Last night at dinnertime, my kid had an emotional outburst because — horror of horrors — her fish sticks would not stay on her fork. My advice to pick them up with her hands was unacceptable. Our feeding her bites once we managed to get some on the fork was also unacceptable. In the end she got frustrated enough that she fled from the table and ran upstairs to sob on her bed. How dare those dastardly fish sticks not cooperate?! Madness, I tell you!

When she and I talked through her feelings, we first talked about how the fish not staying on the fork was a problem that had solutions, which were, namely, that she use her hands to eat or that we help her with the fork. I then acknowledged that she was experiencing some big feelings about this problem, but, not all problems are big.

This is a difficult thing for people to process (that’s right, people, not just children but adults too). How to regulate our emotions so that they appropriately fit the size of the situation is a skill of lifelong development, and many many adults never really become proficient with it. When you have adults without proficiency in self-regulation, who then have the added challenge of raising children with even less proficiency because it’s all entirely brand-new to them…whew, baby, that’s about as frustrating as…well, as trying to stab uncooperative food with your fork at dinnertime. It just doesn’t work, and the more you try to force it, the more the food (feelings) get mashed up and the more impossible your endgame becomes.

This may not work for all children (or adults), but what I have found to be helpful with my daughter is to try to make these intangible ideas a little more tangible. If she has a way to represent in her mind everything she’s experiencing in her body, she’s got a better chance of making sense of it. We can’t say, “oh, look, that’s frustration” in the same way we can say, “oh, look, that’s a red block” during playtime. But we can lean into the concepts they’ve learned to help associate feelings with ways to handle them. Here’s what I told her last night:

Most problems are small problems. They can fit on the tip of your nose. Once we consider how to solve the small problem, once we talk through it, we can take a tissue and blow that problem away, right off our nose! Occasionally though, we have bigger problems. A bigger problem might require more action than just talking through it; we should talk through it, but also maybe we need to do something more physical to work out our feelings, like singing or screaming or jumping or going out for a walk or playing basketball. And so, we slip the bigger problems on our feet, like shoes, so we can walk them out.

Fortunately, this metaphysical, metaphorical representation of how to handle feelings and problems seemed to really work for my kid, who sometimes asks now to talk about feelings because she’s actively trying to make sense of her world. I hope it helps others to do the same.

As for the fish problem last night, we came up with two solutions. One was that she would try our suggestion of using her hands next time if needed; the other was that I should buy the other brand I used to buy, which apparently stays on the fork much better. Touché!