Warriors. Welcome. I’m so excited you’re here with this episode in your ear. Today we’re talking about emotional maturity and kids. Last week we talked about how to build our emotional maturity as adult. And this week I’m giving you tips and strategies on how to build and raise emotionally mature kids. Super helpful. As you look around and we see a lot of emotionally immature adults. Also helpful because the more emotionally mature we are, the better able we are to handle our life and the things that are coming at us. And that’s really what we want for our kids. They will not have a life full of rainbows and daisies and, and I don’t really want them to. I want my kids having these great big adventures, which include highs and lows of emotions. And the better able they are to handle those emotions, the better their lives will be. So let’s learn the skills to teach those. Let’s go warrior. Thanks for clicking play.

Voiceover: Hi, this is the Love Your Life show with Susie Pettit, certified life and Wellness coach. Join Susie as she helps you with your wellness and mindset so you can live a life you love. Let’s go Warriors.

Morning Energy & Setting Expectations for Kids

Hello Warriors, and welcome to the Love Your Life show. It is me, Susie Pettit, your certified life and parenting coach. And I’m. I think this episode should have a warning that not only is it morning and I wake up like an Energizer bunny, I have so much energy in the morning that just as it goes down, if you see me at eight thirty at night, it’s not the same case. But this is morning, Susie energy. Plus I had a cuppa, as they call it in Australia here today. So that’s a coffee with an extra dose of caffeine. So oh, plus I’m super passionate about this message that I’m sharing today, which is how to raise emotionally mature kids. I, it really is a built my parenting class around it. It is something that I, um, can preach to parents all the time that the better we can get at helping them and helping to teach them the skills of emotional intelligence, emotional maturity, emotional regulation, emotional A well awareness all those things, the better their lives get and also the better our relationship with them is. And so I’m so excited you’re here today. For many, many reasons. And I want to dive in. But before we even dive in, I want to start with some things that we just set ourselves off on the right foot just to have us all on the same page. As a reminder that our kids are supposed to be emotionally immature. Okay. The goal of this is not to get a twelve year old to act like a thirty two year old. No, that’s the thirty two year old’s job, okay. They get to they have emotional maturity for whatever age they are. Let’s say they’re sixteen. We want them to have the emotional maturity of a sixteen year old, not an eight year old, but also not a twenty six year old, as that’s not fair or appropriate. So part of being a teenager is learning emotional maturity, but you don’t land in emotional maturity in the same way. We don’t expect a fourth grader to know advanced calculus. We’re like, oh no, no, no. They’ll learn that when they’re older. Okay. This is the thing that we’re building. We and we don’t just take our hands off the wheel and we’re like, oh, no, we’re not going to teach them two plus two. We start with the skills of it. So just to know that they are, they are emotionally immature. They’re supposed to be emotionally immature. And we’re just it’s a sliding spectrum. As we talked about last week in the lesson of emotional maturity for adults. Okay.

Parental Self-Awareness & Emotion Shoving

And I honestly, I guess the, I like starting with that because when I notice myself wanting my kids to be more emotionally mature than is developmentally appropriate, that’s often a clue that I’m not practicing my own emotional maturity. This is full transparency here as a life coach that teaches this. Okay. But when I want them to stop having feelings that I’m uncomfortable with, and I’m trying to rush them out of that. That’s my own inability to regulate my emotions, my own inability to sit with the feelings. Then they’re done that still do it, still there. And I just want to bring this awareness that if my teenager is upset because let’s say someone didn’t sit with them at lunch, or because a friend didn’t text back, or a teacher made a sarcastic comment, and I’m there trying to fix it, give advice that wasn’t asked for. You know, having like my own emotional reaction that my little cherub is upset. That’s my work to clean up. This is why I say the most important skill as a parent is to learn how to emotionally regulate and to practice your emotional regulation. Some days will be good at it, some days we will be horrendous at it. But it’s a learning journey. All right. And so this is one understand they’re going to be emotionally immature. Two, if you are thinking they should not be feeling this way or this isn’t right. Or like, know yourself. Like, is your chest all tight when they come in the door? And like, that’s your opportunity to check in with your own emotional intelligence, which is, you know, why I love last week’s episode and also the Love your Life School building, the skills so many of us were not taught. And even if we were taught it, like if you’re the one percent unicorn out there that did have a parent that had a safe place, it’s still a skill that we’re learning so slowly and it would make sense that it would show up in parenting when we’re like surrounded by the people that we love most in the world. So slowing this whole process down so it feels safe for us to feel what we’re feeling instead of what most of us do is that we’re trying to change them so we can feel better. So we’re just like, oh, maybe if they think about it this way, or they think that the kids, you know, not inviting them to sit with them at lunch isn’t a big deal, then they’re not going to feel so devastated. And then I can go on with my day of doing what adult me wants to do. Okay, well, first problem. This doesn’t work when they’re in the feeling state. They’re not thinking clearly. So we like to try to sort of thought shove things in there and it just doesn’t work. They actually don’t have access to that part of their brain.

The Danger of Externalizing Control

Also, even if we could be convincing, people are gonna think and feel what they’re going to think and feel. You see this with adults. So many of the gymnastics we do in relationships is to try to get someone else to think or feel differently, or do something different instead. And that was just out of our control. Instead of letting them be them, the whole let them theory, let them think what they’re thinking. Let them feel what they’re thinking. Let them I mean, let them feel what they’re feeling. Let them experience what they’re feeling, experiencing, okay. And then let you manage your own emotions. Because the problem with this way of living, where, like the other person comes to us with an emotion and we’re like reactive and we’re like, oh my gosh, this can’t be, let me get them to change. Let me focus on them. Them, them is the control is outside of us. It’s very disempowering. And I don’t want you to be disempowered. It’s like we can only feel better if they feel better. And then what does that how does that leave you? To me, it feels like I’m constantly on edge and vulnerable to how they’re feeling. It’s so out of control because the control is outside of us. I know for me, as a as a parent, when I was learning this skill, it’s like I’m feeling all happy and la di da and then boom, our kid comes in and her mood feels like a sludge bomb on our life. I’m keeping it to parenting here, but I know that you with partners can get this too. It’s like we’re all good, and then our partner’s like, oh, and it just feels like ick. Like they threw their emotion on us and now we’re sitting in it. When we put the modem of control outside of us.

Two Mistaken Parenting Approaches & Toxic Positivity

All right. I know I did this, I parented for the most part of the beginning of my kids lives like this. Two ways I would. I was just like a hyper controlling mom. I would try to control all the outside things so as to minimize the potential that they’d feel a bad emotion. Like it’s like make sure that they have the exact people in their summer camp program that they want to have and make sure that their, their desk arrangement is this and make sure that they get, you know, all, all the outside, which is impossible because the human process here on earth is to feel feelings. Even if everything’s all going well, we’re going to feel feelings. Okay, so that’s impossible. Trying to control all the outside factors. I am not God, right? And secondly, okay, I try to then control if they did have an uncomfortable experience. I try to control their reaction to that too by saying really disconnecting and almost like shaming things to them. Like, oh no, don’t be sad or no, that’s not the way to think about it. Think about it this way or it’ll be fine. This is just middle school. This is you’re there are bigger things to deal with. That toxic positivity. I’ll link that episode in the show notes below. But I did that because what I didn’t understand at the time was the solution was me learning to regulate my self me, instead of considering all those external factors inner consideration, like, oh wow, Susie, it’s hard for you when your kid comes home from school and is upset that people weren’t sitting with them at lunch. Of course it is. I needed to learn how to process and feel my emotions before I got into processing theirs. It was my own lack of emotional maturity, which. I’m your coach. I’m your supporter. I’m here to say that’s understandable for all the reasons we mentioned last week and in so many of my episodes. Okay. And yet, once we know better, we can do better. All right. So the first our kids are meant to be emotionally immature. Please don’t expect your sixteen year old to act like a twenty six year old. So then you can act like an emotional sixteen year old, right? That is usually a little gentle sign that your EQ needs some attention and some skill building, all of which I do in the Love Your Life school.

The Core Framework: Where Feelings Come From

And now moving on to how do we then raise and encourage our kids to be emotionally mature at the timeline that’s appropriate to them? It is basic learning, like we do in this podcast and in the practicing that I help you with in coaching and all of that sort of stuff. But the learning here is the two main pieces to keep in mind as a parent that you want to teach to your kids is one understanding where feelings come from, and two, the ability to process the emotion and emotion is energy in motion. So the ability to process that energy, to bring their nervous system back to regulation. This is our job, one of our three jobs as a parent to teach this emotional intelligence where feelings come from and how to process the emotions so that we can bring our nervous system back to regulation. Right. The first part I’m going to keep brief because I have entire episodes on this. This is the thought model that we were not taught from an early age. The my podcast roadmap, if you’re a new listener or you want to refresh on that, get the podcast roadmap, which is at my website, smbwell.com/roadmap. If you’ve listened to that over and over and over again and you’re like, like all the episodes on there, and you still want more reinforcement, which it’s helpful to relisten to episodes it gets when we’ve had training for most of the decades of our life that counteract actually the reality of where feelings come from. It is helpful to keep relistening to things because it sort of marinates our brain in the wisdom and the, the emotional maturity versus what society and what it has been marinating in all those years. And if you want more, I also have a PDF on, uh, emotional, like all my episodes on emotional maturity, just go to the website. And I have a whole category there called emotional intelligence and click on that and start listening. All right. The short version is this. So get the roadmap. And then the short version is that most of us believe that the things happening in our lives create the way we feel. Okay. Like our friend didn’t text back. So we’re going to be sad or we got a bad grade, a thing happening, and then we feel upset. Friend didn’t text back and we feel sad, it’s because the friend didn’t text back that we feel sad, or it’s because the bad grade that we feel upset, or it’s because we didn’t make the team that we feel disappointed. But feelings don’t come from those things. Feelings don’t come from the not making the team the bad grade or the friend not texting back. They come from our thoughts about those things. Each of those experiences a friend not texting back okay and someone feeling sad. We can see how that person would feel sad, but someone else. So that person’s feeling sad because they’re thinking thoughts that they wanted that friend to text back. Someone else might be might feel relief because they’re like, oh, thank goodness she’s not texting me today. Oh, I’m so glad there’s not a text from Susie today. Okay. Or the bad grade or that didn’t make the team. How about the kid that didn’t make the team? But it’s so freaking glad because they actually wanted to tell Mom and Dad they want to play violin. They feel really. Anyhow, the point here is that feelings don’t come from circumstances. Feelings come from our thoughts about circumstances. It comes from the meaning our brains give to the experience. And this matters acutely because emotional intelligence and emotional maturity isn’t teaching our kids to never feel sad or disappointed or embarrassed or frustrated or anxious. It’s teaching them to understand that their feelings are coming from their thinking and to feel empowered in that. And sometimes we don’t always need to change our thinking like the bad grade there. I actually want my kids to feel disappointed. Which leads us to the second part. Like when my kids get a bad grade on something that they wanted a good grade on, or that it is helpful for them to get a good grade on, I want them to feel disappointed. Our feelings drive our actions, so if they’re feeling disappointed about their grade, well then maybe the next time they’re going to study instead of watching all those YouTube videos. So it’s not about feelings being good or bad. It’s just like noticing feelings don’t come from the circumstance. They come from our thinking.

The Wave Metaphor & Learning to Surf

And then the second part is how do we process those feelings once they’re there? How do we teach them? Which is where I love using metaphors to help teach things. And this is one of my favorites. I’ve always loved the beach, and now I have the benefit of living by the beach. And one of my favorite things to do is sit and watch the surfers. Emotions are a lot like waves. We have like, if you look out at the ocean when it’s not flat, there are going to be waves all day long. We’re going to have feelings all day long. We aren’t like, oh my gosh, what’s happened? There’s a problem. No, we’re just like, of course there are waves. Like that’s what happens in a, in an ocean. So like a human, it’s like, of course my kids are having feelings that that’s what happens in a human. Another way, emotions are like waves is a wave builds, it rises. There’s sort of like a little rise up. And then it reaches a crest really quick. Like that’s it’s like, and then it falls away and sort of like rumbles into the, into the coast. That’s what emotions do too. There’s a little build. Then they peak. That’s when it feels the. That’s when the energy in our body feels the most extreme. And then they move through us and pitter patter out. The problem isn’t the wave. The problem is that many of us were never taught how to serve. We weren’t given a surfboard as a kid. Think of a surfboard as your your emotional regulating tools. Okay, so what do we do when the wave came? Well, the wave would knock us over. And then another wave comes and knocks us down again and knocks us down. And we’re getting, like, fumbled around in that wave like a freaking washing machine. Boom, boom, boom. Yet when we have the tools and the surfboard, emotions become something. Think of a surfboard. You’re just riding on a surfboard. You just ride over it. It’s just there. It’s okay. Not because they’re pleasant, but because we know what to do. It’s all right. All right. Guess what else I get to see. So that’s emotions with us. But I also get to see parents teaching kids to surf. And guess what they do. First off, the parent is calm, right? The parent isn’t like, oh my gosh, a wave. You know, they’re calm. The kid comes home from school and was like, I’m so sad that Susie didn’t sit with me at lunch. You’re like, oh, of course you are. We aren’t like. Second, so the parent knows there are waves and expects them. That’s so important. A and then the parent helps the kid with the board. They help. They hold on to the board. They might help them position themselves on it. They line it all up. They help the kid crest the wave. To me, this is how we help our kids with emotions and building their skills with emotional maturity. We don’t freak out with the waves. We don’t spend time preventing the waves like I used to. We use our adult brain and we help them learn to ride it.

The Three Steps: Name It, Describe It, Feel It

And riding the wave. Feeling a feeling is the same. No matter our age. There are three steps and it’s name it. Describe it and feel it. That is how we move through an emotion. That is how we process a wave. Name it one word. A feeling is one word. If we have more than one word, we’re telling a thought and a story, and then that’s just going to make our way even bigger. Okay, so we name it with one board, one word. I’ll put a feeling chart in the show notes. Disappointed, embarrassed. Lonely. Eager. Excited. Frustrated. Angry, nervous. Okay. Then we describe it. Describe it in your body, not in your head as to why we’re feeling that way. That’s the problem we get into. And when our parents are not attuned, it helping us practice emotional intelligence. Often we go back into the defence of why we’re feeling that way, and we actually make the wave bigger. So instead we want to go into the feeling of it, the allowing that it’s there. Of course, you’re feeling disappointed when Susie doesn’t sit with you at lunch and then describe what it feels like. Does your chest feel tight? Does your tummy hurt a little? Does it feel hot or heavy like you’re. I talked to it when I’m working with middle school and kids. Any age that I’m trying to teach this skill, I say describe it like you’re talking to a medical doctor in your body. It’s the first part. Name it, second part, describe it. Third part. Feel it. Get out of your head again, explaining why you’re feeling disappointed and why Susie should have sat with you and why you’re such a loser because you have no friends. That’s just going to make the way bigger. Can you see that? But instead, we sit there and if our parent is helping us with the surfboard, we’re just like, oh, it makes sense that you feel disappointed. Oh, and we can take a breath. We don’t we don’t have to say to them, take a breath. We can co-regulate other episodes on this, like us taking a breath actually calms their system. Okay, we can feel the breath. We can take the breath. We can prod with questions. There are lots we can do that I’m not going to get into in this podcast episode, or else it’ll be seven hundred minutes long. But something that I absolutely can help you with one on one coaching and the Love your life school, what we do is we just know it’s coming. We don’t avoid it. Like we’re not running from the wave. We show our kid how we’re like, oh, of course you are. And we just help them with their board and positioning so they can ride it, right? It’s so helpful. And it really is. It is simple. It’s not easy because we are not emotionally intelligent ourselves. You know, like emotional intelligence is a spectrum. We have been practicing this. We can practice it. All right. And there are so many different skills we can use here and I will share some of them in the show notes and all that. But mostly I want you to think of this wave analogy and try to practice it right.

Boundaries vs. Emotions & The Impact of Immaturity

Allow our kids to be emotionally immature. They’re going to be emotionally immature. I do need to say emotional immaturity is not the same. Like we can feel any feeling. We want that, that ability to allow any feelings. That’s one of the jobs of parenting. The other job of parenting is to have boundaries and house guidelines. And so we often, when I’m setting parents up for success in parenting class, I have. We talk about boundaries and guidelines for them to feel their emotion. It’s okay to be angry. It’s not. Anger is an emotion. It’s not okay to hit their brother or punch their sister or yell at me or swear at, you know, like, those are things that absolutely we can help with boundaries. That’s healthy parenting and why I’m, I just love helping you guys in that class. But what we don’t want to do is shut them down and run from the wave, or make them feel that they’re wrong for having the wave. This is such important work. Kids who grow up with emotionally immature parents report feeling misunderstood like mom doesn’t get why I’m feeling disappointed that Susie didn’t sit with me. They feel like it’s unsafe to have an emotion like, well, I can’t talk to mom about that. Which then I think you can see how that would wound our future relationships. They can feel like their emotions are inconvenient, like an emotionally immature parent, like myself being like, oh, I was in such a good mood. Or don’t you understand how much I, you know, I was gearing up for this or like, okay, so kids with emotionally immature parents, which we all are until we learn the skills that I teach in the Love your Life School, okay? They feel misunderstood. They can feel unsafe. They can feel like their emotions are inconvenient, like their opinions don’t matter. There isn’t room for them. Like they have to be someone else in order to be accepted. That sort of put a little smile, like turn that frown upside down. We don’t have to parent that way. And any day is a great day to start. We can raise our kids to know that their feelings matter, and their feelings are safe here with their mom. That their feelings aren’t problems to be solved. When we are that sturdy parent, we can come in in that loving energy and just be. It just feels so good. I know that many of us didn’t have these types of parents not faulting our parents. I talk about that so much. It’s just the situation. They did the best they could with the knowledge they had. And yet we have the opportunity now in this generation to change the patterns. I help warriors every day with this, and I love that. You know, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re already doing it. So please don’t focus on the gap. Like how much more you have to do. Give yourself a little credit here for the gain.

Call to Action & Closing

And then also just think, okay, so what’s my next step? What’s my next thing? Can I practice this week? And if you’re feeling a little confused and you want a little support, do you know, I just started offering free clarity calls, which is just hop on the phone with me twenty, twenty five minutes. We’ll chat about what’s going on in your life and the clarity part of this. I help you figure out a path forward. Maybe it’s just on that call. I’m like, hey, practice this this week and that’s it. Maybe it’s, you know what? You’d be a perfect fit for the love of your life school or, hey, maybe, you know, you want to take the parenting class and then just one on one. It’s not always working with me and going right into one on one coaching. Okay. But I have spent now two decades helping parents in this and creating really safe houses for people to have emotions because I did not create that with my own kids and myself in their early years. So I’m here to help you so you get that at my website. There are like little buttons all over my website to get to it or just go to https://SMBwell.com/call. All right, I love you, I support you. If no one’s told you today, I am really, really proud that you’re the type of person that listens to calls like this or podcasts like this and is interested in this self-development. You’re like making the world better one moment at a time. And I’m so grateful that you’re part of the Love your life family. I’m sending a big hug to wonderful you.

Thank you for listening to the love of your Life show. If you want to hear more from Susie and support the show, be sure to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes. Also, leave a review and share this podcast with friends and family. Go get em, Warriors.