Is Your Child Emotionally Reactive?
Emotional reactivity means your child needs help coping with stress and anxiety
Happy New Year! I hope you and your family are doing well!
Just a personal update: I live in Santa Monica and am a Los Angeles native, so most of my family and friends live here. We’re stressed but safe. I’m grateful for everyone keeping us in their thoughts.
When a child struggles with anxiety, an eating disorder, body image issues, or other mental health conditions, we often find ourselves stuck in cycles of emotional reactivity. It looks something like this:
➡️ Your child gets frustrated, angry, anxious, or scared, and completely loses it.
➡️ You try to stay calm, reasonable, and centered. When you try to calm them down, they escalate and become harder to reason with.
➡️ You do the best you can but eventually lose your temper because your child’s behavior is out of control and you worry they’ll never learn to regulate their emotions.
➡️ You both feel bad. But then it happens all over again …
It’s an endless hamster wheel. You’re trying so hard, but nothing seems to help.
Maybe you’re starting to feel hopeless and doing late-night Google searches for answers to questions like “What if my child never gets better?” and “If my best efforts don’t work, what can I do?”
Emotional reactivity is when there’s no space between impulse and reaction. The minute your child experiences, thinks, or feels something, they react quickly and intensely. They instantly go into a flight, fight, freeze, or fawn response.
A child with high emotional reactivity has immediate, intense, and excessive reactions to minor inconveniences and everyday challenges. This might look like lashing out when they don’t get the meal they expected or you ask them to put on a coat before going outside, or longer-term worries like gaining weight, getting a certain grade, or making the team.
Look, emotions are an essential part of being alive. We don’t expect our kids to be flat, passive stones. But some kids are spicier and their emotions feel completely over the top. It’s exhausting to live with someone who is emotionally reactive.
Here are five symptoms of emotional reactivity:
Yelling and screaming
Stomping, slamming, throwing, pinching, hitting
Saying hurtful things they later regret
Dominating and talking over others
Accusing and blaming others
With emotional reactivity, emotions seem over-the-top and don’t align with what’s happening. Emotional reactivity is the opposite of emotional regulation, which is the ability to regulate and modulate emotions.
Your child (and everyone else in your home) would be more comfortable if they had more emotional regulation and less emotional reactivity. But what to do about it?
Here are two things I tell my clients who are facing this:
Emotional reactivity is based on genetic temperament. Some people are born more emotionally reactive, others less so.
Emotional regulation is like a muscle. Even if we are genetically primed for higher reactivity, we can build emotional regulation muscles.
The best news is that you can help your child build emotional regulation muscles and become less emotionally reactive. Some kids will always be faster to react and struggle more with emotional regulation. But even highly reactive kids can build emotional regulation skills.
It may sound complicated, but it’s not that different from teaching your child their ABCs or how to ride a bike.
Emotional reactivity is rooted in genetics but is shaped by the environment, especially parental behavior. When you practice and model emotional regulation with your child, you will see improvements in their mental well-being and behavior.
They’ll start to feel better … and so will you!
You can help your child develop emotional regulation skills and build the strength to pause between impulse and reaction. If you’re like me, you may need to begin with yourself.
I was very emotionally reactive and struggled to cope when my child lost it. This led to painful tantrums and power struggles that left us feeling bad about ourselves and each other.
With coaching and practice, I built my emotional regulation muscles, and we’ve both learned to manage our inborn emotional reactivity. Not perfectly, because we’re human, not robots. Also, genetics mean we’re both spicier than your average person😂. But the beauty is that practice, not perfect, is all it takes.
Let me know if you’d like some help getting started!
Ginny Jones Parent Coach / More-Love.org
GUIDE + WORKBOOK: Reducing Emotional Reactivity
Help your child when their reactions feel over-the-top and don’t align with what’s happening
This short guide and workbook gives you information about managing your child’s emotional reactivity. Building emotional regulation to reduce emotional reactivity is hard work, but it’s an important investment in your child’s recovery and will help them experience fewer and less intense emotional reactions over time.