Welcome to Connections

Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent.

Kia ora Reader

Back in my teaching days I once had a 7 year old tell me that someone had called him the “N word.” Feeling slightly concerned (after all I’m way older than this boy and in my mind the “N word” is so not great it’s rarely heard - thankfully!), and thinking it best to check in I asked him, “What’s the n word?” His reply left me reminding myself to tweak his phonics knowledge … it turns out the dreaded “n word” was “narsehole” 😂

I also checked in with him as to how he was feeling about this word and it turns out he wasn’t bothered, just thought I should know.

It’s a bit like that with our adolescents - they’d like us to know how they’re feeling. The ‘e word’ is a thing. And for those of us who have been brought up to not talk about our emotions, sometimes it’s hard to notice that’s a conversation we could have, much less manage the conversation.

For those of us who want to venture into uncharted parenting territory, here’s a bunch of super handy questions to have lying around somewhere visible that you can use as prompts while you’re having the chat:

• How do you feel?
• Can you name this emotion?
• What triggered this feeling?
• Is this a familiar feeling?
• When did you last feel like this?
• When is the earliest time you remember feeling like this?

Well done noticing that the second bullet point asks about emotions while all the other bullet points ask about feelings. That’s intentional because an emotion is something that pops up, often unbidden and it will be usually one of 4 different emotions that show up in your body first. The four core emotions are:

Mad 😖

Sad ☹️

Glad 😊

Scared 😦

Our bodies code these emotions differently and therefore they feel differently in our bodies. For beginners, it’s really handy to explore the physiological responses that come up when different emotions are prompted.

It’s so interesting! Pause a moment and think about how your own body reacts to these core emotions. Do your fists involuntarily tighten when you’re mad? Do you have a pit in your stomach when you’re scared? Ever noticed a heaviness in your shoulders when you’re sad, or a lightness in your heart when you’re glad?

These emotions are fleeting and it’s so worth taking the time to notice and be comfortable with your body’s initial reaction - it’s not called a ‘gut reaction’ for nothing!

Feelings are what happens when our minds take over. They notice the body’s reactions and begin putting labels onto the emotions. Every feeling can be traced back to an emotion so these four core emotions are the perfect starting point for pulling out a wide range of feelings.

Dig into these prompts, use them with love and see what gems they turn up in a conversation for you.

Kia pai tō wiki ... have a great week

Melanie

PS: These questions are brilliant for you too - just replace 'you' with 'I' and you've got the perfect prompts for any reflective thinking you may be wanting to do.

Melanie Medland is a communication coach, an author, and a course creator.​

More at www.beautifulconversations.co.nz​

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