Parents learning new feeling vocabulary practices to teach their kids
What Accounts for Variations in Children’s Abilities to Label Emotions?
The ability to label emotions is a developmental skill that is not present at birth—it must be learned.
And just as there is wide variation in the point at which children start to demonstrate appropriate use of books, begin writing, and recognize letters, some children’s ability to identify, understand, and label their emotions develops at a slower rate than others.
Three variables can underlie a child’s growing ability to label emotions:
(1) the child’s temperament and developmental status
(2) parental socialization and environmental support
(3) the teacher and child care providers’ emphasis on emotional literacy.
Indeed, differences in the way adults talk to and teach children about feelings and problem solving are related to children’s abilities to label emotions.
What Can Adults Do?
Adults can play a major role in children’s ability to identify, understand, and express emotions in a healthy way. The following strategies are key in fostering emotional literacy in young children:
Express Your Own Feelings.
One way to help children learn to label their emotions is to have healthy emotional expression modeled for them by the adults in their lives.
For example, a teacher who knocked over all the glitter can say, “Oh boy, I feel frustrated. Oh well, I’d better take a deep breath and figure out how to clean it up.”
Or a parent who just got word that she got a promotion at work can say, “Wow! I feel so excited about this! I feel proud of myself for working so hard.”
Parents, teachers, and child care providers can make a point to talk out loud about their feelings as they experience them throughout the day.
Label Children’s Feelings.
As adults provide feeling names for children’s emotional expressions, a child’s feeling vocabulary grows.
Throughout the day, adults can attend to children’s emotional moments and label feelings for the children.
For example, as a child runs for a swing, another child reaches it and gets on. The first child begins to frown. The teacher approaches her and says, “You look like you feel a little disappointed about that swing.”
Or a boy’s grandmother surprises him by picking him up at childcare. The boy screams, “Grandma!” and runs up to hug her. The child care provider says, “Oh boy, you look like you feel so happy and surprised that your grandma is here!”
As children’s feeling vocabulary develops, their ability to correctly identify feelings in themselves and others also progresses.
Below is a great recap of what we learned from Feeling Blocks at Los Angeles Mommy and Me Networking last week!
Click here to check out the video trivia!
Play Games, Sing Songs, and Read Stories with New Feeling Words.
Adults can enhance children’s feeling vocabularies by introducing games, songs, and storybooks featuring new feeling words.
Teachers and other caregivers can adapt songs such as
“If you’re happy and you know it” with verses such as
“If you’re frustrated and you know it, take a breath”;
“If you’re disappointed and you know it, tell a friend”; or
“If you’re proud and you know it, say ‘I did it!’”
and use the extended vocabulary Feeling Blocks to add new versus to the song.
- Pass the Feeling Block around a circle as music plays. When the music stops, the child holding the block can select a face designating an emotion and identify it, show how they look when they feel that way, or describe a time when he or she felt that way.
- Using the Feeling “Face” Block, choose the sad face and explain that it is normal to feel sad sometimes. Talk about things they do when they feel sad.
Ask what helps them to feel Happy again. Some examples could be talking to a family member or a friend, going for a walk, spending time with a pet, etc.
- Use the Feeling “Face” Block as a bowling ball and roll a feeling and ask them think of a time that they felt that way.
- Choose a feeling word for the day from one of the Feeling Blocks. Look the word up in the dictionary together and be sure that everyone is now familiar with it’s meaning. Use the word in a sentence and have everyone describe a time when they felt that way.
- Children and adults can play “feeling face charades” by using the Feeling Block to choose a feeling and then freezing a certain emotional expression and then letting others guess what the feeling is.
- In the mornings, have children “check in” by selecting a feeling face that best represents their morning mood. At the end of the day, have children select again, and then talk about how their feeling changed or stayed the same and why.
- Choose a word from the Feeling Blocks and make statement like
I feel happy when the sun is shining.
I feel sad when I when it’s raining and I can’t play outside.
I feel loved when my mom and dad hug me.
I feel angry when you ignore me.
I feel excited when it’s time to go to the park
I feel scared when I have to speak in front of the class.
- Pick a word and find all the synonyms you can for it. Talk about how the feelings are the same but different.