Does hiding my feelings from my child backfire?

Most directly, the flat face itself. Emily Bariola, Elizabeth Hughes and Eleonora Gullone surveyed 379 young people aged 9 to 19 along with their parents for a 2012 study in the Journal of Child and Family Studies, and found that mothers who habitually suppressed their emotional expression had children who suppressed theirs. Fathers' strategies showed no such relationship in that sample.

The second lesson is harder to measure and easier to watch happen. Say something cruel to a wall and the wall stays a wall. A child who tests a sharp line against a controlled blank comes away with a fact about the world: that one didn't register. Repeat it and the fact generalizes, either into nothing I say lands or into adults don't have interiors that need care. The parent thought they were demonstrating composure. What got demonstrated was inconsequence.

They're different operations, and your child can tell.

Regulation processes the feeling: you notice the surge, you decline to act from inside it, and what eventually comes out is smaller and truer than what arrived. Suppression keeps the feeling at full size and puts a lid on the display. It costs more to hold, and per the finding above, it transmits.

The advice most parents are carrying, stay regulated, don't put your weather on your child, is aimed squarely at the first operation. It's a rule about flooding. It gets heard as a rule about disclosure, and those aren't the same rule. Amanda Sheffield Morris and colleagues place a family's overall emotional climate among the three pathways by which children absorb regulation, and a household where nothing is ever shown is a climate too.

Then say nothing. There's no quota here.

Manufacturing an injury you didn't feel is its own version of the problem, and a worse one to walk back later. Plenty of rudeness is a tired eight-year-old at six in the evening, and the accurate response to that is a limit, not a disclosure. That's not how we talk to each other is a complete sentence. It doesn't need a wound attached to earn its place.