Emotions can be hugely overwhelming for children and adults alike. Investing the time to regularly talk about feelings with your child is one of the best things you can do as a parent or caregiver.
Not only will openly talking about feelings help your child to better understand their emotions, it could also significantly improve their behaviour and your relationship.
The concept of feelings
One of the reasons that it can be tough to teach children about feelings is because they can be such an abstract concept.
Until you have an occasion or experience to associate it with, it can be difficult to describe to your child how it feels to be sad, worried or excited.
Don’t panic though – there are some great ways to start discussing feelings which we’ll cover shortly.
The benefits of talking about feelings
It’s essential that you teach your children about emotions as early as possible. How they are feeling is likely to affect every decision they make in their daily lives, so giving them the understanding is a vital life skill.
Children who understand their emotions are generally happier and better able to express themselves.
If children know that they are feeling sad or angry, they may be able to communicate this to you rather than expressing it through other means such as a tantrum or aggressive behaviour.
When children understand their emotions, they are able to resolve conflicts much more peacefully and effectively. By giving them the tools to express how they feel, they are less likely to hit, snatch or grab.
Top tips to help your child identify their feelings
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Name feelings as early as possible
For preschool children, you’ll want to make sure they understand the basic feeling words such as happy or scared.
For older children or children with more advanced vocabulary, you could start to explore words such as disappointed or anxious.
You can use games and picture cards to practice identifying emotions and children will enjoy being asked to make faces themselves to show that they are angry, cross, happy, scared or excited.
It’s useful to practice naming feelings by talking about situations you see with your child – either in real life, in a book or on TV. Ask your child open questions about how they think someone is feeling and discuss why they might feel this way.
You could extend this exercise to asking your child to think about whether they’ve felt like this at some point too.
Identifying with other people’s emotions is an excellent way to develop your child’s empathy which will help their emotional intelligence. If your child does something to another child (either positive or negative), talk to them about how they think the other child felt about their behaviour.
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Talk openly about feelings
Rather than sitting down and forcing your child to specifically talk about their feelings, try to make it a relaxed part of everyday conversation.
As a parent or caregiver, you can model how to show feelings by expressing your own emotions. You could say “I felt really happy when you shared your toys at the park today” or “I’m feeling sad that you aren’t listening to me today”.
Expressing appropriate emotions to your partner or friends in front of your children is also a way to model behaviour to your children. You could say “Oh thanks for making me a cup of coffee, that made me feel really happy as I was getting very thirsty”. Children will quickly start to notice this behaviour and associate the feelings accordingly.
It’s also important to regularly ask your child how they’re feeling. If they are struggling to express themselves, you could try using emotion faces. These can be in the form of stickers (of smiley, sad or cross faces) or you could make your own by painting different emotion faces onto stones. Ask your child to pick or point to the emotion they are feeling.
You can help your child identify their feelings by giving them prompts. Try saying “You look sad about something, do you want to talk about it?” or if they have been aggressive or badly behaved you could say “Do you know why you hit your brother/sister? Was it because you felt angry?”.
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Help to provide coping strategies
When your child is confronted with big emotions, they may struggle with what to do and how to cope with them. This sometimes leads to them getting angry, displaying attention seeking behaviour or becoming aggressive.
As a parent or caregiver, you need to help your child deal with the emotion and the situation. Usually, the child will need helping calming down. Try to remain as calm as possible when dealing with your child’s emotions and speak slowly and clearly.
Suggesting you work together and take some deep breaths or a moment outside will make them feel reassured and less alone. Try to teach your child to self regulate their behaviour and to identify when they might need a bit of time out.
Always reward positive behaviour as much as possible. Try to do it immediately so that your child is aware of exactly what they’ve done to receive praise. You could say “I saw that you were angry then, well done for calming down and taking a moment – I feel really proud of you”.
Helping your child with their emotions and ensuring they are confident talking about their feelings takes time, effort and consistent hard work – not to mention patience!
You need to make sure that your child is aware that any type of feelings that they have are OK and that you’re not trying to stop them from feeling a certain way. However they need to know how to manage these feelings because there are certain behaviours that aren’t acceptable.
As a parent or caregiver, you will have a huge influence over how your child learns to express their emotions. By modelling appropriate ways to express your feelings you’ll be helping to equip your child with key life skills.