Emotional Peaks & Troughs

I saw a question posed recently on Twitter asking whether you would prefer to live the rest of your life with double your emotional range or half of it. The highs yet more Olympian or the yawning chasms rendered gentle dips? 

If you’re able or willing to live your life on an emotional even keel it obviously wouldn’t make much difference if the range available to you was much bigger or smaller. But for those condemned to or desirous of living life at its edges it’s a genuinely interesting question.

How much control do we have over our emotions anyway? When you see two drivers, complete strangers to each other, squaring up over a minor roadway squabble or a friend mooning calf-like over a new partner it can seem that the answer is not much. Certainly some seem to have a greater facility for self-control. Resolutely not losing their heads when all around absolutely are. But if you were five years old with a grazed knee are they the ones you would go to for hugs and consolation? 

One thing I know for certain is that if you asked most parents whether they would like their small children to have a doubled or halved emotional range you would have to wait for their hysterical laughter to subside before getting a pretty unequivocal response. Imagine the Terrible Twos to the power of two!

It’s a pretty trite observation that small children are what might euphemistically be described as ‘naturalistic’ in exhibiting their emotional range. And, in my opinion, a 3 year old that has learnt to keep its emotions strictly in check is somebody I would want Social Services checking out pdq. 

While my children slowly (sometimes very slowly) evolve out of unconstrained emotional display I have realised that this is one of the aspects of parenting I find most interesting. What is the dividing line between rearing deplorable man babies unable to get a grip in the face of life’s most inconsequential obstacles and emotionally constipated furled umbrellas unable to tell their wives they love them even on their wedding days? 

As with most things parenting only time will tell. But it’s telling isn’t it that ‘If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands’ doesn’t have a second verse ‘If you’re a gloomy and you know it cry your eyes’ or a third ‘If you’re livid and you know it ball your fists’. The one emotion we’re encouraged never to self-regulate is happiness. 

One thing I am confident of is that we have words for a reason and while you can’t always and should not strive to reason emotions away words are the way to understand better what lies behind emotions. The unhappy truth is that children are often condemned or criticised for their emotions because their emotions are either inconvenient or uncomfortable for the adults around them. 

Sometimes discerning what has prompted an emotion is plain as day. Hunger, tiredness and boredom will all make themselves unmistakably known. However fear, shame and embarrassment often have causes well out of sight and can trigger curious or even counter-intuitive emotional responses. 

Whether your child’s emotional range is as high as the Himalayas and low as the Mariana Trench or it’s more Scafell Pike and Ullswater it is one of the chief responsibilities and privileges of parenting to become familiar with every gradation and to learn how to help your child comfortably and confidently ascend or descend the scale as the occasion demands.