The key to figuring out and making sense of kids starts with understanding their feelings. This is rarely straightforward, especially when their feelings are complex and based on their own misperceptions of what’s going on around them.

Because kids often can’t tell us how they feel—either because they don’t know what they’re feeling or they’re developmentally unable to describe it with their words—they act out their big feelings with big (i.e., challenging) behaviors.

If we can 1) understand the feelings that are driving these behaviors, and 2) name those feelings for our kids, the challenging behaviors tend to disappear.

The key to all this (and the hard part) is deciphering what exactly our child is feeling.

This is what child therapists face every day, and we have techniques that help us figure out kids.........

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