Key Takeaways: 

• Navigating  negative emotions during COVID-19
• Stay positive
• Well-being tips stay-at-home

Due to the recent epidemic, the kids have been staying at home for more than three months. We are getting calmer from the chaos to facing the daily jigsaw jumps. As a working mother, I deeply feel that we need a more efficient way to balance work and life problems especially during a crisis time like COVID-2019. 

Many families experience countless battles with the kids every day.

The child's changing emotions and crying seem to be like a bomb in the family, which can explode at any time. 

My child has been a very stubborn kid since childhood, she would cry when something is different from what she expected. For example, it often trigger her emotion when she does nothing wrong during craft time.

Bad emotion is a process of accumulate disappointment. No matter for adults or children, when we encounter something unsatisfactory or failure, we will show negative emotions such as angry, disappointment, and sadness. Adults can regulate themselves, but for children they can only express their emotions by crying and making trouble.

What do you do when your child has negative emotions?

     1. Compromise immediately to stop the child from crying.

     2. Use loud yelling to stop the child from crying.

     3. Tell the kids a lot of truth.

I don’t know how you deal with it. I have basically made the above three mistakes. What will happen then? Of course it will not work, and the child will still break out next time. Take my daughter as an example: when she was in elementary school, she was very persistent in writing, and she force herself writes well and properly, otherwise she would keep erasing again and again. I have tried method 2 and 3, but it doesn’t work. Why do you think it doesn’t work? She stopped crying at one time, but next time she would break out at this point again. Her teacher claims she gets worse at school.

So I calmed down myself and think about it. The answer is I was wrong. I thought that her bad emotions would be gone if she stop crying at that time. In fact, she didn't hide it. All her emotions gathered in the next time, and the reaction is worse.

I think many parents may have made this mistake. When kids start to have bad emotions, we did not provide reasonable help and counseling. Children can't distinguish what this emotion is, how to deal with it, that is why they relieve negative emotions:

• Step 1: meet emotions—for emotional bursts caused by different events, we should not avoid it, but should face it directly.
• Step 2: expressing understanding and empathy for his emotions—we might as well give her a hug instead of reasoning and let her emotions vent.
• Step 3: Resolve emotions-After he calms down, we can review and reflect on the incident just now. Listen carefully to your child's feelings. Let the child understand what his feelings are? And why do they appear?

Give children advice and solutions for different results.

Write at the end:

To all parents: Our children may not be the best and smartest. Maybe no other child is smart enough to make you proud, but he must be the one who loves you the most. Sometimes they are naughty and sometimes they drive you crazy, but without them you will find that your life seems to have no colour.

As parents, we try our best to help them grow and that help us grow as well. I hope that every sapling can produce unique words. Like the little prince and his roses, we are the only one for each other.