Dr. Kristen (00:00):

It’s important that people are willing to go there and not be afraid that emotions are these dangerous things, right? Our emotions are so adaptive and they evolved for a reason to help us navigate the world. They tell us when something is right and when something is wrong, but yeah, I definitely understand that particularly in kids who are strongly feeling kids who have maybe gotten in trouble for being strongly, feeling kids, they sometimes just want to suppress and not talk about emotions at all.

Dr. Sarah (00:43):

I am so excited for today’s episode because we are diving into the science behind something that every parent deals with on a daily basis, big emotions. Joining me is Dr. Kristen Lindquist, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Ohio State University whose research focuses on how we develop emotional awareness and regulation across the lifespan from babies to adolescents, and even through adult transitions like mires and menopause. Kristen’s work helps us understand how our brains and bodies process feelings and what actually helps us make sense of them. This conversation you’re about to hear is packed with practical science-backed insights that can really shift the way you approach emotional moments with your child. We’ll talk about why trying to label your child’s emotions in the middle of a meltdown might backfire. How to use play and everyday conversations to build emotional intelligence and why the moments before and after a dysregulated episode are where the real learning happens. So whether you’ve got a toddler who tantrums or a sensitive big kid who shuts down this episode will help you feel more confident and connected as you support their emotional development.

(02:02):

Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights so you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.

(02:31):

If you are interested in learning how to strengthen your child’s emotion regulation abilities, you are going to love today’s securely attached podcast interview. But before we get into it, I wanted to let you know about a completely free guide that I created to help you build those vital emotion regulation skills through an avenue that is most impactful for learning play. This guide is filled with playful connection based games for kids of all ages that are designed to support your child’s developing brain and nervous system. These activities are simple, fun, and most importantly, backed by science. So they actually work helping your child build the emotional wiring they need to be able to calm their body and grow their resilience over time. You can grab the link to download the guide right in the episode description or head to drsarahbren.com/games to get it sent straight to your inbox. Okay, now let’s get started with this week’s interview.

(03:37):

Hello everyone. Welcome back. We have Dr. Kristen Lindquist here. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Dr. Kristen (03:43):

Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here.

Dr. Sarah (03:45):

Yeah. So before we hit record, I was totally nerding out with you on some neuroscience, but you have done some incredible research on emotions and in children and adults, and I’m very curious if you could share a little bit with our audience, kind of an overview of how you got into this type of research and what piqued your interest about the kinds of things you’ve studied and what’s kind of, what are some of the highlights of that have directed your research over the years?

Dr. Kristen (04:15):

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I sort of became an emotion scientist by accident. I thought I wanted to be a clinical psychologist, and so knew I had to get some research experience and found a lab that was doing research on emotion, and I thought, I don’t know, can you scientifically study emotion? But sounds like it would at least be some good training prior to going into clinical psychology. And then I just fell in love with experimental psychology and the fact that we could ask questions about the nature of people’s daily lives and where they came from and how they were influenced by the worlds that we live in. I had previously also considered going into biology, and so was sort of very interested in also how it is that our brains and our peripheral bodies and sort of the physiology that underlies our body might actually contribute to those experiences.

(05:23):

So over time, I also studied in neuroscience and physiology, and so sort of added those tools to my toolbox for understanding what emotions are and how they function. And then more recently, I’ve also become interested in not just how they sort of act as these static things in young adults once we’ve developed, but how it is that they emerge early on infancy and really shift and change throughout all of the human lifespan. So we’ve really started sort of studying them from womb to tomb, as we say in the lab. So we have studies that look as young as infants in some cases, and then all the way up to 85, even older if we can recruit folks that old.

Dr. Sarah (06:25):

Yeah, that’s so cool. Are you finding that there are very distinct developmental stages? I’m thinking adolescents, perhaps even rece that you might be studying to see if there are obviously early childhood would be the obvious ones too, but that there are real peaks in changes in development of emotion and language.

Dr. Kristen (06:51):

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it seems like there are some critical periods during the development of emotional processes. I mean, obviously infancy is a huge one when the whole brain is just so rapidly developing and early childhood is really a time when kids are sort of gaining their emotional repertoire and their understanding and their regulatory abilities, and so that’s really crucial. But yes, obviously adolescence is a huge one. The onset of puberty changes the entire neurobiology and the brain’s ability to even sort of predict what’s going on in the body as associated with that is the onset of all sorts of mental illnesses and mood disorders and so on, especially in girls, not to mention all of the social things that also happen around that time that can exacerbate things. And then, excuse me, I’m also becoming really interested in sort of midlife to older age has long been a somewhat ignored phase of emotional life, but there’s huge changes to our neurobiology as well as our social worlds. Again, during that particular phase of life, I’m particularly really interested in perimenopause and menopause in roughly half the population that has long gone understudied how that impacts health and wellness.

Dr. Sarah (08:28):

Oh, that’s really interesting. We’ve actually been planning on doing a number of perimenopause related episodes, so I might have to have you come back and talk to us about some of that research because that would be super interesting. And I’m curious too, does Metres essence come up in your world as well? I feel that is also, I feel like, and maybe it’s a product of more women being in these fields and having an interest in our own development and biology and biochemistry and actually tracking our own patterns instead of it being so male-centric. But childbearing years being an actual developmental change in the brain, in the body, and then the sort of end of the childbearing years, and it’s going to that perimenopause through menopause shift again, massive restructuring.

Dr. Kristen (09:18):

Yeah, I mean in general, women’s health has been so ignored and we don’t understand a lot, although in recent years there has been really interesting work looking at, as you said, how it is that a woman’s brain is actually changing as a product of pregnancy and postpartum and so on. So that’s obviously really interesting as well and has huge shifts on people’s emotional lives. But even some of the brain structures that change in pregnancy are those that are associated with empathy and social cognition and really having connections with your offspring. And so it’s fascinating to think about how the biology could precede some of these changes in the psychology.

Dr. Sarah (10:12):

Yeah, I mean think to me, I hear that as fairly compelling indication that attachment science is so hardwired. We basically are, our biology just evolutionarily has adapted to shift into increased capacity for attachment connection.

Dr. Kristen (10:32):

Absolutely.

Dr. Sarah (10:33):

As we raise a child.

Dr. Kristen (10:37):

Yeah, I mean, I think some scientists would say that was mammals great adaptation, right?

Dr. Sarah (10:43):

Yeah. We’re not the only, we are not the only species that attaches. Yes, exactly. It’s very important process across multiple species. It’s so interesting. So going back, I want to go back to some of maybe more practically and day-to-day life. When you’re studying, I mean, you have kids, I think you have kids.

Dr. Kristen (11:09):

I do have kids, yeah.

Dr. Sarah (11:10):

Close to the same age as my kids. Actually, my kids are six and seven and a half.

Dr. Kristen (11:16):

Okay. Yep, yep. I have an almost 6-year-old and an eight and a half year old.

Dr. Sarah (11:21):

So we know this firsthand, but there is, we can get into the science and we could think about the theory, and I wouldn’t mind picking your brain a little bit about really understanding the neuroscience of their development of emotional capacity because I like, if I want to know how to get, how do something, I kind of want to know why that works.

Dr. Kristen (11:44):

Absolutely.

Dr. Sarah (11:44):

But if we’re trying, I mean, how many moms are listening or parents that are listening are like, I clicked on this episode because I really want to understand how to support my child in becoming more fluent in their emotional experience so that they maybe are able to talk to me about what’s upsetting them instead of showing me by exploding it out at me and lava. What do you find in your research has been the building blocks of that emotional regulation capacity? What helps, what’s going to happen automatically? What do we need to support a little bit?

Dr. Kristen (12:24):

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’m super happy to get into the nitty gritty neurobiology for folks who are interested because the neurobiology is kind of like the hardware. It is what can the system do? But you have to sort of help with the software and as kids are developing, the hardware is developing, but the software actually helps it along. So we can get more into all of the nitty gritty neuroscience if you want to, but I agree probably most parents are like, what can I do to help my kid? So as kids are developing, we have learned that their emotions go from very sort of broad to more differentiated as they are learning more about themselves, learning more about the world and so on. And so you can think about this starting as early as being a newborn, where they are born into a world of, I think Alison Gonick called it blooming buzzing confusion.

(13:44):

They have never seen the world outside, and they’re seeing light and hearing noise in new ways that they didn’t when they were inside the womb. I mean, they did, but it was different. And so their brain is trying to make meaning of that. It’s trying to make meaning of their own internal sensations, so feeling cold or too hot or hungry or discomfort. And so they at such an early age, are really sort of emoting to you that they feel distress or everything is copacetic, right? I’m cozy and fed and sleepy things are great, or I am the opposite of those things. And as their brain is developing, it is learning to predict the meaning of its own internal states better. So everyone with a toddler has had an experience where your kid’s losing their mind and they don’t realize it’s because they’re right. So at some point they’re learning to understand that internal sensation is hunger, but they don’t quite get that right away.

(14:59):

And parents are very adept at helping with them with that, or it’s time to take a nap because you’re losing it, and they don’t know themselves like, oh, this is sleepiness. I should probably go and have a rest. And so there’s all these ways in which the brain is really learning how to predict the meaning of its own internal sensations as they exist in the world around you. And emotions are much the same way. So when a infant who is mobile encounters something and can’t get the toy that they want, and they feel frustrated, they are learning that they can actually enact change on the world, but that sometimes they don’t get what they want in return. And that’s a very frustrating experience, but they don’t necessarily know what that means, how to avoid it in the future, how to regulate it. And this is where parents come in and help to actually shape some of the meaning and some of the reactions to those experiences. So there is a lot of evidence that parents who in that situation where the toddler is frustrated, say, Hey, are you feeling mad? What can we do about that are actually producing kids who in the long run are going to have better regulated experiences, more discreet emotional experiences, be able to tell the difference between different emotions better and act in a more appropriate way for the context?

Dr. Sarah (16:41):

Well, yeah, because what I think what ultimately ends up happening, and correct me if I’m wrong, but when the parent is helping the child name their experience, and sometimes you could do this with words, and I know that a lot of your research is on actual language, so you saying, oh, you are mad. But I think I would imagine, I feel like you could do it a lot too with nonverbal cues. I know. I think also a lot of times kids when they are really frustrated, too much words is just noise. And so marking that, mirroring that, and if you can put language even better, but only if they can hear you and tolerate it.

Dr. Kristen (17:27):

Exactly.

Dr. Sarah (17:28):

What we’re doing though in those moments is helping them create, the way I often will describe it is you are creating book cases, but then a child can go put a book on next time, a way to organize these experiences that the child can then keep that organization and return it on their own when you’re not there.

Dr. Kristen (17:52):

Exactly. I love that metaphor. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (17:55):

Okay.

Dr. Kristen (17:55):

Yeah. And you’re right, we don’t always do it with explicit labeling. In fact, that would be really annoying in daily life. We just walked around labeling everybody’s feelings. But yes, there’s ways in which we are engaging in nonverbals or even just helping with the situation coming and saying, oh, is that toy stuck? Let’s get it unstuck. And that will make you feel better that you are helping to structure those bookcases that yes, then the kid has this cognitive repertoire that they can apply in the future. It’s also the case that while in the moment it might not be helpful to use the label or try to logic it out. You can when the kid is calm, developmentally appropriate, discuss the situation. So people, parents who discuss sort of the causes and consequences of emotions with their children a lot, again, have kids who grow up to have this really sort of rich emotional intelligence that in turn benefits their psychology and their academics and their wellbeing and all these positive outcomes.

Dr. Sarah (19:13):

Yeah, that’s actually a really helpful distinction, I think. And I’m curious if there’s research that says that trying to communicate the emotion verbally to your kid in the moment versus doing it in calm, connected later moments might be more beneficial. Are they finding that Because I find parents, understandably, who are now inundated with a lot of these sort of parenting strategies, they’re just constantly getting, and they’re always sort of reduced to a soundbite. We’re all told, you’ve got to validate your child’s experience, you’ve got to validate their emotions. This is how you build emotional intelligence. And I do not disagree with that, but I think there’s some nuance to it, and I think there’s some timing to it that often gets lost in what parents are actually getting taught. Can you talk a little bit about that? I have lots of thoughts on that.

Dr. Kristen (20:13):

Yeah. I also have lots of thoughts, but more as a mom than as a scientist.

Dr. Sarah (20:18):

Oh, yeah.

Dr. Kristen (20:19):

Yes. So the research that I am referring to actually is not looking in the moment with kids. So this is research that is using CBRA of parent directed speech or parent-child conversation. So this is hanging out with your kid, chatting in the car after pickup, or in the cases of some of these studies, you come into the lab and you’re just having a conversation. And so it’s not in the heat of the moment, it is conversing with your kid, and it’s the parents who in those moments are using these sort of socio-emotional concepts and using them in a nuanced way and referring to the causes and consequences of emotion or referring to comments about internal states. So all these things that sort of make up the feature space of what emotions are that have children who longitudinally. So over time go on to have kids who possess more emotion knowledge so they can sort of repeat that back.

(21:29):

In some ways, that’s not that surprising, but good to know that they’re retaining it. They are more adept to understanding emotions on other people’s faces and in other people’s behavior. And we have some recent evidence that for kids who have more nuanced understanding of different emotion concepts, so anger, love, sadness, disgust, et cetera, these kids are actually rated by their parents offline in a totally different context as having better emotion regulation, as having more situationally appropriate emotions. They experience the right emotion in the right context, they can differentiate amongst their emotions more. So yes, it’s not necessarily in the moment. And in fact, in my own experience as a parent of a kid who has big feelings early on when she was younger, I’d seen the gentle parenting stuff and would be like, okay, let’s talk about it. Why are you feeling this way? And she was like, actually. And so I actually learned very quickly and using some great psychology resources, but for her, actually in the heat of the moment, what was better was for her to have a timeout, not to punish, but a timeout, to calm down

Dr. Sarah (23:07):

A break.

Dr. Kristen (23:08):

Yeah. Let it run its course. And to this day, she can speak very articulately about what she was feeling after she’s done, but in the heat of the moment, it’s hard. And it’s the same for adults, right? There is evidence that during very high intensity emotions, even adults have a hard time differentiating what they’re feeling, or at least they’re worse at it than they are when they’re experiencing lower intensity emotions. So everybody experiences it.

Dr. Sarah (23:40):

Right? Well, if you think about it, when we’re flooded with an emotion, our prefrontal cortex, the thinking brain is offline. And if that’s what we use to organize our felt experience into language that makes sense to us and to someone else, we really need to have that part of our brain on. And so I think sometimes we have really unrealistic expectations of even adults, but also certainly kids, that when they are flooded with emotion that they can hear not only that we expect them to use their own words, that’s quite a lofty expectation, but that they can even take in our words when they’re 10 out of 10, it’s a pretty good chance that we are noise, just stimulus noise undifferentiated to them. And it can actually be, I would imagine I’ve seen it with my own kids, that that’s actually overstimulating and adding gasoline on their fire, even if the words are intended to be validating, soothing, supportive. I feel a lot of parents get confused by that.

Dr. Kristen (24:54):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (24:55):

It’s perplexing in the moment. I’m trying to help you and you’re screaming at me louder. I’m trying to touch you and soothe you, and you’re kicking at me.

Dr. Kristen (25:02):

Yes, yes. And actually what’s interesting about having multiple kids is that they’re totally different, right? Totally. Despite what the science says, everybody is so unique. And so what I have found there, which I think makes sense based on the science, is that different kids may need different things in that context. And so you may want to give your kid a hug, but for them they’re like, touching me feels like fire on my skin right now. And yet for another kid that soothing touch may be exactly what they need. And if you were to give them a break and take away all their stimulation, they would be like, oh my God, this is terrible. Now you’ve separated me and left me by my lonesome. So I think yes, figuring out maybe offline when you’re not in the heat of the moment, what sort of things would make it better? What very low level things would make it better?

Dr. Sarah (26:01):

When I do work with parents, I do a lot of parenting support and I work with a lot of parents who have very explosive kids. And one of the things I always do with them is have them map out their child’s, I call it their sort of regulation thermometer and their preferences for being regulated co-regulate within those different moments. And when my kid is at a five, I have a lot of things that I can use to co-regulate with her that match her needs in that moment. When my kid is at a seven, it’s much more limited. And when she’s at a 10, there’s probably about one or two things that I can do to support her in that moment. And mostly it’s just keep her from hurting herself or somebody else or damaging something and just kind of like let’s triage and get out of, let the wave go all the way through. And then talking in that moment is bad choice. On my part, it doesn’t help at all. But that took some practice and some figuring it out. But when I help parents kind of recognize, and you could do this with two kids at the same family and it will look completely different, it’s completely individualized. It has to be individualized to their brain. Nervous system, sensory preferences.

Dr. Kristen (27:30):

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. What a great tolerance. I laughed a little bit because when my eldest was young, I drew a very bad feeling thermometer, and we used it, and then she’s subsequently decorated it and made the people on the side have exploding faces.

Dr. Sarah (27:47):

That’s awesome. But that was done after, right, outside.

Dr. Kristen (27:51):

Oh yeah.

Dr. Sarah (27:57):

Hey, jumping in one last time, because we just talked about a lot of really useful strategies for parenting sensitive, spicy or more explosive kids, like mapping out their regulation and knowing not just how but when to use different tools and techniques. And if you’ve ever felt like you’ve tried everything, timeouts scripts, deep breaths, and nothing actually helps in those heated moments, I want to tell you about Parenting by Design, my guided program for increasing behavioral and emotional regulation in sensitive kids. In this program, I’ll walk you through exactly how to move beyond the one size fits all parenting hacks and instead, customize your approach to your child’s unique brain, body and temperament, which could be a total game changer when nothing else seems to work. It’s the same approach I use in my clinical work with families to help bring more calm connection and confidence into their homes. And now it’s available for you to learn on your own schedule. You can find the link in the episode description or go to drsarahbren.com/parentingbydesign to join and start today. That’s dr sarah bren.com/parenting by design. Alright, back to the episode.

(29:13):

Another thing I will always say to people when I’m trying to describe when is the best time to teach a kid not to do something destructive or help them learn more about their emotions, is if you think about a timeline of an explosive event, think about before, during, and after. If you were to take that line and just turn it into a circle, the before and the after touch, right? Your before is right, before all the after stuff turns into the next, before the next explosion, right?

Dr. Kristen (29:58):

Right. Exactly.

Dr. Sarah (30:00):

What I often find is that parents, I think we’re getting better at not doing as much intervention in the jury,

(30:09):

But I still think parents are very compelled to parent to teach in the jury. Teaching in the jury really doesn’t do a whole lot of utility. I think parents are moving more towards teaching in the after, right? That’s debriefing, right? Oh, hey, let me help you connect the dots. Let me help you make sense of why were you so mad? What happened that you got so upset that you smacked your sister? Or what was going on before that happened? What were you trying to do? What could you do differently? Here’s where I might teach. Oh, you can totally scream that you’re mad, but you can’t hit. If you feel that way and you want to hit next time, what could you do instead? That’s all after stuff, and that’s good. I think that’s a great place to start.

(31:02):

But where I think is actually the sweet spot of parenting that people totally do not appreciate and definitely under index in their parenting is before the next explosion different from the after. And that it’s not about tying it back to this event, which can also be super triggering for kids who are very sensitive to shame. They might just go right back to the during if we try to do too much after teaching, but the before is just about skill building and it’s unrelated to a prior challenging moment. And I feel like that’s a lot of what your research is talking about when it’s saying this is the evidence-based way to build motion regulation skills and kids over time is to really talk and build skills around language and emotion connections in the before.

Dr. Kristen (31:59):

Yes. Yes. And so instead of saying, remember that last time that we were at the pool and you lost it because of whatever you are saying, emotions in general work like this, right? So when we’re frustrated, we tend to feel this way, and what are some things that we can do to make ourselves less frustrated? So the last time that you were really frustrated in this situation, what could we do to help structure the situation better next time so that you don’t feel that way?

Dr. Sarah (32:37):

Yeah. Do you think that parents feel like they have skills or other strategies? I mean we’re talking kind of broadly. I think we all get the idea. Yeah, it’s good to teach your kids about emotions, but I also think kids, especially really sensitive kids who have had many experiences where their emotions just don’t feel good to them, and then they do stuff that then people get mad at them about. And this whole area of talking about emotions, talking about feelings for this subset of kids can just be something they really want to avoid. I have a lot of families where even in the before moments, their kids just shut down. They tune them out, they feel like they’re just not able to tolerate anything about emotions. What would be ways to start that feel maybe 1, 2, 3 steps removed that still are working on these neural connections in the emotion mind?

Dr. Kristen (33:34):

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really tricky. I think also there are parents who are reluctant to talk about emotions, right?

Dr. Sarah (33:40):

Oh yes. Like I don’t want to poke the bear when he’s calm.

Dr. Kristen (33:43):

Or they’re not comfortable with their own emotions. And so they come from a place where emotions are bad and dangerous, and there’s all this work on emotion beliefs and sort of how do you even approach the value of emotions in the first place? And so there is this sort of intergenerational phenomenon where people who have parents who are good at talking about emotions tend to be good at talking about emotions and then have children who they talk about emotions with and vice versa. So I think on both ends actually, it’s important that people are willing to go there and not be afraid that emotions are these dangerous things. Our emotions are so adaptive, and they evolved for a reason to help us navigate the world. They tell us when something is right and when something is wrong. But yeah, I definitely understand that particularly in kids who are strongly feeling kids who have maybe gotten in trouble for being strongly feeling kids. They sometimes just want to suppress and not talk about emotions at all. There’s probably some pretty standard gender differences in this as well.

(35:05):

We tend to socialize our girls, so both moms and dads talk to girls more about emotions than they do to boys from a very early age. We encourage boys to just suppress emotions, which turns out not to be a super great emotion regulation tool all the time. So I think finding avenues to have these conversations is key. And I don’t know that there’s a one size fits all. It could be reflecting on past experiences, but again, that can be shameful, that could be triggering. It could be reading books that have characters that experience strong emotions, that sort of normalizes experiencing strong emotions or using the book as a jumping off point for saying, what do you think that that character was feeling? Why did they behave that way? What do you think they could do next time? And then it’s actually not personal, but you’re engaging in the content in hopefully a compelling way.

Dr. Sarah (36:20):

Yeah. One of the things that I am thinking of as we’re talking is I think books is really useful. I think that’s one of the easiest entry points. But I also know there are some kids who that they’re like, I don’t want to read that. You have kids who are like, they got a HD diagnosis and their parents want to read them books about that. And they’re like, I don’t, or even not so on the nose, but just books where a kid is having an emotional experience. I do think the more 1, 2, 3 steps removed. So books with animal characters rather than people or where there are emotional exchanges happening in the book, but the book isn’t about that necessarily. So it can be, it’s just we can get some space and some distance and we titrate. We work our way up, so we start where it’s more peripheral and we expose and expose and expose in that space, and then can slowly bring it to a more direct place where we’re starting to introduce a book where it’s really about an emotion explicitly or there’s a resolution that’s talking about the emotion more explicitly.

(37:27):

And then we could just read that without tying it back to our child’s experience at all. And then again, titrate up a little bit more. And maybe we’re going to go, there is a book they look for an emotional exchange that happens in that book and then try to make that connection point for them. So we’re building their tolerance over time. And one other strategy that comes to mind is play. And I’m curious your thoughts on this because, and I think this is also, there’s some gender differences in this too, but I think I see it in boys and girls that when they are playing and they are aggressive in their play, if they’re, for example, if they’re smashing some trucks together and they’re saying it’s going to smash and crush you, and oh, I’m going to beat you up and bang, you bang. And then parents are like, oh, no, no, no, no. Wait, wait. Let’s be nice. Let’s make the trucks play nicely. We interrupt aggression in play. That is, and I’m talking about play aggression, that a child is working out through play, not I’m playing, and all of a sudden I get mad and I’m hitting you. Not aggression that breaks through the play, but aggression that truly is being played out inside the frame of play. We tend to interrupt that and shut that down and redirect it a lot. And I wonder if that’s actually doing a lot more harm than good.

Dr. Kristen (38:55):

Yeah. I mean, lots of developmental psychologists think that play is where kids are learning and exploring. And so I think if they’re engaging in emotional stuff while they’re playing in the context of their fake world, then great encourage it. You could even say, oh, why did that one truck smash the other truck? What happened? And you really start to engage them on causes and consequences and how did that other truck feel when it just got hit? And obviously you have to feel it out and see if they’re willing to go there.

Dr. Sarah (39:40):

Well, I think there’s the middle of the bell curve. Kids are going to totally tolerate that, although I’d be mindful of not interrupting the play with these reflective comments in the moment, but those sensitive kids, if you try to do that, you’re going to just kind of throw a grenade on the play. My thought would be in that moment to join in the play, to do the exploring, to do the labeling. So if the child’s smashing the cars together, grab a third car and be like, oh, someone got into a smash accident. I got to come and see what’s going on. Oh, are you what you see mad car? And see if they can engage with you as the characters. So you, again, you are not pulling, you’re not popping the bubble. It’s the popping the bubble and having these direct conversations about language that a lot kids struggle to tolerate. But if you stay inside the bubble of the play, they are in motion. And if you can keep them in that motion, they will likely go with you. And so I think that’s also a good place to stay if you have a kid who really doesn’t tolerate direct communication about emotions and you want to build up that kind of core slow exposure to it and increase their tolerance.

Dr. Kristen (41:05):

Yes, absolutely. It’s interesting. I remember reading a book on parenting when my kids were young, really young, and it’s like step one, engage in play with them. And I was like, hold up. Do you think I’m not nice to my kids? Let’s get to the meat of the issue here. I don’t want to deal with play stuff. And then I was like, I’m a psych, like, oh, the venue in which a lot of that attachment occurs and it’s a safe place. And also where you can start to, I mean, this is how kids work this stuff out, right?

Dr. Sarah (41:45):

Yeah. It’s where a lot of the learning takes place.

Dr. Kristen (41:47):

Exactly. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (41:48):

It’s a really safe place to learn constructs. But I also think, and I think your point is well taken. I don’t love playing with my kids and I don’t want parents to feel like, oh, another thing I have to do, I got to play with my kids and I know, but I don’t want to. And I’m like, I also want to give parents permission to say, you do not have to play with your kids all the time. Yes, I do think you are going to have to be playful with your kids, but if your goal, I’m just trying to help parents understand we have a grownup mind, and when we think about our goal is to teach our kids about emotion so they can build emotion regulation skills, we go to a grownup way of learning and we think of it as very direct. Like, okay, I’m going to teach this lesson and I’m going to help them make sense of it directly.

(42:40):

And what we have to remember is if our goal is to teach our kids something, we have to think about how do kids learn? And if they learn more comfortably and more accessibly in play, because play also, it hits a lot of the prerequisites for learning. It turns them on When they’re playing, their pre cortex is engaged, their threat response is off. You can’t have a threat response and be playing at the same time. They’re mutually exclusive. So by playing, you are regulating the body and the mind, you’re activating the parts of the brain that are needed for learning. And they’re present. They are present. They are fully engaged and mindfully available to the subject matter in their play. I want parents to understand, I’m not saying, oh, you’re only a good parent if you play with your kids. I’m saying, if your goal is to teach your kids something and you want to be the most effective at achieving that goal, stop thinking about it from the brain of a parent and figure out how to teach through the play and you will get your goal met so much more effectively. That’s where the before parenting interventions are magic.

Dr. Kristen (43:54):

Exactly. Yeah, I was going to say, you probably get much more bang for your buck in that five minutes of play than you do and trying to drone on about it to them later. I’m with you. Don’t love playing pretend, but if you can play, pretend for five minutes and actually engage with them, then probably worth it.

Dr. Sarah (44:17):

Yeah. Use your teaching budget bandwidth, because we tend to spend a lot of time trying to teach our kids, and we probably, if we thought about it, probably have some sort of emotional and mental budget for how much time and energy we’re going to spend teaching our kids. If you take that time and energy and you turn it into the time that you play with your kids and you could stop doing all the teaching part Exactly. You’re netting even. You’re still using up the same amount of energy.

Dr. Kristen (44:47):

Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Sarah (44:48):

And it’s probably having a bigger impact. So are there other things, I know some of your research, but are there things we haven’t yet discussed that you’ve discovered in researching emotions that might be interesting that you feel like, oh, if parents knew this piece, that would be a really useful missing piece to a puzzle that a lot of people are curious about or frustrated by?

Dr. Kristen (45:16):

Yeah, I mean certainly. Well, I think one thing that has become clear to me is that just because we have a sense of what our kid is feeling doesn’t mean that they have a sense of what they’re feeling. So that was huge. Another piece that is maybe sort of talked about in the validation conversations, but that has been important for me. Again, it is so hard to regulate in the moment, and I think deeply feeling kids especially are often getting the message that they’re too much, it’s too much what they’re feeling is wrong. And even just recognizing regardless of what you’re feeling and whether it’s appropriate in this context or not, you are very distressed by this right now, and I can have real empathy for that, and we’ll work on it later to make it such that you can have more appropriate responses and we’ll talk about what’s appropriate and what’s not. But yeah, just recognizing their distress I think is huge.

(46:36):

The other thing that I don’t know if this is interesting to talk about, but something else that we research that’s separate from the sort of conceptual cognitive labeling and understanding piece is interception. And so that’s how people understand their internal states and have access to their internal states. And one thing that is interesting to me is that it does seem that there are just people who are completely unaware of anything that’s going on inside their body. And that really is such an important prerequisite for being able to understand and label your emotions and regulate ’em. And obviously kids are developing that skill, but as adults, there are people who are very good and people who are very poor at understanding internal sensations and detecting. And so I think also thinking about ways that you can get kids in touch with their bodies and their internal states, and it doesn’t have to be about emotion per se. It could be knowing you’re hungry, knowing you’re fatigued, engaging in actual physical activity and knowing what your muscles feel like. All of that is such an important precursor for even beginning to know what your emotions are because that all feeds into your emotions.

Dr. Sarah (48:14):

That’s so true. I feel like, and I see this a lot, and even I fall into this a little bit sometimes where we get kind of cognitive with our teaching our kids about emotions, and so we go right to words and labeling it and intellectually engaging with our kids about their emotions, but dropping it down into the body is like, that’s step one. And we skip over that sometimes. So it’s like if your kid is really upset or even just really excited about something, it could be anything that’s an intense emotional experience, and we want to go to this sort of thinking place with them.

(48:52):

Oh, you’re feeling this, or This happened because of this and this and this. We’re pulling them out of their body into their head. We might inadvertently be training them to, when they have an emotional experience, to go right up to the brain and the mind, like the thinking cognition, and instead, take a beat. Feel what it is you feel what they feel. Notice it in your body. That’s why I was saying the reflecting emotions back to kids with the nonverbal stuff, the Oh my. Oh, I know. Oh yeah. Those visceral more experiential communications of like, I see you, I can feel it too. Oh my gosh, no. That is probably helping with interoception awareness.

Dr. Kristen (49:41):

Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Sarah (49:42):

Not just helping them go straight to the mind. I feel like we forget to do that a lot. I mean, I think our society has trained all of us to not do that, and we’re having to unlearn that now.

Dr. Kristen (49:54):

Yes, absolutely. And the less that we go out in the world and do real things and it’s all just mediated by media and so on, probably the more so right, that we just are not going to be embodied to the same extent.

Dr. Sarah (50:14):

There’s so many interesting things to think about, and I really am grateful for you coming on and sharing these really interesting stories about your research. Thank you so much. If people want to follow your work, read some of your research articles, where can we connect them to you?

Dr. Kristen (50:31):

Yeah, so all of my work is on my website, kristenalindquist.com, and then you can also find me in my lab at the Ohio State University Psychology department.

Dr. Sarah (50:45):

Amazing. And what are you working on? What’s coming out next?

Dr. Kristen (50:49):

Yeah, well, I mean, we are continuing to do all of this stuff across the lifespan. So looking at kids, and actually we have some work in adolescents looking at their interception, so relationships between parents’, interceptive abilities and their kids’ intercept abilities and how those may be related. And then we also have work at the other end of the lifespan where we are understanding how it is that changes to your body and your peripheral nervous system and your brain with age are sort of preceding some of the shifts that we see in emotion in later life. So lots of work on sort of the interplay of biology and the world around us and development and how that all is creating emotions in our health and wellness.

Dr. Sarah (51:45):

That’s so great. I’m excited to keep reading what you put out and thank you so much for coming on.

Dr. Kristen (51:50):

Yeah, yeah. It was great to chat with you.

Dr. Sarah (51:58):

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