By Tahlia Mandie, Direction Exploring     Everyone experiences great days, but there will also be some days where you feel down. We all experience highs and lows, and children are no different. There will be times when children experience tough times and low times.

It is not uncommon to feel stuck on how to help them get through this. Depending upon the situation, these experiences your child feels similarly wears off onto you - their pain becomes your pain. 

Children need to feel acknowledged, understood, supported and loved. Just like adults, children also need their feelings and emotions heard and acknowledged. However the difference is that children do not have the capacity and emotional intelligence to reason and understand their emotions the way adults can.

When adults experience different feelings and emotions, they are generally able to label them. Children on the other hand may have difficulty with this. They therefore rely on their parents to help them label and understand what they are feeling. No matter what they are going through, it is important that their feelings and emotions are heard. Here are some handy hints to try and help you help your children:

1. Listen to your child
- Listen to their words, feelings and concerns without judgment. If they know they can be heard they are more likely to come forward and tell you when they think they may be feeling low and down in the future.

2. Reinforce your understanding, love and support
- This includes emotional and physical support. When children experience rough patches they need comfort, closeness and love.

3. Tell them that it is okay to feel sad and down
- Children need to know that they are not expected to always feel happy and joyful - having down days and low days are common and normal experiences.

4. Teach your children about different emotions
- By teaching your children the many different emotions that humans experience, empowers their resilience and coping skills. There are many resource tools available that can aid in this education – www.peoplemaking.com.au

5. Children learn how to cope through adversity through their role models
- Children learn how to cope through the behaviours and actions their role models display.

It is important to remember that it is okay for your children to feel down. Enabling them to have these low days and assisting them to then get back up is the key to building their resiliency to face tough times in the future.

About the author:

Tahlia Mandie is a psychotherapist, family counsellor and mum who runs her own private practice, Direction Exploring and now runs her own blog, The Parenting Files - because families matter. Discussing all things parenting and family matters to the serious stuff to the not so serious stuff, the parenting files is spoken with a little witt, quirk and humour. Tahlia also writes regular columns and articles for magazines, newspapers and other online forums.

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