What are you saying?

Parents can easily feel overwhelmed when children say things such as, “I wish I was dead,” “I hate my sister,” or “I’m going to kill you.” These words can easily arouse feelings of terror, rage, worry, and helplessness in us.

We often punish children for using these words, demand they stop talking like this, coax them to speak more nicely, or tell them what they really intend to say (“We don’t use the word ‘hate’ in our family… You don’t mean that… You love your sister… Go to your room until you can talk decently.”) Or we leap into high gear, insisting with our own overloaded emotions that they tell us exactly what they mean and why they are saying that.

These responses can’t reach a child who is in such an overloaded state, and our own emotional flooding is likely to increase the child’s emotional pressure. Then they may dig in and keep repeating the words that had such a dramatic impact. We, in turn, may panic and react as if our child is at serious risk for suicide or homicide.

That is seldom the case.

In young children, this type of language is almost always an........

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