What should I do if my child keeps crying? How should I discipline my crying child?

Many parents are at a loss when their children cry, and may even get upset and scold their children. Every time your child cries, have you tried to understand why he cries? And what can you do at this time?

Why do children cry?

Crying is an emotional release

Many parents get upset when they see their children crying. Some stop their children from crying, some sarcastically say "boys still have the nerve to cry", some scold "so squeamish, no future", some threaten "I won't like you if you cry again"... However, crying is a natural expression of human emotions. Even adults will cry when they suffer from a breakup, unemployment, etc., let alone weak children. Tears are not weakness, nor do they mean incompetence and retreat. Crying is a child's right and a means for them to express their emotions. Parents who are cruel and refuse to hug and cold-bloodedly refuse to comfort their children will not be able to "force" independence, but will instead leave a shadow on their children's hearts. "Don't cry", an excessive suppression of children's emotions, not only cannot help them correctly understand emotions, but also cannot help them learn to control emotions.

Parents who always express dissatisfaction with their children's crying will make their children think that their parents like them when they are well-behaved, and they will learn to hide their negative emotions. At the same time, they will form the impression that their parents are unreliable and cannot share their inner feelings unconditionally, which will lead to alienation between parents and children. Secondly, children will think that if their closest parents cannot accept their emotions, others will definitely dislike them even more. Over time, they will learn to suppress their emotions, which may lead to depression. Finally, bad emotions are like floods, which should be drained rather than blocked. If negative emotions are suppressed for a long time, children may adopt inappropriate ways to vent, such as beating, scolding, and throwing things.

Therefore, parents need to give their children the right to cry. It is helpful to remember four principles: when a child cries, first, do not interrupt him/her; second, do not rush to express your opinion; third, try to understand and communicate with him/her; fourth, use your actions to tell your child that you care about him/her, such as handing him/her a tissue or water.

Is a child’s crying due to his innate temperament or due to improper education?

For young children, crying is a way of communication. Their language expression is not fluent yet, and they often rely on crying to express their emotions and frustrations. Therefore, when children's language ability improves, they will cry less. However, if the child is still very fond of crying after that age, it needs to attract the attention of parents.

Generally speaking, there are two main reasons why children love to cry: one is the "congenital" type, which means that the child's innate temperament is sensitive and crybaby; the other is the "acquired" type, which means that the parents' family education methods are inappropriate. Let's analyze these two reasons in detail.

Children's crying habits caused by innate temperament

In terms of natural temperament, children with different temperaments have different performance types. Some children are very quiet, some are very active, some love to cry, and some can accept all kinds of changes...

Some children are born sensitive and crybaby, often lose their temper and complain about trivial matters. Even if there is nothing unpleasant, it is not easy to make them laugh. Sensitivity, like shyness, aggressiveness, and sociability, is a person's personality trait and is innate.

Sensitive children cry for many reasons, such as falling down, having a small cut on their knee, or having their toys taken away. Although they cry often, a sensitive child is not unhappy. They tend to care about other people's feelings, sympathize with others, have good observation skills, and can follow rules, which makes them useful throughout their lives.

Crying is not always a bad thing for sensitive children. They will feel better after crying. Some researchers have also found that people who cry are healthier emotionally and physically than those who don't cry, so don't think crying is a bad thing.

However, fear of failure and setbacks is the result of fear of difficulties and a manifestation of lack of self-confidence. When helpless, crying is used to solve the problem. This is a reflection of the negative emotional nature of infants and young children's temperament. When children with negative emotional nature encounter unpleasant things, they usually express it with negative emotions: such as crying, temper tantrums, etc. This is his personality tendency, but parents do not understand it, so they are likely to follow their children in throwing tantrums, resulting in frequent unpleasantness between parents and children, and they cannot teach calmly.

If your child's crying is caused by his or her temperament, parents can take the following measures to help alleviate it:

1. Parents should show understanding for the higher sensitivity of such children, because sensitive children do feel pain more strongly than other children, and it is not wise to forbid them to cry. Parents should use understanding, sympathy and encouragement to gradually make them stronger.

2. Children who lack self-esteem are sensitive and cry easily, so improving children's self-confidence and self-esteem will make them good at self-recognition and have a sense of accomplishment. You should not have too high expectations on your children and ask them to do things beyond their abilities.

3. Teach children to express their pain clearly through words rather than crying.

4. Don’t label these children as “sensitive and crybaby”, otherwise it will be difficult to remove the label later.

5. Children are very sensitive, so they are easily affected by adults' anxiety, tension, anger, depression and other emotions. Therefore, adults should relax and control their emotions so as not to affect children. If emotions are revealed, it is best to explain to children in a simple way immediately to prevent children from constantly guessing and aggravating their sensitivity.

Improper education methods lead to children crying

Generally speaking, children rarely cry after they are 3 years old. However, since 4-year-old children are more competitive, they often cry without warning. However, in order for children to grow up smoothly in the future, parents are better to let their children say goodbye to the "crying period" at the age of 4.

Toddlers with slower physical and mental development do cry more than their peers. It is useless to stop them from crying. There seems to be no other way except to wait patiently for them to grow up. On the other hand, children with normal development may also cry for a longer period of time if they are not educated in the right way at home, for example:

1. Overprotection, doting and indulgence by family members can easily lead to children crying, because children who grow up in such an environment cannot stand the slightest grievance and have no choice but to cry when encountering problems.

2. Crying is also a "killer weapon" used by some children to threaten adults and satisfy their own demands. At first, children only use this method to express their inner loss and grievances, and it is an emotional catharsis. However, some parents become soft-hearted when they see their children's tears and immediately compromise. From then on, the baby regards "crying" as a panacea to achieve his own goals.

Crying is often an effective way for children to threaten adults and get their demands met. At first, when children see that their parents do not meet their demands, they feel wronged and emotional, so they naturally cry to vent. However, when parents see their children crying, they immediately compromise with them, agree to their demands, and meet their wishes, which gives the children an illusion that they can get everything as long as they cry. Therefore, after they have basically used crying to get their demands many times, they have mastered the method of dealing with parents.

From the perspective of the psychological development of young children, 3-year-old children have begun to accept the teachings of their parents, but they are still stubborn, insist on their own ideas, and have fear and separation anxiety; 4-year-old children can basically express their opinions and requests correctly, do some behaviors that adults appreciate, have intermittent emotional fluctuations, and have obvious likes and dislikes; 5-6-year-old children begin to express their emotions in words, have good ability to control their emotions, and sometimes accept criticism from others. From this process, if your child still likes to cry to solve problems and express emotions when he is four or five years old, it means that parents need to improve their education and training methods. Don't spoil your children, because the more thoughtful you protect them, the fewer opportunities they have to exercise. Not only do they not have enough experience of various senses physically, but also in their minds, because they are too dependent on adults and lack experience in solving problems, they will also develop immaturely. In this way, when they encounter problems, they will only feel at a loss.

If a child's crying is caused by improper family education methods, parents should reflect on their own education methods:

1. Find out the specific reason why the child is crying. Show full understanding of the child's request and treat it correctly. When the child cries because he is sad, angry or wronged, parents should show the child that you fully understand his mood, so that the child feels that someone understands him, and the mood will naturally be much better, and he will not continue to cry. When the child cries because his request is not met, parents should carefully explore the reasons why the child must insist, and do not deny the child's request based on their own tolerance or value judgment. For unreasonable and excessive requests, they should be firmly denied, not spoiled, and explain to them the reasons why they cannot be satisfied. When the child is crying, you must not coax him immediately, let alone simply tell him "Don't cry anymore, otherwise I will..." Such threats can easily make the child rebellious and cause him to cry even harder.

2. Let the child form a concept of "I have grown up and should not cry anymore". Parents should let the child understand that only babies who can't speak well love to cry. They are already grown-up children and should not cry anymore. If they cry all the time, others will laugh at them. And because of crying, other children will feel disgusted and laugh at them, and they will not be able to find friends. With this awareness, the child can hold back tears when he wants to cry and gradually become stronger.

3. When children act unreasonably and try to achieve their rude demands by crying, parents can appropriately ignore them to make them feel that crying will not attract the attention of adults, thereby reducing the frequency of such crying.

However, when using this method, parents should first reason with their children, and when the children ignore the reasoning, parents can then use the cold treatment method to deal with it. Parents should not be moved by their children's "tears" and give them what they want out of weakness, otherwise it will cause the children to repeat the same thing over and over again in the future.

4. To change a child's crybaby personality, parents must work hard on their daily education. They should not spoil, indulge, or pamper their children blindly, nor do everything for them. They should give their children more opportunities for autonomy.

5. In order to help crying children bravely face setbacks, parents should start by cultivating their abilities and enhancing their self-confidence. When they encounter difficulties and setbacks, they should work hard to overcome them. Parents should give timely and clear affirmation to their achievements in fighting against difficulties, so that children can feel the joy of success and have the confidence to overcome difficulties further. Then parents should give their children some difficult tasks for them to complete.

Children are children after all, and crying is normal. Parents should never completely restrict children from crying, especially if they show disgust when they hear their children crying. This will bring heavy psychological pressure to children, and their emotions will not be vented, causing depression. In fact, crying is not necessarily a bad thing. Children can feel relieved after crying because crying can reduce the production of chemicals in the brain after being under stress. People who cry a lot are healthier physically and mentally than those who don't cry a lot, so don't completely forbid children from crying.

When your child cries, stop hurting him with this sentence.

When children are young, it is inevitable that they will bump into things while running and jumping, or cry when they are sick or feel uncomfortable, or when they get a shot and it hurts. But we always like to say:

"It's okay, it doesn't hurt."

Ineffective, still crying, the next sentence is——

"You are a man, you are the best! A man can't be a coward."

It’s not working yet. How can I stop crying?

"Stop crying, or your mother will leave!"

This is what I would have said. Gradually, when little Jo bumped into something and it hurt, she looked at me with tears in her eyes and shouted, "It doesn't hurt!" "It's okay!", as if she had made a mistake, just like the little girl at the beginning.

I would quickly run over to comfort him, but he would push me away and yell, "I don't want my mom!"

I thought little Jo had always been a sensitive and emotional child, and maybe she would get better when she grew up, until I saw the same child after child around me. When the pain occurred, their mothers stood on the opposite side of their emotions, telling them that it didn't hurt and they shouldn't feel pain.

Later, I read an article written by a foreign mother. Her child suffered from asthma at a very young age. She taught her child to use a metaphor to express discomfort so that when the disease occurs, she can judge the severity in time. For example, when the child feels that an elephant is stepping on his chest, she knows that it is a level one alert and he should be sent to the hospital. With other expressions, she knows that the child's symptoms are not that serious.

And what am I doing? Not only did I not teach my baby how to express pain, but I also hinted to him that your pain is wrong, even though I didn't say it directly.

I know a child who grew up with this kind of suggestion.

When I first started working, a colleague suddenly fainted at work, which scared us all. After a while, she woke up. We asked her what was wrong with her, and she just covered her stomach and said weakly: "It's okay, it's okay..." We called 120 and sent her to the hospital. We found out that the girl had a gynecological cyst. The doctor said: This disease is not serious, but the pain is a hundred times more painful than dysmenorrhea, a bit like the contractions of childbirth!

The girl endured it in the office for several hours, and we didn’t know until she fainted! After she was hospitalized, her mother came to see her and told us: "I have taught my daughter to be strong since she was young. She never told me where she was feeling uncomfortable and insisted on going to school." The girl was admitted to Renmin University with the top score.

I didn't think anything was wrong at the time, but now I think about it, if there were no colleagues around and the girl didn't take the initiative to ask for help, would she be in danger? Is it right to suppress your pain and not express it?

When a child is in pain and cries, we know that he is in pain and it is necessary for us to comfort him and respond to him. However, the words of comfort that come out of our mouths, such as "It's okay, it doesn't hurt, don't cry", are wrong.

The correct way to do it is:

You immediately run over to check if the baby is hurt. If there is no serious external injury, you just need to hug him gently and say, "Mom sees that you are hurt. Mom can feel your pain. If you want to cry, cry for a while."

After I tried this a few times, Little Jo no longer rejected me. He would lie on my shoulder and continue crying for a while, but soon he would pay attention to other things.

By doing this, the crying period is often much shorter than before.

This approach is called "empathy" in psychology. The key point is to transform the facts into the child's psychological feelings and emotional needs. But at the same time, we do not make any comments, do not judge whether he is right or wrong in falling or bumping, and let him feel that his mother is "standing with me".

Back to the case at the beginning, the first step is to empathize, and the most important thing is to communicate with your child; the second step is to think of a solution. There are many frictions between children under the age of 2. It is not necessarily the fault of one child or the intention of another child, but they simply cannot control the intensity. Communicate with the other child's parents and let the other child pay attention to the intensity. The parents should be present when playing together next time. After the friction occurs, guide the baby's emotions in time, and play happily together tomorrow.

I have heard a beautiful story about the power of empathy.

An old man was sitting on a chair in the park, sobbing. He had just lost his wife. A boy saw this and ran over to see what was going on. He climbed onto the old man's lap and sat there quietly. A strange thing happened. The old man suddenly felt much better and his mood stabilized. Later, the boy's mother asked him what he said to the old man, and the boy replied, "I didn't say anything. I just helped him cry."

Dear mothers, are you willing to help your children “cry”?

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