What School Counselors Wish Every Parent Knew About Children's Emotional Wellbeing

When my son was in second grade his teacher called me in for a meeting.

He was struggling. Not because he wasn't trying — he was trying harder than anyone in that classroom. But reading comprehension was genuinely difficult for him, and the gap between what he understood and what the assessments expected was widening every semester.

What I noticed — and what nobody talked about enough at the time — was that his reading struggles and his emotional struggles were the same struggle wearing different clothes. When he felt confused he shut down. When he felt behind he stopped trying. When the words on the page felt like they were working against him, his whole sense of himself as a learner quietly started to erode.

That experience sent me on a years-long journey into how children's emotional lives and their academic lives connect — and it is ultimately what led me to create The Grumble Toad Adventures. Because I wanted to build a world where children who struggle feel seen rather than deficient. Where the story meets the child exactly where they are.

Along the way I spent a great deal of time talking to school counselors — the people who sit with children in their hardest moments every single day. And what they told me changed how I think about everything.

Here is what they wish every parent knew.

School counselors see things most parents never get to see.

They see children in the unguarded moments — the hallway conversations, the lunchroom tears, the quiet child sitting alone who nobody has noticed yet. They hear the things children say when they feel safe enough to say them. They hold space for the feelings that children do not yet know how to bring home.

After years of that work, most school counselors carry a handful of things they wish every parent understood. Not because parents are getting it wrong. But because the partnership between home and school is the most powerful tool any child has — and the more aligned those two worlds are, the better equipped every child becomes.

1. Emotional Skills Are Learned — Not Inherited

One of the most common things school counselors encounter is the belief that some children are simply born resilient — that they arrived in the world with an ability to handle hard feelings while others simply did not.

This is not how emotional development works.

Emotional skills — the ability to name feelings, manage big reactions, show empathy, resolve conflict, and bounce back from disappointment — are learned. They develop gradually through experience, through modelling, through practice, and through the consistent presence of adults who demonstrate these skills themselves.

I saw this firsthand with my son. The emotional skills he built — slowly, imperfectly, with consistent support — eventually became the scaffolding that made the academic challenges more manageable too. Not because the reading comprehension difficulties disappeared, but because he developed the emotional resilience to keep showing up for them.

What you model matters more than what you teach. Always.

2. Children Need Permission to Feel Hard Things

Many parents, entirely out of love, move too quickly to fix their child's difficult feelings.

A child is sad — and the parent immediately looks for the solution, the distraction, the reassurance that everything is okay. A child is angry — and the parent moves swiftly to correct the behavior, missing the feeling underneath it entirely.

What counselors see repeatedly is children who have learned that hard feelings make the adults around them uncomfortable. And so they hide those feelings. They say "I'm fine" when they are not fine. They perform okayness to protect the people they love.

I recognize this. There were moments with my son when I rushed to reassure rather than sitting with him in the difficulty. What I learned — slowly — is that the sitting matters more than the solving.

The most powerful thing a parent can do for a child's emotional health is to communicate — clearly and repeatedly — that all feelings are allowed here.

Not all behaviors. Behaviors have limits and consequences. But feelings — every single one of them — are valid and welcome.

"You're allowed to feel sad about that. You don't have to be okay right now."

Those words, said with genuine warmth and no urgency to fix, can change everything.

3. What Looks Like Bad Behavior Is Often Unprocessed Emotion

This is perhaps the single most important thing school counselors wish parents understood.

When a child hits, lashes out, withdraws, refuses to cooperate, or has repeated meltdowns — the question to ask is not "what is wrong with this child?" but "what is this child trying to communicate that they don't yet have the words for?"

Behavior is communication. Always. Especially in children who are still developing the language and neurological capacity to express what they are experiencing internally.

My son did not act out. His response to overwhelm was to go quiet — to disappear into himself and stop trying altogether. That quiet withdrawal was just as much a communication as any meltdown. It said: I am drowning and I do not know how to ask for help.

This does not mean excusing harmful behavior. It means responding to the root rather than only the surface — which is both more compassionate and more effective in the long run.

4. Children Are Paying Attention to Everything You Do

Not just to what you tell them. To everything.

They watch how you handle frustration. They notice whether you apologize when you get things wrong. They absorb how you talk about other people. They register whether the adults in their life are able to sit with uncertainty, or whether anxiety always spills over into control.

Children learn emotional regulation by watching regulated adults. They learn empathy by receiving it and observing it. They learn that mistakes are survivable by watching adults make mistakes and recover from them with grace.

This is not a reason for guilt. Every parent loses their patience, says the wrong thing, gets it wrong sometimes. The question is not whether you model perfect emotional regulation — nobody does. The question is whether you model repair.

Whether you come back and say: "I was frustrated earlier and I didn't handle that well. I'm sorry."

That repair is one of the most powerful lessons a child can receive. And it is one I had to learn to give.

5. Early Support Is Always Better Than Late Intervention

School counselors consistently wish they saw children earlier — before the difficult patterns had become entrenched, before the emotional backlog had built up, before a child had spent so long suppressing their feelings that unpicking it required significant work.

Looking back at my son's second grade year I wish I had understood sooner that his reading challenges needed an emotional response as much as an academic one. The two were never separate. They never are.

It means talking to your child about feelings before a crisis makes the conversation necessary. It means building emotional vocabulary in ordinary moments, not just hard ones. It means creating the conditions for regular low-stakes check-ins so that your child experiences you as a safe person to talk to — long before they have something truly difficult to share.

This is exactly why The Grumble Toad Adventures was built the way it was. Every book, every activity, every reflection prompt is designed for ordinary moments — not crisis moments. Because emotional fluency is built before it is urgently needed, not during the emergency.

Find the Grumble Toad Adventures SEL Activity Pack here → lunaastherastudio.etsy.com/listing/4492212912

6. The Relationship Is the Intervention

Above all else — above every technique, resource, program or structured activity — what school counselors know from experience is this:

The relationship is the intervention.

The single most protective factor in a child's emotional development is the presence of at least one consistent, caring adult who knows them, sees them, and communicates unconditional positive regard. Not approval of everything they do. Unconditional positive regard for who they are.

My son had that. It made all the difference. Not because it made the hard things disappear — but because it meant he never had to face them alone

.

You do not have to be a perfect parent. You do not have to know all the right things to say. You do not have to have your own emotional world completely sorted before you can support your child's.

You just have to show up. Consistently. With warmth and curiosity and a genuine willingness to know your child as they actually are — not as you hoped they would be or feared they might become.

That showing up — that steady, imperfect, wholehearted presence — is the most powerful thing in the world. And it is the thing that no book, no activity pack, and no blog post can replace. But it is also the thing that everything else — every story, every calm corner, every conversation — is quietly building toward.

Sandra M. Holliday is the creator of LunaAstheraStudio and the author of The Grumble Toad Adventures — a five-book children's fantasy series exploring social emotional learning through the magical world of the Mycelium Undergrowth. Her series was born from her own experience watching her son navigate learning challenges in elementary school — and her belief that every child deserves a story where they feel seen. Resources and books available at lunaastherastudio.etsy.com/listing/4492212912

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