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Emotion Regulation
The Teacher Says My Child Is Too Sensitive
Helping children manage their emotions.
Updated June 22, 2023 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
- Children who struggle to manage their emotions have less energy to devote to their learning and social lives.
- Most children don’t like being around peers whose emotions seem intense, unpredictable, and unmanageable.
- One solution is to challenge the validity of what is often a negative interpretation of a particular event.
Restricting our social interactions at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic had negative effects on all of us. The impact was particularly harmful to young children, whose educational experiences in school are as much about learning social skills and emotional regulation as they are about learning academic skills and content.
One consequence of COVID was that children had significantly fewer chances to interact with peers and experience the kinds of discomfort that some social interactions can bring about. Children missed opportunities to evaluate situations and determine that they weren’t as horrible as they may have first imagined. They also had fewer occasions to consider alternative perspectives when evaluating the intentions of their peers and the associated impact of their peers’ actions. Appraisal is vital to how we process situations, so the reduced opportunity for children to practice these skills during COVID took a toll on their social and emotional development.
What Dysregulated Emotions Look Like
Emotional regulation is a skill that is key to children’s well-being, and those who struggle with it tend to display their emotions more frequently and more intensely than their peers. They may become upset about things that don’t upset most other children, or when they get upset, it may be a bigger deal for them than it is for their peers. A first grader may sob inconsolably for 10 or 20 minutes because his favorite-colored marker is unavailable. An older child who gets partnered with an undesirable peer may groan and roll his eyes, throwing materials on the floor, physically turning away from the classmate, making negative comments under her breath, and remain distressed for hours.
The older the child, the more their peers may wonder about their dysregulated behavior. And if their behavior is considerably out of keeping with that of their classmates, their classmates may feel uncomfortable around them and distance themselves. Most of us find uncontrollable emotions off-putting, and if your children’s teachers don’t know how to soothe your child, their peers will likely not know how to do this either.
Parents will also hear about your child—not because a classmate is tattling on them, but because, during the natural discussion of their day, children may talk at home about how upset they became over a minor issue. Even when your child’s classmates aren’t pulling away, other parents may suggest that their children steer clear of your son or daughter. Many parents are understandably focused on their children getting the most out of their educational experience, and your child’s upset may tend to derail instruction.
Signs of Struggle
It is likely that you will see emotional struggles at home, too, but, if not, you will eventually hear about it from your children’s teachers. Some teachers will tell you directly, and others will give veiled messages. The direct approach, although sometimes painful to hear, can give you a clearer course of action because you know something needs to change. With less-direct messaging, however, you may have to read between the lines of polite teacher-speak, which I call “the Pollyanna Effect.” This is essentially when a teacher or administrator delivers a message in such a sugar-coated way that parents often can’t even recognize that there is a problem.
Teachers may say that your child “is sensitive,” “has big feelings,” “has difficulty managing emotions,” or “can cope with disappointment with the help of teacher support,” all of which point to your child’s difficulty with emotional regulation, and may be used to describe your child in frequent calls or emails.
A Helpful Model
A useful way of understanding the distress your child may be expressing at school—and possibly at home—is based on a simple schema that is the foundation for cognitive behavioral therapy. To make sense of the world around us, especially less familiar or relatively undesirable situations, we interpret our experiences, label them, and have thoughts about them. How we interpret our experiences will determine how we feel about them, so if our interpretation of an event is negative, we will feel negatively (e.g., sad, distressed, angry, frustrated). If, on the other hand, our interpretation is positive, we will feel positively (e.g., happy, content).
If our goal is not to feel miserable, then the best point of intervention is at the point of appraisal or cognition—which led us to feel badly in the first place. It is much easier to consider alternative interpretations than to tell yourself not to feel bad after you have already decided what happened was awful.
How to Use This Framework
Now that you understand the basis for your children’s feelings, here are some strategies you can use to help them cope with disappointments. Basically, you want your children to look at any situation more benignly and neutrally. At worst, you want them to think that the situation is undesirable rather than terrible.
One of the easiest ways of doing this is to model it for your children. Take a situation you could have complained or catastrophized about and indicate how you chose to look at it less negatively. What did you say to yourself? You may even want to add how you felt about the situation because of your more neutral or benign interpretation.
You can also coach your children to look at situations more neutrally by asking questions about whether there are any other ways of seeing the situation. For example, your son is somewhat new to his school and invites classmates to his birthday party. Not as many classmates have accepted the invitation as he would have liked. He concludes that he is friendless, he will never have friends, no one likes him, and the children at his school are mean.
To counter your son’s negative assumptions about the situation, lay them out and challenge their accuracy. First, does he have any evidence of his negative interpretation besides a feeling? What’s the best reason anyone would turn down an invitation? Are there explanations that don’t assume intentionality, significant and absolute harm, permanence, or a doomed future? Is it possible that some of those classmates live far away? Did you plan the party on a holiday weekend when many families have other plans? Is the activity for the birthday one that might not appeal to kids your child’s age?
These other interpretations or explanations might not be more accurate, but you are training your child to consider a broader range of reasonable possibilities. The goal isn’t necessarily to feel good about the outcome—because it might still be disappointing that not many classmates agreed to attend your child’s birthday. But a neutral explanation may leave him feeling less hurt and may be as viable an interpretation as your child’s initial thoughts.
Checking Your Responses to Disappointment
My last advice is to evaluate yourself and recognize whether you go to the dark side in the face of disappointment. Do you often find yourself seeing a disappointing situation as some kind of mistreatment? Do you ascribe malevolent intent to the actions of other children toward your children? If your children see you respond in these ways, they will likely do the same. Furthermore, children are constantly striving to be relevant to their peers. When you suggest that a peer did something to them intentionally, you are essentially saying that your child doesn’t have value to their peers. And the younger your child, the harder it is to brush off the notion that others don’t care about them.
