With emotional vaccination, we connect with our children before a big-feelings moment, thereby strengthening regulation skills before our child needs to use them. We connect with our kids, discuss and validate the challenge they might soon face, and verbalize or even rehearse how we might handle it—all before it happens. By connecting, validating, and anticipating, we build up our child’s “emotion regulation antibodies” before the full-force emotion arises. In this way, we are pre-regulating a feeling, and when the challenging moment comes, our child is more equipped to handle it. That doesn’t
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