5 Emotional Needs Every Child Has | Raise Emotionally Healthy Children | Riddhi Deorah

When a child is not seen, when their inner world is consistently overlooked, they begin to lose touch with themselves. They stop trusting their own feelings. They become very good at performing what people around them want to see, and they grow into adults who don't know who they are when nobody is watching them. When your child is speaking, do not prepare your response While they are still talking, just listen all the way to the end and then ask, "Is there more you want to share?" You will be stunned at what comes out when your child feels truly heard. You are going to feel good, and so is your child. So need number two, emotional need number two, is the need to be heard. Now let me tell you the emotional need number three. Welcome, welcome everybody. And before we start with the topic for today, I want to thank you for showing so much love to my previous video. I'm so happy to read your comments. I'm so happy to see that mothers are learning and then raising their children. The world is going to be a better place because you chose to be a learning parent. And in today's video, we are going to talk about emotional needs of children. I'm going to give you a complete guide that's going to help you raise healthy adults. Your child has everything— a good home, good food, good school, good clothes, holidays, birthday parties, everything on the list that a good parent is supposed to provide— and yet something is feeling off. Maybe your child is feeling anxious, clingy, or the opposite, they are feeling distant, shut down, hard to reach. Maybe they cry too easily, or maybe sometimes they never cry at all. Maybe they are performing perfectly on the outside— good grades, good behavior— but you sense something underneath that you cannot name, and you lie awake at night wondering, have I given them everything? Why does it feel like Something is still missing. If this is you, then this video is exactly for you. My name is Riddhi Devra. I'm a certified parenting coach, and I built one of India's largest digital schools for mothers. I have students from India, U.S., U.K., so many different countries, and I help parents understand children at a deeper level so that they are raising not just success. Successful kids, but emotionally healthy adults. And today I want to talk about something that changes everything once you understand it— the emotional needs of children, what they actually are, why they matter more than anything else you will ever provide, and what happens when their needs are unmet. In this video, I'm not going to give you a checklist of things to do differently. I'm going to show you what your child is actually asking for, because underneath their behavior, under every trauma, every withdrawal, every act of defiance, there is something that your child wants. Because once you see it, you will never want to miss it. You will look at your child in a very different way after this video. And here is the thing that nobody tells you When you become a mother, children have 2 sets of needs. The first set is so visible— food, shelter, safety, education, healthcare. These are the needs we can see, we can measure them, we can provide. And most mothers I work with are meeting these needs very beautifully. The second set is invisible, and it is the second set that determines who your child becomes as an adult. These are emotional needs, and they are just real, just as urgent as any physical need your child has. A child whose physical needs are met but whose emotional needs are not will struggle. Not visibly, not immediately, but deeply and quietly, in ways that only show up years later. In relationships that don't work, in anxiety that has no clear source, in a constant feeling of not being enough. They will have this inability to trust, to love, and to truly own themselves. The emotional wounds of childhood do not disappear when we grow up. These wounds travel with us into our marriages, into our workplaces, into our parenting, and they can be healed. And it is so much easier to meet the needs in the first place than to heal the wounds or heal the pain later. So let me walk you through the 5 core emotional needs every child has. Emotional need number 1, the need to feel seen, not just looked at. Seen. There is a difference. Looking at your child means you're physically present. You're in the room, your eyes are on them. Seeing your child means you notice what is underneath. You sense when something is off even before they say a word. You pick up on the small shifts. They are quieter than usual, they feel slightly withdrawn, the laugh doesn't seem the same, eyes are not matching. The child who feels seen Knows— my mother knows me, not just my achievements, not just my behavior. She understands me, she understands what I feel. That's what it means to see your child. And that knowing, that felt sense of being truly known by your parents, is the foundation of a child's sense of self-esteem. When a child is not seen, when their inner world is consistently overlooked, They begin to lose touch with themselves. They stop trusting their own feelings. They become very good at performing what people around them want to see. And they grow into adults who don't know who they are when nobody is watching them. The practice here is simple but not so easy. Once a day, put everything down. Look at your child. Not at what they are doing, but look at them and ask not how was school, but how are you feeling today? And then just wait, and then just listen to what comes. Even if they don't respond, that's completely okay. Just ask them this question. They're going to answer it for themselves. They might tell you, they might not tell you. Don't push for it. So emotional need number one is you have to really see your child. Now emotional need number two, the need to feel heard. Feeling heard is different from being listened to. Your child can be talking while you're half listening, nodding, saying hmm hmm, while your mind is somewhere else entirely. They know this. They can sense it. Your child always knows. Being heard means your child finishes speaking and feels that, yes, my mother got it, she understood me. I don't need to explain more or prove more or fight for her attention. She's completely with me. She's 100% with me. Most of us were never truly heard as children, so we never learned how to do it for our children. We interrupt. We finish their sentences. We jump to solutions before they have finished describing the problem. We compare their experiences to our experiences. We minimize their feelings. We tell them, "Kuch nahi hua." Nothing has happened. This is what I went through in your age. And every time we do this, our child learns that their experience is not important enough to receive your full attention. So they stop sharing. First they stop sharing the small things, and eventually they stop sharing everything. The shift here is one of the hardest things I ask mothers to practice. When your child is speaking, do not prepare your response while they are still talking. Just listen all the way to the end and then ask, is there more you want to share? You will be stunned at what comes out. When your child feels truly heard, you are going to feel good and so is your child. So need number 2, emotional need number 2, is the need to be heard. Now let me tell you the emotional need number 3, the need to feel safe. We've done 2, the need to feel seen, the need to feel heard. Now I'm going to explain The need to feel safe, not physically safe. Most children in loving homes already have that emotional safety, but what they need is emotional safety. So let me explain, what does emotional safety mean? Emotional safety means that your child is thinking, I can be myself in this home. I can have a bad day, I can feel I can be angry, I can be sad, I can make a mistake, and I will still not lose my mother's love because of it. Emotional safety is the difference between a child who comes to you when something goes wrong and a child who hides it. It is built slowly, over hundreds of small moments. Every time you stayed calm when your child brought you a hard truth, You built that safety for your child. Every time you lost control and your child watched you explode, you lost a little bit of emotional safety. Every time you repaired after a difficult moment, you created emotional safety. So emotional safety does not require perfection. It requires repair and it requires consistency. A child does not need a parent who never gets it wrong. We are all human, we will make mistakes. But they need a parent who comes back with love, who says, I'm so sorry I was harsh with you, who shows them that relationship can go through difficult phases. That is the most important lesson you will ever teach your child about love. So we've covered 3 needs till now: the need to be seen, the need to be heard, And the need to feel safe. And emotional need number 4 is the need to feel valued. So let's understand this. Every child needs to know, I matter. Not because of what I achieve, not because of how I behave, not because of how my parents look at me, just because I exist. This sounds obvious. Every mother watching this, I'm sure, loves her child unconditionally. I know that because I've been working with thousands of mothers over the last 10 years. I know that mothers love their children. But the message the child receives is not always the message we intend to send. When every conversation is about marks, the child learns that their value lives in their performance. When siblings are constantly compared, the child learns that their value is very relative to somebody else. When a child's opinion is dismissed, they learn that their voice does not matter. When a child is praised only for achievement, they learn to earn love, not receive it. They're always trying to do better so that they can get appreciation. The child who grows up feeling unconditionally valued, not for what they do, but for who they are, that child has an unshakable foundation. They can fail and not fall apart. They can be criticized and still not be destroyed. They can lose and still know they are enough. That foundation is built one moment at a time. Every time you celebrate who your child is, not just what they did, every time you sat with them in their failure without making it about their failures, that's when emotional safety builds. So we've covered 4 needs: the need to be heard, the need to be seen, the need to feel emotionally safe, And the need to feel emotionally valued. And now I'm going to share with you emotional need number 5, very, very important, so listen carefully. The need to feel connected. Connection is the deepest need of all. Your child does not just need to be in the same room as you, they need to feel that there is living, breathing, felt bond Between the two of you, even when you're not physically present. That bond is what all researchers call secure attachment. And it is the single greatest predictor of a child's emotional health, their relationship quality as an adult, their resilience, their capacity for empathy, their mental health, everything. Connected children are not children who were never left alone. They are children who, when they reached for their parents, found them there. Not always, but enough times. Enough that they learnt that the world is safe, people can be trusted, I'm worthy of love. And that belief, absorbed in the first years of life through thousands of small moments of connection, travel with them for the rest of their life. The practice here is what I call 5 minutes of pure presence every day. Not an activity, not screen time together, not driving them to classes. 5 minutes where you're fully, completely, only with your child. No phone, no agenda, no correction, just you and them. 5 minutes Every day, done consistently, changes a relationship completely. I have seen this happen over and over in my work. Let me tell you about Meera. Meera is one of my students. She came to me with a 10-year-old daughter. I'm going to change the name of the child, so let's say Siya, who had started having anxiety attacks at school. The school counselor had flagged it. The pediatrician had ruled out anything physical. Meera was doing everything right by every visible measure— present at home, involved in school, emotionally warm, patient. And when I sat with Meera and we went through these 5 needs one by one, something became very clear. Siya felt seen. She felt heard. she felt safe. She did not feel valued for who she was, only for who she was becoming. Meera, without realizing it, was always in future mode with Siya, always focused on what Siya needed to improve, develop, or achieve. The conversations were always around growth, and Siya, bright, sensitive, had absorbed a quiet belief that she was always a work in progress, never quite enough for her mother, always one achievement away from being complete. That belief, sitting quietly underneath everything, was the source of her anxiety. Within 2 months of Meera shifting her conversations from what Siya could become to who Siya already was, The anxiety began to move. The anxiety began to lift. Not because anything external had changed. Because Siya finally felt, I am enough right now, in this moment, just as I am. So here is the one thing that I want you to take from this video. Your child's behavior is always communicating one of these 5 unmet needs. The tantrums, the withdrawal, the defiance, the clinginess, the lying, the aggression—it's telling you something. So before you address the behavior, ask yourself which need might be underneath it. If needed, go and watch this video again. Take notes because this is very important for you, your child, and your family. Ask yourself. Is my child feeling unseen right now? Is my child feeling unheard, unsafe, undervalued, disconnected from me? When you find the need and you meet that need, the behavior almost always shifts on its own because your child was never trying to be difficult. They were just trying to find these needs. If this video opened something for you, If you want to go deeper into understanding your child's emotional world and healing your own world, I want to invite you to my free parenting masterclass. Every week I work with mothers from across India, Dubai, UK, US, and I help them become emotionally present parent, emotionally present for their children, because children need this. You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to do everything right all the time. You just have to be present. The link for my free parenting masterclass is in the description. Register, find time for this, and see how you can do so much better for yourself and for your family. If this helped you today, share it with one mother, and this can be your way of helping someone. And if you have any questions, please drop them in the comments. I read every single message and I try to create videos around the questions and messages that you share with me. And I also want to thank you for staying with me till the end. It truly means that you're a learning mother, you're a committed mother, you want to grow, and you truly want to parent your child the right way. So I want to appreciate you for being this parent, and I want to appreciate the fact that your child is very lucky to have a parent like you. I'm going to create more such videos for you, and I'll see you in my next video. Thank you for staying till the end.