Hi, this is Janet Landsbury. Welcome to UnRuffled. Today I'm responding to a question that I received from a parent who's concerned about her son who seems to be faking emotions and manipulating.

And this parent is doing a wonderful job. It sounds like helping her children to perceive their emotions as all acceptable and healthy.

But she's getting a bit stuck here because it seems like her five-year-old is using emotions to manipulate situations.

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Okay, here's the note I received. Dear Janet, my husband and I have been fans of your methods since we were introduced to the No Bad Kids book through our eldest son's school.

We find ourselves returning to your materials for our reframing of our perspectives whenever either of our sons is exhibiting behavior we'd like to understand better.

I haven't found anything that resembles what we are going through with our son, so I'm hoping to share what's going on and hopefully gain that perspective and advice from you.

Our five year old son has been having trouble regulating his emotions for the past month or so.

I say regulating rather than controlling because we are a very open family about emotions and talk about how all emotions are valid.

Sadness, happiness, silliness, anger, annoyance, etc.

We talk about the most appropriate ways to express them, but we do not try to suppress them.

So our children are encouraged to feel whatever emotions come up and we validate those as real helping them to process and regulate as we do so.

Our son has begun to jump to a level 100 in tears. The instant he gets frustrated or isn't given what he wants.

Everything from someone else turning off the TV with appropriate heads up to not wanting to brush teeth to his younger brother,

whose two wanting a toy or taking a turn, he immediately goes into a false sobbing, screaming, complaining mode.

I have no doubt he's angry and frustrated, but the tears and sadness are what's false.

He tells us that really hurt my feelings, or I can't do blank. I'm so sad.

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