Dealing with sensitive children

Parent question: I wanted to ask you for some advice on my 7 (almost 8) year old daughter. Yesterday when I picked her up from school she was crying, she told me she had some problems with her friend where she thought her friend was mad at her and she felt sad, she said she just had a bad day. The thing is, she gets her feelings hurt real easily, I try to talk to her and tell her she will have bad days but I can't help but feeling awful for her because I was the exact same way when I was her age, still am really. I would get my feelings hurt real fast when a friend wouldn't talk to me or be mad at me. It was no fun being the girl that cried all the time for every single thing at school; I really don't want my daughter to go through the same thing. How can I work with her on that? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Answer: Because you know your child gets hurt easily, and possibly doesn’t cope well in situations that feel “stressful” to her, I would guess that you possibly tried to help her “make life easier” and avoid certain things that would upset her as she was growing up.

It’s really easy to get drawn into acting certain ways that unfortunately only dig a deeper hole for your child and don’t allow her to learn to cope. Because this is so difficult for parents to know what to do, at times a parent will be empathic but not set limits and at other times parents get frustrated by what they may feel is “over dramatic” and are more strict. This is really understandable and a typical way for a parent to respond with the frustration and feelings of helplessness at being able to know what to do.

This feeling of helplessness by a parent usually begins a pattern of overprotecting her child. Sometimes the sensitive behavior starts when a child is a baby or young toddler and parents try everything to get the crying to stop. Carrying a child around (toddler and above) so that the crying doesn’t start again is pretty common. Parents will not leave their child with a friend for fear she may get upset. Sometimes the bedtime routines are really long because they don’t want their child to cry and get upset. It’s one more book, singing to her, back rubs anything to keep a from crying! And so, the parent begins to indulge and overprotect the child. While that feels like you are helping, all this does is reduce a child’s ability to cope with life’s everyday situations.

As much as that may feel like you’re being a concerned and helpful parent, all it really does is to teach a child to be more helpless and dependent. Your response from your child: whiny and demanding behavior! At that point many parents just can’t deal with it anymore and the “fixing” the child isn’t working! All of the indulgence didn’t work either! After years of this, most parent just lose their patience and become frustrated with their child. Yelling and impatience usually increases because after all of this time, parents are still feeling frustrated and helpless. So there is goes, protective and indulgent with a child until the frustration builds and then frustrated and angry. It’s just one big cycle! You can feel patient for days, hours or minutes and then the frustration can hit and the patience is just gone.

Often there is a split in parents on this. The mom may be more indulgent of the crying and the dad gets frustrated and yells. Then mom feels sorry for her vulnerable child and gets over protective again. But sometimes these roles are reversed and the dad is the one coddling and the mom is angry about it. Whatever way it goes, the child is really aware of the difference in the roles of each parent! A firm voice from a parent can send a sensitive child into a major breakdown of tears! The fluctuations between anger/frustration and overprotectiveness only make things worse because in the child’s eyes, the parents are unpredictable and that’s just confusing!

After a while the parents may feel that their child is just trying to manipulate them for attention. If that happens, parents then become rigid. Then from what was once, “Sure I’ll get you something else to eat” to “Eat what’s put in front of you. That’s it!”

Sometimes sensitive children are brilliant and gifted children. But no matter what, you need to help your child learn to cope in a healthier way with her environment. Giving her the basic psychological experiences that she needs for her emotional development while working around her sensitivities will help her get on a better path.

If you can get your spouse to work with you on this, it’s really the best. You want to give your daughter consistency and not always mixed messages. Of course you want to remain empathic, but you also want to give her structure and limits and encourage her initiative too.

Overly sensitive children need more empathy than most kids. But at the same time, she needs more firmness and structure than many other children. Sensitive children often feel that they’re on sensory overload. Parents usually think that if they empathize with a child’s feelings it will make things worse because it may make their child cry even more. “I understand how hard it is when a friend isn’t nice to you. It can really hurt your feelings.” Just helping her recognize and label the feeling is important. If you guess the wrong feeling, she’ll let you know! But the important thing is that you keep the closeness between you.

If your child is clingy when you have to leave her somewhere such a school, even at home with another parent, etc. you can still help by labeling her feelings that you understand that she wants to be with you and you do sympathize with her need to be close, but set the limits and leave. The longer you stay and try to rationalize the worse it gets. It gives the feelings that you’re worried too! Some kids are fine with leaving a parent but get extremely angry if parents go out together and they are left with grandparents or a sitter. You can still empathize but you need to state the main feeling with is anger and not fear. “I know you feel angry when mommy and daddy go out together to have fun, but we need to have fun too.” Don’t get caught in the trap of arguing and explaining yourself because you already did. What you are teaching your child is to label her emotions and that they are acceptable to have. But there are still limits and the emotions don’t change that!

As children get older and are in school, you aren’t there to “save” them, so it’s important that you work on building skills with your child to help her cope. There are a lot of politics in peer relations that will continue to be a challenge. Parents hate to see their child sad and disappointed. You know how strongly your child is feeling the emotions of being hurt!

When children are upset and sad about friendships and arguments you’ll notice that they speak in the extreme! “No one likes me.” “I’ll never have friends.” “People are always mean to me.” Empathize with your child and how she feels by saying things such as, “I remember feeling like that when my friends were mad at me. I felt like I’d never have a friend again.” By saying things like that your child may start to pull out her feelings and give them labels. She may talk about feeling lonely and embarrassed. As you try to help her “analyze” her feelings just let her talk. Don’t try to analyze her feelings for her! Relate to what you can but don’t try to “fix” it right away. The more she talks the better. When you start doing this with her you may see that she talks a little but more seems to come out the following day. She’s just processing and thinking but you are helping her by listening, sharing your feelings and letting her know that her feelings are OK. By doing this, your daughter will learn that these feelings are just part of the human drama. She won’t feel as alone in her feelings; she will be learning that other children and adults feel the same way too. By being the “listener” and not the “fixer” your child is learning to cope with difficult feelings and to move on.

If she were talking about a problem with a friend and you said, “Don’t worry about her; you have lots of friends. Let’s call a few over for a play date.” All that does is minimize her feelings, and basically know that you don’t want her to talk about her feelings. It’s more important to help her to come to terms with difficult feelings and learn to tolerate loss and disappointment and then move on. Yes, some emotions can be painful. But if she has you to talk to she won’t feel alone in trying to cope with them and she will also learn to increase her tolerance to frustration and disappointment and not be devastated by those feelings.

As your child starts to talk about new friends or being a friend again with a child that she just fought with the day before, resist the temptation to “fix” it with words. Don’t say things like, “See, I told you it would get better and you’d be friends again!” Comments more like, “We all keep learning about people and how they can act different ways” is a more general comment and one that still says a lot. Support her positive feelings.

While being empathic with your child, you also need to teach them structure and limits. You need to help that clingy, whiny and possibly demanding behavior come to an end. You can do this by being firm and loving. Limits don’t have to be cold and rigid, but can be warm and compassionate. Limits really help a child feel more in control of their life. It’s just predictable and feels safer for them!

It may be hard to stay calm when enforcing new limits because many sensitive children will scream and cry and just lose it! Two out of control people will just make it worse! You can still be gentle and loving and let your child know that you’re on her side but once you set your limit, stick with it. Don’t try to rationalize it or argue with your child. You can keep your voice calm and impart the “I know you can do it” kind of confidence. You may have to make your voice firmer each time, but there is no reason to scream or yell.

New limits often make children angry. Just stay positive and as calm as you can. Don’t feel badly that you are setting limits and that your child is upset. You are just helping your child build the skills that she needs in this world.

Keep in mind that empathy and limit setting go hand in hand. As you increase the limit setting, you need to increase your empathy.

There are no quick fixes! Quick reassurances and minimizing the problem aren’t ever going to get to the skill building that she needs. Encouraging her attempts and acknowledging her successes provide her the support that will help her develop stronger coping skills.

If you play dolls with your daughter you can come up with various scenarios for your story line that you know she’s coping with. Don’t try to be the “teacher” in this. Just have two dolls talking to each other with one possibly saying, “I don’t want to be your friend” and then having the other doll give some answers, come up with solutions, etc., but always expressing feelings. Your daughter will watch what you’re doing! She will learn by example and may eventually join in with one of her dolls. You could even have your doll who was hurt go to her doll and ask her what she should do. What you are trying to do is show more elaboration of feelings and also some problem solving. You are in essence teaching your child not to run from problems as she gets older.

Just keep an eye on yourself. Ask yourself if you’re being too overprotective. Are you jumping into arguments that she may have with siblings or friends? When you take over, you’re giving your child the message that they can’t do it and that just encourages helplessness and passiveness. Things proceed with small steps but just know that you’re helping your daughter step into a world of confidence!

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Kids helping kids: Enjoy this blog by an 8 year old girl! Kids can really teach parents too!