the person who abandoned it (in the most severe cases).

• The child will feel worthless and lack self-esteem due to a lack of emotional support from their parents or primary caregivers.
• They will resent life for not having learned to express their emotions properly, something that will make them sick and in poor health.
• It can be a child who causes bullying at school or mobbing at work as an adult because he does not know how to express his emotions.
• You can withdraw into yourself and think that the world around you is too hostile and that everyone wants to hurt you.
• You could develop harmful habits due to emotional emptiness: smoking, drinking alcohol, taking drugs, other types of addictions, etc.

Since childhood

Children need to learn to understand their emotions from the moment they arrive in this world and it is their parents who are responsible for their success. For parents to be able to teach their children about their emotions, it is essential that both parents understand their own emotions, that they are able to name them and understand what causes an emotion in the state of people.

Parents must understand at the same time that their children from birth are all emotions. A child who has a tantrum is not testing you, he is only showing you that he is angry for some reason and that he is not able to understand what is happening or how to handle those feelings inside. To do it, it needs you.

Children must be allowed to cry, laugh, get angry … They need to understand why they have emotions, learn to name them and above all, understand what each of those emotions means. Only by knowing what it means will they learn to look for solutions (first with your help and eventually on their own), to find a way to be better.