How Teaching Your Kids to Feel Their Emotions Heals You, Too

One of our most important jobs as parents isn’t fixing our children’s problems; it’s having a pulse on their emotional health.

And when I say that, I don't mean making their sadness disappear or turning their anger into gratitude. It’s about noticing when they need support, comfort, or simply a safe presence.

If your child is sad, can you let them be sad?

Can you hold them while they cry, without trying to distract, fix, or find a silver lining?

If they’re angry, can you stay present without sending them away or telling them they’re “wrong” for feeling that way? Can you hold back from sending them to their room?

And if they’re afraid, can you resist the urge to rush in with reassurance, and instead sit beside them in their fear?

These are some of the most powerful parenting moments. These are the moments your child is learning emotional regulation. These are the moments they learn it's ok to be human, that they don't need to be perfect, and to connect through pain and sorrow.

These are the moments that many of the adults I work with missed, and later in life show up as overeating, binge eating, highly restricted eating, and even pain and fatigue syndromes and muscle tension patterns that are "chronic" (untreatable) in our medical system.

What Emotional Regulation Really Means

Your child’s number one emotional task isn’t to feel happy. Childhood is when they learn how to move through all emotional states safely.

They need to learn how to go into big emotions and come back out again... without needing a screen, food, without being sent away, and without something external to soothe themselves.

When children don’t learn this, they grow up isolating or searching for something outside of them to regulate their inner world. That’s often where addictive behaviors, anxiety, depression, and neuroplastic pain syndromes (TMS) begin.

Being able to move through sadness, fear, or anger and return to a state of safety, without hurting themselves or others, is what allows them to thrive in life.

This is emotional resiliency, and it is essential to holistic health. We want them to be able to feel an emotion and come back from it. Not push it down, not mask it, and not lose control.

What Many Women (and Mothers) Missed as Children

So many of the women I work with never learned this growing up.

They didn’t learn how to get angry and come back down.

They didn’t learn to see anger as information, a sign that their boundaries were being crossed, that they were exhausted, or that they weren’t being appreciated.

They were taught that anger is a weakness. Shove it down and be lady-like.

They didn’t learn how to grieve.

As children, grief was often met with distractions. “It’s okay, don’t cry,” "You're fine." or “Here, have some ice cream.”

But when we grow up without learning to process those smaller griefs, we become adults who don’t know how to face the big ones, like losing a parent, ending a relationship, or letting go of lifelong dreams.

We're taught to stuff it down, keep moving, and tell ourselves we’re fine.

When Emotions Get Trapped in the Body

Here’s where it becomes a mind-body issue.

When we suppress emotion, especially grief, anger, and fear, the body perceives danger. It moves into cellular danger mode, which can look like:

• Anxiety and Depression

• Chronic fatigue

• Headaches or migraines

• Low back or neck pain

• IBS

• Fibromyalgia

These symptoms are the body’s way of saying, “It’s not safe to feel this.”

Our body begins to carry the emotional load we were never taught to process. Pain distracts us from the emotions we never felt.

This gets passed down generations. When we don’t learn to hold our emotions safely, we struggle to hold space for our children’s emotions too.

We repeat the patterns of being patient until we are enraged.

We keep comforting our grief with food.

We stay so busy that our emotions don't have time to come up, move through, and complete their wave.

We continue to store emotions in the body.

The Emotions You Can’t Feel Are the Ones You Can’t Hold for Your Kids

If you never learned how to feel grief, your child’s sadness might trigger discomfort in you.

If you never learned how to feel anger safely, your child’s anger might feel like a threat.

So you tell them, “You’re fine.”
“Be tough.”
“Don’t be dramatic.”

It's not because you aren't kind or you're a bad mom; it's because those emotions feel unsafe to you.

And that’s where the generational cycle continues.  We aren't consciously neglecting them; we're in a state of emotional survival.

Breaking the Cycle

Healing yourself is how you begin to heal your children... and their children... and their children...

When you learn to sit with your own sadness, you can hold your child in theirs.

When you learn to process your anger without judgment, you can guide your child through theirs.

This is generational healing at its most powerful level. It doesn't only get passed down through epigenetics, but through nervous system inheritance.

When you regulate yourself, your child learns regulation through co-regulation. Early in life, they rely on us for emotional regulation. Their nervous system attunes to our own.

They don’t need perfect parents. They need parents who are emotionally safe.

You're the BEST Mom

Your child’s emotional development begins with your own, and by learning to feel and move through your emotions in your body, you teach your child that all emotions are safe.

That’s what breaks the cycle of mind-body syndromes, anxiety, depression, and emotional disconnection that so many families carry.

This isn’t just about raising emotionally healthy kids; it’s about breaking generational cycles that are hurting our health and blocking our happiness.