Emotions

[Marvin6418]

My DS has recently turned 5 and has always been quite a sensitive child even as a baby. He has only really mixed with childrne his age at nursery from 2 and at school. We have never really talked down to him and he has grown up around lots of adults and understands a lot of adult words and from age of 3 has used these in the right context.

His behaviour is normally really good although he does have his monents! In the last year I have noticed he can get quite frustrated at times and gets angry quite quickly over things. It is almost like he doesn't know how to express what he is feeling. After he has calmed down and stopped crying I try to talk to him about what he feels and he can sort of explain to me why he is angry but gets upset about being angry.

Has anyone else gone through this? If so how did you deal with it?

Thanks

We encouraged ours to come and talk to us when they were starting to get cross about something...that way we could help. We also have emotion faces which were used to help our 2 learn to recognise what they were feeling/thought they were feeling, they are not used so much now but DD(6) still finds them helpful when she's having trouble finding the right words.

Communication and validation are big things in our house though; both dc know that will never be in trouble for what they are feeling as long as they don't express it badly (no hitting/swearing/throwing/etc), they also know that they can come to either DH or myself and we will help them work through problems/odd emotions/irrational feelings however odd they may or may not be.

Thanks for this I might try the emotion faces and see how that works. I have always encouraged him to talk to us about how he feels but he just suddenly snaps. For example, he was playing with some friends and they were doing a treasur hunt, he had found a clue and one of the other boys went to take it and it ripped in two and I said it doesn't matter as I saw his face start to go into crying and I simply said we can put it on the floor and lay it together like a jigsaw and he just turned and shouted at the boy put it on the floor and then burst into tears. He stopped quite quickly but it just built up instantly. There have been many situations like this with very little warning.

We are unsure if any of this is to do with the fact he is rather sensitive and him being the only child.