Helping your child’s emotional development
Understanding and managing emotions is important for development and wellbeing, emotional development happens over time but helping your child to recognise and name emotions can support emotional development.
Developing language of emotions
Children experience emotions before they can use words so it can be helpful to label emotions to develop “emotional language.” You could do this by:
- Labelling your child’s emotion that they are experiencing.
- Labelling the emotion your child is seeing in other people.
- Through play such as reading, imaginative play (example use dolls or puppet to show emotion).
Lets have a go:
Helping your child to understand and manage emotions.
Children develop their ability to recognise and name emotions through practice, it’s easier for children to do this before their emotions get too intense and it can often be developed through play and observation. You can practice recognising and naming emotions by:
- Talking about the emotions characters are experiencing in media.
- Use books, tv shows, movies to demonstrate emotions.
- Use modelling to show your child how to recognise the emotions,
example “I became angry when I saw that mess because I was feeling frustrated, does this happen to you?” - Use a body map to help your child recognise how they are feeling physically
Do emotion recognising activity with your child such as using an emotion wheel.