Don't Catch a Bad Mood

Moods can be contagious. Imagine you have a throbbing toothache. You sit down in the dentist’s chair in pain. The dentist enters the room in a cheerful mood. If you catch the dentist’s mood, you relax a bit and he breezes through the procedure. If the dentist catches your mood, what would happen? He’d wince when you winced. As your knuckles turn white grabbing the arms of the chair, his knuckles turn white grabbing his instruments. As your panic grows, his panic grows. My guess is you would never go back to that dentist again.

People in helping professions meet others sadness, anger, and pain with an attitude of acceptance and a belief in their ability to be helpful. Imagine meeting your children’s hostile moods with acceptance and a belief in your ability to be helpful.

It isn’t always easy to be accepting and helpful. Just try dealing with a mouthy teen, who insists on skipping the family reunion picnic to wait in line for tickets to a concert. When you hear her disrespectful tone, it’s so tempting to escalate the conflict instead of staying conscious enough to defuse it.

When my son was three-years-old, he was angry about having to get dressed. Instead of using skills, I caught his mood and got angry with him. He mirrored my anger and got even more angry. I got angrier back. Right in the middle of one of those, “Yes you do,” “No I don’t,” kind of arguments, I realized that I had reduced myself to the maturity level of a preschooler. I was reflecting his mood instead of responding to it.

To respond in a helpful way, start by understanding that it is okay for children to feel what they feel. It’s okay for a teenager to feel disappointed about missing a concert to attend a family reunion. It’s okay for a preschooler to feel angry about getting dressed. It’s easier for kids to restore good feeling once their bad feelings are accepted. While unacceptable actions need to be limited, permitting feelings helps children cope with their frustrations and move forward more easily.

To keep your child’s hostile mood from spreading to you, take a moment to challenge yourself to choose your mood. If a child shows anger and you reflect anger, the anger grows. If you respond with compassion, it changes the dynamic. For example, in a mood of compassion, I could have said, “I can see how angry you feel. It’s not easy to stop playing to get dressed and rush off to preschool. Sometimes doing what needs to be done, can be really hard.”

Imagine being the child who heard those words. Now ask yourself how you might react differently to a parent who, in a rage, screams, “I don’t care what you want to do. You’ll do as I say!” It’s much easier for children to catch the mood of cooperate from a parent who approaches their upset emotions with acceptance and confidence in their kids abilities to do what needs to be done.

Sometimes everyone is in a good mood, then something unexpected happens. Do you remember the feeling of fear flooding through your body the first time your child got hurt playing a sport or the first time your toddler took a tumble head first on the floor? Everything inside of you wants to gasp and come running. When you do, your child is often more impacted by your mood than their mishap.

Have you ever seen a toddler who after bumping into something, looks around the room to see if mommy or daddy saw? If her parents aren’t around, she’s fine, but if they are anywhere in sight, the crying begins.

I remember my sister’s wise words of advice. She told me not to overreact when my toddler fell. She said, “Instead of panicking, stay where you are and just ask if he’s okay. When you panic, they panic.” It worked like a charm. Unless he was really hurt, he’d just pick himself up and keep playing.

The parent, not the child, is responsible for changing the emotional climate of the home. It’s up to you to model healthy ways of handling life’s upsets. If you find yourself catching or spreading a bad mood, don’t beat yourself up. Instead, do your emotional homework. Start by congratulating yourself for noticing what you did that was unhelpful. Not until you become aware of your behavior, do you have any hope of changing it. Noticing it means you are making progress.

It takes awareness, planning and practice, practice, practice to become effective. Since the odds are good that someone in your family will be in a bad mood again some time in the near future, you can plan a more helpful response now, so that when you are in the situation, you don’t blindly fall back into your old way of reacting.

By putting these principles into place, you vaccinate yourself against catching future bad moods and raise the emotional intelligence of your whole family.