I watched a friend of mine have a blow-out today and was really glad to see it. She’s been through a lot recently, quite a lot actually and has been “keeping a lid on it all” really well, so much so that those of us who don’t know her very well, would think that everything is plodding along just tickety-boo, until today.

All it took was a minor, yet insistent incident, something that normally wouldn’t annoy her, yet today drove her past her tipping point and she threw a complete wobbly, shouting, throwing things, stamping her foot, walking off in a rage only to return, rant again and storm off again, all in the space of around thirty seconds.

This out of character behaviour upset her children and my child who all witnessed the wobbly and scattered in various directions. Needless to say they had not a small part in the cause of said outburst, having pushed her already stretched patience to the limits and then past it without pause in an effort to have their own way, as young children are want to do.

Of course in the immediate aftermath of such an outburst there is the realisation that other people’s feelings have been hurt and when those other people are your own children there comes a rush of guilt and the effort of making things right again. This all took time and when things had calmed down again, my friend returned to the room I was in, apologised for her outburst to which I calmly replied “I’m glad I’m not the only one who does that.” At first she thought I was joking to make her feel better, until I explained I’d had a similar incident earlier in the week myself, triggered by a minor incident piled onto a stressful series of events.

She however reckoned that such incidents were not under any circumstances excusable in front of children and was giving herself a hard time about having lost control in front of them. My opinion is different. I don’t see how children can learn how to deal with such incidents if they are constantly protected from them. With that in mind an occasional outburst and I do mean occasional, followed by an apology with an explanation of what happened teaches children that we are humans with a tipping point.

If they don’t experience that, how will they learn to deal with it as they grow up, because they will experience it at some point on the journey towards adulthood.  I’d rather they learnt at home how to deal with it effectively than be exposed to it elsewhere and not have the coping skills to deal with it.

There is a lot to be said for protecting our children and I can fully understand the desire to do so, however there is also the danger in not equipping them with the necessary skills to be able to deal with sudden stress outbursts or learning how to avoid them happening in the first place.

We are also leaving ourselves as adults open to unnecessary amounts of stress and possible illness by bottling up our frustrations in times of duress because we don’t want to express it in front of our families.

It is a very thin line we walk as parents. We are often be torn between suppressing our own emotional needs in times of duress, displaying a veneer of coping in a bid to protect our children from that same duress, so much so that what we attempt to avoid comes back to bite us hard.

I’ve learnt to offload potential stress by dealing with issues as they arise and I have a good network of friends, some of whom are also coaches. When necessary I’ll either ring or meet up with one of them and discuss my issues. Friends are there in good times and in bad, it is when things are going bad that we realise how good are good friends are.

For those who don’t want to burden their friends with their issues, hiring a good coach makes all the difference between building up stress levels and learning to ease your stress.