Child Emotions: How To Use Them To Empower Your Child

The entire range of child emotions need to be correctly labeled if we are to help our child to become more self confident. The first step in correctly labeling our child's emotions is to acknowledge and openly express our own feelings.

This helps our child to understand that all emotions and feelings are okay, not just the good ones. It also allows our child to know what these emotions feel like and how to express them properly.

Knowing how to both understand and accept all of his feelings helps to teach our child how to trust his own feelings. Trusting their feelings will hopefully lead to our sons and daughters making good decisions that benefit both them and the other important people in their lives.

Another important effect of teaching our children to understand and accept their feelings is it will make teaching empathy to them so much easier. This is an important part of bringing up an emotionally intelligent child.

How to Label Child Emotions Correctly

Correctly labeling child emotions becomes easier once we have an okay understanding of our own feelings. Yes just an okay understanding is enough; we don't need an in-depth knowledge. So long as we know when we are feeling sad, anger, happy or nervous and so on, we are well over half the way there.

Words are a powerful way to correctly label our child's emotions. Just by adding a few feeling words into our everyday conversations with our child can be extremely effective.

"Playing in the snow/water makes me feel happy, how does it make you feel?"
"I can see that it upsets you when other kids are mean to you"
"Mommy/daddy is feeling a bit sad at the moment"
"I love it when we spend time together"

Just remember when expressing our feelings to our kids to be honest. Kids are extremely perceptive, they know when we are covering things up. So do no tell them that you are okay when you are clearly not. It will only confuse them and send a strong message to them that being angry or sad or what ever emotions we are covering up is wrong and we shouldn't feel it.

The problem with hiding our feelings or incorrectly labeling them to our kids is that our kids model our behaviour. The next time they are feeling sad or angry for example, they will repeat back to us that "nothing is wrong I am okay." And all of a sudden the lines of communication are closed.

This is not because our kids do not want to tell us what is wrong instead it is because we taught them not to tell us.

By us wanting to protect them from our sadness or anger we have unconsciously sent them a very strong signal that either these feelings are wrong and shouldn't be talked about. Or they will not be able to correctly label their feelings because we have taught them (through denial) not to trust what they are feeling.

By keeping in the back of our minds the longer term consequence of our actions today we can combat sending the wrong signals. As I have mentioned in other posts, for me having a clear vision of what I want to achieve as a parent has given me so much more understanding on what signals I am sending my kids. This in turn has improved my understanding of child emotions.

Watching movies together as a family is another great way to work on correctly labeling child emotions that is easy and fun. So get out the popcorn and enjoy spending some quality time together.

You don't need to get into a deep and meaningful conversation, just acknowledge and correctly label the feelings that you felt by watching the movie and let the conversation go from there. The conversation could be short and sweet or it might just lead to a more in-depth discussion on child emotions.

Generally speaking most people find it easier to talk about other people's feelings then our own. So watching movies together is a great starting point if you are not comfortable talking about your own feelings.

I also find with my son that playing sport with him is a great way to get the conversation going. And again I talk about feeling when and where appropriate. Generally he leads the conversation and after a while will tell be about how someone upset him at school today or how he scored the wining goal and so on.

The more quality time I spend with my children (this usually involves simply doing things they want to do) the more opportunities I have to talk to them about both feelings and everyday stuff. This in turn makes it easier to label and discuss all the child emotions they feel.

Body Language is another way to help our child understand and correctly labeling her feelings. That is, how our bodies can feel when we experience different feelings. Some of the typical body reactions are,

When we are confident we stand tall, push out our chest and are willing to tackle any challenge.

When we feel vulnerable or lack confidence we tend to hunch our shoulders, look down and avoid eye contact.

When we are excited we feel full of energy, we laugh or giggle easily and generally feel on top of the world.

When we are stressed or worried about something our body's tense up and its not uncommon for us to get colds, an upset stomach or headaches.

When we are nervous, our heart races faster, we can often get sweaty palms and we will have plenty of butterflies in our tummy.

Body language sends out some very powerful messages to others. It can also be easily used to transform the way we are feeling, to develop empathy with us and to improve the way others perceive us. Watch out for future articles where I will discuss the importance of body language in our every day lives.

One final thing to remember is that to be successful at accepting all of your child's emotions you do not need to do this all of the time. Just make sure you do it about 40% of the time and you will be well on the way to having an emotionally intelligent child.