Helping kids recognise and name their feelings

29/11/23

Kids experience an array of feelings and emotions just like adults. They get excited, anxious, nervous, angry, sad, frightened, amazed, and so much more. One of the challenges faced by parents and ministry leaders is that young children (and the not so young) may not have the vocabulary or self-awareness to talk about how they are feeling. Instead, they express their feelings in other ways.

When a child is shouting, laughing, screaming, hiding or throwing a tantrum - all of these are ways of expressing big feelings. Often it is because they don’t have the words to describe how they are feeling. This can be frustrating for them and us.

For Christians, a growing understanding of emotions must be part of a young person’s discipleship. Keith Condie concludes after a survey of the biblical material, “We can affirm that our emotional life is a key aspect of our humanness, reflecting the affective nature of the God whose image we bear.” [1]

Helping young people grow in their emotional understanding is all part of helping them grow as embodied humans made in the image of God. Here are three ways to help young people recognise and name their emotions.

Listen and be present

If we are going to help a child identify how they feel, then we must start by being present with them. When we are distracted, it is very hard to be connected and attuned to what children are feeling. In moments of big feelings, stay present and be in the moment with them. So often the instinct of parents and ministry leaders is to try to ‘fix’ the situation. Hard and challenging feelings are uncomfortable, and we don’t like seeing people that we care about struggling with these feelings. But we need to resist the urge to immediately fix the situation or to make the unwanted emotions to simply go away. Rather we can use this moment as a discipleship moment. Leaders and parents can support children to identify and express how they are feeling. When you notice a child feeling overwhelmed or getting upset, take the opportunity to reconnect. Recognise they may need time to sooth before they can engage in a reflective conversation about their experience. But stay present with them and guide them to regulate how they feel.

Be attentive to the cues

Most young children do not have the vocabulary to describe their emotions. Often they know they feel something, but they can’t label it and don’t know why they feel that way. First, ministry leaders and other adults need to be attentive to the cues that they see in the young people around them. Watch how they are expressing themselves, listen to what they are saying (or not saying) and observe their behaviour. Are they clenching their fists? Are they rolling on the ground? Is the face tight? Is their breathing rapid? Are they stomping a foot? Are they running around? These are all some of the ways that big feelings may express themselves when a child doesn’t have the words.

Secondly, we can help children notice the cues within their own bodies. Help them to match their behaviour to their emotion, and if possible, help them to know how the emotion is manifesting physically in their body. A couple of examples:

• crying = sad = rapid breathing, tightening muscles;

• throwing a toy = anger = heart racing, fists clenching, sweating;

• laughing = joy = increase in breathing, relaxed muscles, butterflies in stomach;

• retreating or grasping to someone = fear = dizzy, tight chest, hot/cold flushes; and

• guilt, happiness, excited….

Name the Feeling

Finally, help a child name what they are feeling. If a young person doesn’t know what to call an emotion, they won’t be able to communicate it or manage it effectively. So leaders and adults need to introduce the words and language to describe an emotional experience. Helping a child name an emotion let’s the child know that what they are feeling isn’t unusual or unknown or uncontrollable. There can be a calming impact in just giving this experience a name.

This can be done at developmentally appropriate levels. Young children can begin with primary emotions – for example happy, sad, angry, afraid. Slightly older children can begin to dig a bit deeper – for example disappointed, peaceful, joyful, overwhelmed. There are any number of tools you could use for this. For young children, use a mood board or a simple emotion wheel to help them choose how they are feeling. As they grow up increase the number of options on the emotional identification wheel to help them dig deeper behind the primary feeling to what may be lying beneath the surface. Do this with the challenging emotions like anger or fear and with emotions like joy or amazement. Build them into conversations rather than waiting for the outburst. Recognising and naming emotions seen in other children or family members can help too

 As we help children identify their emotions and grow in their self-awareness we are discipling them into a deeper understanding of who God has made them to be. What could you try with the children in your life?

[1] Condie, K 2023, ‘Emotions and Spiritual Formation’, House Conference, Sydney, 29-31 August.