Teach Your Child More Sad and Crazy Words
As adults, we often tell children who are clearly upset to “use your words,” but what if they don’t have enough words to choose from?
Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University and author of How Emotions Are Created: The Secret Life of the Brain , studies “emotional granularity,” which refers to the ability to label emotions in subtle and concrete ways. The more accurately we can name our unpleasant feelings, the better our brains will be able to cope with them.
If it’s a skill that can be learned, it can certainly be learned early on. I tried to help my six-year-old daughter better identify her negative emotions so that she can better control them. She recently had an illustrated children’s dictionary , and we worked on it, several pages at a time. There is a section on “experiencing bad words.” A few examples:
deflated: hopeless or disappointed; like when you feel empty, like a balloon with released air
envious: jealous or resentful; when you want something that someone else has
humiliated: shame or embarrassment; how do you feel if someone makes fun of you
There are also “angry words”:
irritated: irritated or irritated; like when you hear the annoying song over and over again
rage : rage or irritation; like a furious bull in a rage
vicious: hateful or vile; how to intentionally spill paint on someone’s work to ruin it
Later, if she comes home from school upset, I hope she can tell me – or at least tell herself – whether she is feeling anxious, depressed, embarrassed, or just hungry. Then figure out what to do next. As Barrett told Northeastern University , “To prepare for action, your brain has to work better than” This sucks. ” There isn’t a lot of behavioral specificity associated with “It sucks.”
Here are a few more ways parents can work on this skill:
- Use a variety of adjectives to describe your emotions . Your child can see how you react to different situations.
- Create a wheel of emotions . I love how this parent created basic categories of emotions and then added more specific feelings to each.
- Have your child keep a diary of their emotions.
- Read books in which the characters have great feelings. Jack’s Worry is a story of anxiety caused by new experiences. Snurtch is a child’s inner monster that prevents him from doing what he wants. When Miles goes insane, he explores anger and what children can do to calm down.