Dr. Amanda Darnley is featured in the new documentary, The Overly Emotional Child
This new documentary helps parents gain a deeper understanding of why children may have BIG Emotions.
Learn how you can help your child:
- Eliminate tantrums
- Stop shutting down
- prevent overreacting
Like a complete course to help parents and children gain emotional intelligence together.
Get more info on the documentary at
www.learningsuccesssystem.com/documentary/emotional
Liz Weaver (00:00):
In today's video, we have dr. Amanda Darnley, dr. Amanda Darlie is a licensed clinical psychologist with over a decade of experience working with all ages and a variety of settings, including inpatient hospitals, residential treatment facilities, and outpatient practices. She has extensive training in empirically supported treatments, including dialectical behavior therapy, which centers on teaching skills to improve mindfulness, emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. Her video is about regulating our emotions so that our children learn how to regulate theirs. Let's watch.
Dr Amanda Darnley (00:47):
Hi, I'm dr. Amanda Darnley, and I am here today to give you some tips on how to effectively regulate your emotions. This topic is so important, especially as parents, because the way that we handle our own emotions becomes the way that our children learn to handle theirs. So thank you so much for joining us today. The first thing that I would suggest doing when experiencing a stressful situation with your child is to pause before you act, take a deep breath, and then just notice what's coming up for you in that moment. Start off with physical sensations. Are you feeling a tightness in your chest? Are you feeling a lump in your throat? Are you feeling heat bubbling up in your face, just notice what's happening in your body. And then move on to the harder thing is to identify. So what thoughts are you having in, in that moment?
Dr Amanda Darnley (02:02):
What judgments are coming up for you and then noticing how those judgments might be impacting your urge to respond, giving yourself some space, to figure out what you're feeling and why you're feeling. It is really important because sometimes our our emotions are actually connected to the beliefs that we have or those judgements that are coming up rather than what's actually happening. For example, let's say you're in the middle of target and your kid starts throwing this Epic meltdown and you noticed other shoppers starting to like glance in your direction. You might start feeling heat rising up in your face and you might have the thought, Oh my God, I look like I can't even handle my own kid right now. I feel like such a bad mom and that might lead to feelings of embarrassment or shame. Now it's likely that your child is not actually trying to embarrass you in that moment.
Judgements may lead to feelings of shame
Dr Amanda Darnley (03:20):
It's those judgments that you're having about what is going on that are leading to your feelings of shame and embarrassment. So your kid though is really just responding to their own emotional state. They're getting overwhelmed by whatever the situation is, and they're having a hard time managing themselves. So it's really important to distinguish what we're feeling from our, our own thoughts and judgments versus what we're feeling in response to our children. I think being able to separate those things makes us more capable in that moment to respond to our child out of connection and empathy, rather than out of anger or embarrassment or shame, we're going to have very different responses depending on where we're coming from in that moment, this is really difficult to do. And so in order to kind of practice this it's helpful to do some mindfulness exercises in calm moments.
Dr Amanda Darnley (04:46):
So not just practicing it in stressful moments. So the more we practice mindfulness on a, on a day to day, the easier it's going to become to be able to stay mindful in in stressful situations. And again, this is difficult to do so cut yourself some Slack. We are we're imperfect. No matter how hard we try as parents, we are gonna mess up every now and then, and you know what that's okay. I, you know, in those times that we can't model effective emotion regulation, let's say we do lose her cool in target in response to our kids meltdown. What we can do in in those situations is we can take accountability for our actions and model taking responsibility and owning up to our mistakes with a nice, good heartfelt apology. And that's just as important in in parenting. So that's what I have for you today. Thank you so much for joining me and take good care of yourself.
Make sure to watch the full documentary on childhood emotions. You'll learn how to help your child manage their own emotions. You'll learn about your own emotions and how they affect your child. And you'll learn simple ways of helping children improve behavior.
Get more info at
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