Journey Of Parenting - Kidnectivity

Little Kid, Big Emotions

Childhood is filled with big emotions! This is to be expected as your child develops.

All emotions are okay- there is no such thing as a “good” or “bad” emotion. While it’s uncomfortable to watch our children go through ‘difficult’ feelings like sadness, anger, anxiety or loneliness, it’s important to resist the urge to try to fix, distract, or make our children's feelings go away.

Effective parenting helps children develop:

Instead of “dismissing and denying” a child’s feelings, we can support them in identifying and expressing their feelings so they feel heard, understood, and validated, even if the emotion seems unreasonable to us (Siegel and Bryson, 2012). Sometimes parents avoid discussing big emotions with the thought that doing so will only reinforce the difficult feelings. Emotions can be confusing for children and discussing them can make them less so. Discussing emotions can help normalize them, identify them, and learn how to respond to the big emotions when they happen again (and they will!).
Dr. Daniel Siegel, author of The Whole Brain Child, developed a strategy called “Name It to Tame It” to help caregivers navigate big emotions. The idea is to support, model and teach your child in naming the overwhelming emotion through words in order to calm them. Naming the emotion and putting a label to what your child is feeling has a “taming” effect, as your child can share their experience and feel heard and understood. All this helps a child make sense and feel more in control of the situation.

Reading books is also a wonderful way to introduce emotional vocabulary that helps children identify and understand their emotions. Books about feelings can help children learn how to identify emotions, what an emotion might feel like, and that all feelings are okay. It gives kids opportunities to see emotions from the facial and body language of characters in stories and learn how those characters manage their emotions. This process helps children begin to recognize these emotions in themselves.

Once the concepts about emotions have been introduced, parents can continue to infuse emotional literacy into daily life by:

Expressing and labeling their feelings
Identifying feelings in others
Helping their child name their own emotions.

Helping children understand emotions, access language to express themselves, and begin to learn strategies for how to respond to those feelings is foundational to positive behavior and self-regulation.