Let Them See You Cry

There was a time when having a bad day meant doing everything I could to make sure nobody knew I was having one. I could keep functioning, answer questions, take care of what needed to be done, smile when I needed to smile, and hold everything together until I finally got behind closed doors. On the really hard days, I would practically count down the hours until I could be alone and finally let myself feel everything I had been holding in.

For a long time, I thought that was strength. As a mom, I especially believed my children didn’t need to see me upset. I was the parent. I was supposed to be the steady one, and I had grown to associate being steady with appearing unaffected. If I was sad, overwhelmed, hurt, or having an awful day, I could deal with those emotions privately. My kids could keep seeing the version of Mom who was okay.

Then one of my very good friends pointed something out that completely changed the way I thought about it. By never allowing my children to see me experience difficult emotions, I wasn’t necessarily protecting them. I could actually be doing them a disservice.

That thought stayed with me because I realized I was trying to teach my children how to navigate emotions while hiding so many of my own. I wanted them to communicate when they were hurting. I wanted them to come to me when they needed help. I wanted them to understand that crying wasn’t weakness and that having a difficult day didn’t mean something was wrong with them. Yet the example I was giving them was a mom who always appeared to have it together.

So the next time I had a really bad day, I decided to do something that felt incredibly unnatural to me.

I let my kids see me cry.

When Mom Wasn’t Okay

Their reaction told me immediately just how unusual this was for them. They had never really seen me like that before, and they had no idea what to do. At first, they almost seemed to panic. Then they suddenly ran out of the room, and I sat there wondering where everybody had gone and what in the world was happening.

A few minutes later, they came back carrying every comfort item they could think to find. They had massage tools, a hairbrush, combs, and hair ties. They hugged me, started brushing my hair and putting it up, rubbed my back, rubbed my feet, and did whatever came to their minds that they thought might make Mom feel better. They didn’t have sophisticated words for what I was feeling or some perfectly rehearsed response to sadness. They were simply children who saw someone they loved hurting, looked around for the ways they knew how to offer comfort, and brought all of them to me.

It was one of the sweetest and most precious experiences I have ever had.

And I almost prevented it from happening because I had convinced myself that being a strong mom meant never allowing my children to see me cry.

In trying to protect my children from my emotions, I had also been limiting their opportunities to learn how to respond to them.

What Does “I’m Fine” Actually Teach?

There is an important distinction here because I absolutely believe children should be protected from things they are not emotionally equipped to carry. Our children don’t need all the details of adult problems. They shouldn’t become our confidants, feel responsible for fixing us, or carry the weight of keeping a parent emotionally okay. There are healthy boundaries between a parent and a child, and emotional openness shouldn’t erase them.

But allowing our children to see that we have emotions is very different from asking them to carry those emotions for us. They can know Mom had a hard day without being responsible for making the day better. They can see tears without needing all the details behind them. They can watch us experience disappointment, sadness, frustration, or overwhelm and also watch what we do next.

That matters because our children aren’t only learning from what we tell them about emotions. They are watching how we handle our own. If the only version of strength they ever see is a smiling face saying, “I’m fine,” regardless of what is happening underneath it, they can easily learn that being strong means being really good at hiding.

I don’t want my children to grow into adults who are falling apart internally while convincing everyone around them that nothing is wrong. I want them to know they can say, “Today was hard.” They can admit when they are sad, overwhelmed, disappointed, scared, or struggling. They can ask for help. They can pray through what they are feeling, communicate it to people they trust, and learn how to move through an emotion instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.

Emotional intelligence isn’t about hiding difficult emotions. It’s learning to recognize them, communicate them, work through them, and respond with compassion when someone else is experiencing them too.

Learning How to Sit With Someone Else’s Feelings

That day taught my children something else I hadn’t even considered when my friend first challenged me. They weren’t only learning that it was okay for them to experience difficult emotions. They were learning how to respond when someone else did.

They saw someone they loved hurting, and their immediate instinct was to figure out how to show care. Their solutions were wonderfully childlike. A hairbrush and an assortment of massage tools probably aren’t going to appear in many books about emotional support, but the instinct behind what they did was exactly what I hope they carry into adulthood: Someone I love is hurting. How can I be present for them?

That is something they can practice now when a sibling is upset, a friend at school is having a difficult day, or someone they care about feels left out or disappointed. But we aren’t only helping our children navigate childhood emotions. We are shaping the adults they will eventually become. One day, they may need to recognize when a spouse is overwhelmed, create a safe place for their own child to talk, support a friend through loss, communicate what they need in a business relationship, or simply sit beside someone who is hurting without trying to fix them. Emotional intelligence doesn’t suddenly appear when they reach adulthood. They begin developing it now, through the relationships and examples they experience while they’re growing up.

We spend a lot of time teaching children to communicate, but communication isn’t only about learning how to express yourself. It’s also about learning how to receive what someone else is expressing. It’s recognizing emotion without immediately becoming uncomfortable with it, understanding that you don’t have to fix everything, and learning that being present can be valuable even when you don’t have the perfect words.

My children couldn’t have practiced any of that with me if I never allowed them to see anything other than “fine.”

Jesus Never Asked Us to Pretend We Don’t Feel

The more I’ve thought about this through the lens of my faith, the more I’ve realized that the version of strength I had created for myself wasn’t even the version Jesus modeled.

Jesus wept. He experienced grief and expressed compassion. Scripture shows Him deeply moved and troubled. In Gethsemane, He didn’t pretend the weight of what was ahead didn’t affect Him. His emotions never made Him less faithful, less strong, or less surrendered to God. They were part of what we were allowed to see.

It’s easy to confuse faith with appearing unaffected. We can believe we’re supposed to trust God so completely that sadness, fear, disappointment, or overwhelm somehow suggest we aren’t trusting Him enough. Yet faith doesn’t require us to deny what we feel. God already knows what is happening inside of us anyway.

Prayer gives us somewhere to take those feelings. We don’t have to clean ourselves up emotionally before we come to God. We can bring Him the sadness, frustration, fear, disappointment, exhaustion, and questions. We can teach our children that trusting God doesn’t mean putting on a happy face no matter what life brings. It means knowing we don’t have to carry what we feel alone.

That is the kind of faith I want my children to see in me. Not a faith that pretends nothing hurts, but one that knows where to go when something does.

Let Them See What Happens Next

I still don’t believe my children need access to every struggle I experience, and I don’t share every emotion with them simply for the sake of being transparent. Part of parenting is discerning what our children are mature enough to understand and what belongs in conversations with other adults. But I no longer believe my job is to convince them that Mom is always okay.

Instead, I want them to see what healthy emotion looks like. They can see me cry and also see that I recover. They can hear me say I’m having a difficult day and watch me communicate rather than shutting everyone out. They can see me ask for support when I need it, pray through what I’m carrying, take time to process it, and continue moving forward when I’m ready. They can learn that an emotion is something we experience, not something we have to fear or become.

That day, my children didn’t solve what was hurting me, and I didn’t need them to. What they did was far more meaningful. They learned that someone they loved could be sad without the world falling apart. They learned that tears weren’t something to panic over. They discovered that they could sit beside someone who was hurting and offer whatever comfort they knew how to give. And in return, I learned that the parts of ourselves we think we need to hide from our children may actually create opportunities for some of the most important lessons we can teach them.

I still smile when I picture them coming back into that room armed with everything they could find to make me feel better. I thought I was allowing my children to see me in a weak moment. Looking back, I see something entirely different. I was allowing them to witness an honest one, and they responded with compassion I might never have gotten to see if I had kept pretending I was fine.