Emotional Children

[It was a dear friend's pink birthday party. She's three. And one of Eas's best friends. He couldn't not participate... and I think he looks rather dashing in pink. Although, the headband might be a bit much.]

While I'm on a parenting jag (Can we all tell that the two main things I invest my time in these days are children and food?), I thought I'd mention the following.

My daughter (the one on the right...;P ) is emotional. What does that mean? Well, we probably shouldn't use that term, because really we're all emotional. I have emotions and so does Paul - even Collins has emotions, although sometimes I wonder.

Obviously, we all do (well, maybe not Dexter, my favorite psychopath, but you get it...). God gave them to us. On purpose.

Because really, emotions aren't the problem - much like our appetites for food, drink and sex, etc. There is nothing wrong with the fact that we want things - it's the way we control that desire that matters.

Ada Brooks has emotions in spades. She's got good ones and bad ones - but they're all strong ones, and she doesn't always know how to control them.

Anyway, that's our biggest struggle with Ada Brooks - enabling her to control her emotions so that she doesn't feel out of control, and consequently act out of control.

She used to break down, regularly, over the color of her socks.

She still sometimes cries when she cannot do a math problem as fast she herself thinks she should. And heaven help us if her letters don't look like she imagined them in her head (because her hands aren't able yet to produce letters that look like they're 'supposed to.')

She's intense. And we don't want to quash that. But if we let it run wild, well, I don't want to see what that looks like. Actually, I've seen it. It ain't pretty.

And that's a hard, hard balance to strike.

And one of my favorite blogs today had a post about this, which I thought was just beautiful.

So I thought I'd share. Here ya go - for parents of girls or boys (although this article is talking about girls, who are more prone to this stuff, I've known plenty of emotionally out of control young boys... and grown men - and they need the help controlling even more sometimes, because no one tolerates an 'emotional' man, while 'emotional' women are tolerated...too much).