This past weekend I took my kids to see <i>Frozen, </i>the newest installment of the Disney Princess series. To my surprise, it presented an amazing story on parenting.  The film is about sisterhood, true love, and the results of giving into fear.  Interestingly, as seen through my professional lens it also teaches that the problems and conflicts faced by one of the sisters, Princess Elsa, could have been prevented if the parents would have intervened differently to her magical “curse/gift” of being able to create snow and cold.

<a href="http://www.thenestmiami.com/blog/?attachment_id=162" rel="attachment wp-att-162"><img class="wp-image-162 alignleft" alt="Frozen" src="http://www.thenestmiami.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Frozen.jpg" width="322" height="182" /></a>In the beginning the parents are warned of the possible darkness her gift has if she feels fear or negative emotion.  They are also told about the light and the compassion it would have when she feels love and positive emotions.  In their quest to keep both of their daughters safe, they shut the kingdom out of their home and separate the siblings in an attempt to keep the “gifted” daughter from feeling any negative emotion.  The result is the story of the movie, which I will not ruin, but most importantly what it creates is a Princess overwhelmed and sure that her “negative feelings” will overpower her and hurt all those around her.

This is the parenting parable <i>Frozen</i> gives us.  Often as parents we attempt to keep our children from experiencing dark, scary, or angry feelings.  Parents make all sorts of choices to keep those feelings at bay.  In that process we send a message to the child that somehow dark/negative emotion is wrong or bad.  What that creates in a toddler, child or adolescent is a fear of the negative feelings.  They then create a habit of avoiding the feeling or acting out the feeling (i.e. throwing toys, slamming doors, biting) instead of expressing it.  Princess Elsa freezes an entire kingdom.

Just the other day at our tantrum talk the primary question was “how do I keep them from being angry?” and my answer was, “I cannot help you with that”.  As human beings it is a healthy human response to feel angry, sad, frustrated, and afraid. When we ask our children not to be angry, we are asking them not to be human.  The task at hand is to help our children feel the feeling, tolerate the feeling and recuperate from the feeling.  We have to give them the language, the tools and the acceptance that those feelings flow in and out of us, so the child does not become a “victim” to the feeling. The sad truth is that there are a lot of adults in the world that avoid certain emotions.  Addiction to drugs, food and sex is an extreme form of emotional avoidance.  We eat when we are upset to not feel upset and then repeat this cycle.  There is a saying that I love: “feelings are not fact”.  What is fact is what we do with the information the feelings give us that makes or breaks the moment.

I challenge each of you to learn from the extreme circumstances that the film poses and notice how Princess Elsa tries not to feel and see its results. The hard part about negative emotion is that it only feels better after we acknowledge them, feel them and then choose what we will do to make ourselves feel better.  If as parents we shut out the world so our children will be happy, we rob them of that process, which harms them when we place them in that world as adults.  I promise that if you let your children and teens feel all of the feelings in the spectrum they will become stronger for it and most importantly know that your love is true because you accept them completely.

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