Help Your Kids Name and Talk to Their Big Emotions

I was already an adult before I learned that identifying emotions is the first step in dealing with them. Now I always keep the wheel of sensations handy, just in case someone needs help to distinguish feelings of anger from fear, or annoyance from nervousness. I also find the feeling wheel helpful when my child has a strong feeling but doesn’t know how to express it. This helps us find the right word for her emotion and then explore together what it means.

Devon Loftus’ new book Living: A Journal for Naming, Processing, and Embracing Your Emotions expands on this practice with exercises to help you identify, personify, and communicate with emotions. This detailed tutorial is intended for adults, but some of these practices may be helpful for children as well. By using their imagination to create a kind of inner advice for emotional characters to help them deal with strong feelings, they will be better prepared to manage them and not be overwhelmed.

I spoke with Loftus, the mother of a 3-year-old boy, about how parents can use her process to help children recognize and deal with feelings. She said she first started interacting with her feelings as characters when she was a child and faced stress when…

“To help regulate, I would go outside and spend hours wandering through the woods behind my grandmother’s house, talking to those emotions,” she said. “At first, I didn’t realize that this was exactly what I was doing. But I would create worlds and characters. And through those characters, I acted out what I felt or what was happening.”

Three Steps to Name, Personalize and Talk to Emotion

Treating her emotions as characters helped Loftus feel understood as a child, and she wants to help her child create the same tools. She described helping her son through a three-step process:

1. Name the emotion. Ask “Who’s there?” invite him to name the emotion he is experiencing. You can prompt by offering suggestions such as anger, sadness, surprise, fear, excitement, etc.
2. Make it physical. Ask the child to describe how their body feels when this emotion is present. Does it make them move in a certain way, like dancing, jumping, spinning, etc.?
3. Let it go. By performing a physical action, the feeling can dissipate. Say “bye bye” to this feeling as it feels more regulated.

“After about a few months, he started doing it on his own,” Loftus said. “He’ll tell me, ‘Baby’s mad at mom,’ and then he’ll take a few deep breaths. Once he’s a little more organized, if he needs or wants it, we’ll talk about why he feels the way he does and what he needs from us.” And these steps don’t just work with negative emotions: “He does this when he’s happy or excited, too,” she added, noting that teaching children emotional literacy is important for both difficult and joyful emotions.

“We want to better understand our heavier and more frightening emotions so that we can fully celebrate and live with our gorgeous, free and light-filled emotions,” Loftus said. “As my therapist says, the more we have the ability to hold difficult emotions, the more we have the ability to carry those that make us worry that we are living.”

Loftus deliberately pauses when he is in a moment of elation so that he can enjoy it and share it with his son. She also models the naming and processing of emotions when she has difficult moments.

“I try to tell [him], ‘Mom is really upset right now,’ and explain to him the reason, which never includes himself. “Mom is very upset because she overloaded her schedule”, “Mom is really depressed because she is overexcited,” she said.

Five key steps to help children connect with their emotions

Finally, Loftus offers a few reminders for parents who want to help their children connect with emotions:

1. Stop sorting emotions into good/bad or positive/negative. “This is the whole spectrum of being-vitality. Find a way to celebrate together,” Loftus said.
2. If you can’t find the right word for the feeling, come up with your own. “We love Rachel Weil’s book ‘Sometimes I’m a Grump ‘ because it confirms a very intimate feeling, making it personalized and playful.”
3. Individual approach to the child and his emotions. Notice how they are connected to emotions – through drawing, storytelling, imaginary play, movement or music? Include their expression of choice in the study of emotions.
4. Treat your children (and yourself) with the greatest compassion. “Emotions are dirty werewolves. The goal is to create a safe space for them to explore together, not to “master” them perfectly, Loftus said.
5. Practice also in studying your own emotions. “Emotional intelligence modeling is one of the most rewarding things we can do for our little ones (and for ourselves).”