How to Create a Positive Emotional Home Climate

It’s about two months since the COVID-19 outbreak changed the way we work, learn, shop, and interact. How are you feeling? If you are like me, you might be going a little stir crazy at home. I’m not used to being at home every day all day.

When writing my book, Permission To Feel, I heard from families that most people want their homes filled with love and laughter, kindness and compassion, joy, and hope. But what’s the best way to create a so-called positive emotional climate in our homes? This excerpt from my book explains how giving each other permission to feel can help.

Your family's emotional life

Excerpted from Chapter 9 “Emotions at Home”

We all arrive in this world programmed differently where emotions are concerned. Each of us has a different threshold for being provoked, activated, aroused, startled. Some of us experience feelings more intensely than others. We recover from emotional reactions at different speeds. But these individual differences don’t determine whether we will develop emotion skills. Research shows that even highly reactive kids who are raised in nurturing families can turn out just fine.

Few influences can match those of family and home. But which home?

Of course, we’re all concerned about the emotional lives of our children. We know what’s at stake—virtually everything. As we’ve seen already, their physical and mental well-being, their ability to learn in school, their future success at work, and in families of their own, all depend on it. There’s no greater measure of how we did as parents than the success of our kids in this regard. Few influences can match those of family and home.

But which home?

There’s the home where we grew up, where our emotional lives were formed. We’re not born with emotion knowledge; we mostly respond to stimuli—we’re hungry, we’re cold, we’re uncomfortable for one reason or another, and so we react. Nature provides that response to make sure we get the attention we need to survive infancy. Everything beyond that is learned in the nest.

Along the way, as we learn what we need to be an adult and to sustain a home or family, we take in the emotional experiences, like the air we breathe. We carry those emotional patterns forward with us—the good and the bad—often replicating them. And in our new home, the cycle repeats—built on the emotional foundations of the one where we started out.

Many of us go through life trying our hardest to avoid precisely that fate. We strive to be anything but our parents. And then, inevitably, comes the moment when we...

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