5 Tips to Help Your Child Learn to Express Their Emotions

In a world that causes our children to feel so much, how do they express their many emotions like: pain, confusion and anger?

In a “normal” world, academia can teach a lot, really well. It is only recently that our schools realized the value of social emotional learning. To credit our school system, many districts did add this to the curriculum, along with the many other subjects they were teaching. 

At first, social emotional learning was considered valuable to teach to help children to handle and overcome what was becoming normal behaviors on our playgrounds and in our classrooms. 

• Bullying 
• Isolation
• Anxiety
• Feeling Unsafe

It was then intended to help our children learn:

• Right from Wrong
• Accountability
• Effective Communication
• Conflict Resolution

So that, in the end, our kiddos could feel safe to learn and grow as confident beings.

The schools saw the problem and wanted to address it. The problem is life happened. Our schools are not able to teach your child what they need to know how to deal with the onslaught of emotions your child is most likely feeling in a world that has so much more than playground and classroom maladies.

How can you help your child learn to express their emotions safely? How can you help relieve any anxiety or worry in your child?

MODEL

What do you model to your children? All of the issues at work, finances, home and in this crazy world that you have difficulty reconciling in your heart, how do you process that frustration?

Your child watches this. Are you angry at the rising costs of almost every living expense? Do you come home and yell, curse and blame others? Your child will assume this is the way they should deal with feelings of helplessness.

Whether we like it or not, even when our children are teens and may pretend we parents are not their favorite people, they still look to us for answers. What are currently communicating to your children about how to express emotions?

TYPE

What type of child do you have? How do they communicate best with you?  This is a tricky question.  Many parents will say, “They don’t.” Have you heard of the 5 Love Languages? There should be a book called the 5 Communicators. It is so much easier if you have a child who communicates the way you do. My oldest was like this.  He is very verbal and a philosopher. We could just talk for hours, which I love. Eventually, we would get to his feelings.

My younger son, he was a whole different story. I, of course, would try to talk to him and it was like pulling teeth.  He would not talk to me. I could tell there was so much bottled up inside of him, but I could not get him to talk…at all.  It was one word responses with him and never any “keep the conversation going” type of questions back to me.  It was really hard to talk to him.

I took him with me to walk the dogs when he was probably 8. That kid never stopped talking. You would think he had saved every thought in his head for that walk. I started having him walk the dogs with me every evening and sure enough, he would go on and on.  I learned a really valuable lesson; there are different types of communicators. These probably match very closely to the way your child learns. My younger child is much more of a kinesthetic learner. He talked and opened up freely expressing feelings and concerns, while he was active.

IDENTIFY

Now we have the child talking. They may just have a rush of “what happened” or “why is this happening” or “that seems wrong.” Whatever it is, you are listening at this point. They need to know they are safe expressing whatever they have in their head.

Once they have it “out,” your job is to help them identify all of the feelings behind those questions, opinions and concerns. With a “talker” who is a cerebral kind of kid, just taking apart each issue and asking where they feel it in their body may work.  You can ask what they feel, for example, if they feel it in their lungs, does it feel like they are out of breath, or are they able to breathe deeply, etc.

I am a big fan of emotion stickers. Each person in the family can have their own “calendar” for the week. They can put an emotion sticker on at the beginning of the day and then the end of the day. As a family, you can discuss why you chose the emotions you did and what happened that day.

A big part of social emotional learning is self-awareness and the ability to identify and manage your own emotions. The next step is to see the connection between your emotions, thoughts, values and feelings. You can “teach” this everyday with this calendar, while modeling this behavior.  This will make an enormous stride in helping your child learn to express their emotions.

UNDERSTAND

What do you do if your child does not agree with you? It is an incredibly divisive world right now. You can pick almost any topic and it seems that our population is violently “opposed” or “for” it. News, social media, bumper stickers and just people in general are “shouting” an opinion as if it were fact.  Where ever your child “hangs” out is probably no different.

It would be so much easier if their confusion matched yours. That may not, however, be the case.  This is an activity in learning to identify their emotions and feeling safe to express them.  It is not a time to receive a lecture because they have their facts wrong.

Listen. It seems so simple. It may feel so powerless. If your child starts talking, more than half of the battle is won! Listening is the most amazing gift you can give them.

Remember, everyone experiences the same feelings. What triggers us to feel that way may be different, but the feelings are just as wonderful or awful in all of us. 

Support your child in their feelings. Help them to “see” what they are saying, simply by parroting back what they said.  For example, “It sounds like you are really sad and angry too that you did not get the lead role in the play.” You just allowed them to see that you heard two emotions AND you are asking if that is what they are saying AND you are giving no opinion.

EXPRESS

This memory is so vivid for me.  It happened before there was talk about social emotional learning. I felt like I failed as a mom. My older son, the one who talked endlessly with me, the one who made me think I was doing a great job as a mom, was a young teen age boy in tears.  He was shaking with anger.

He looked at me with rage and despair and said, “Mom, I don’t know what to do with it.” 

I had no idea what “it” was. All I saw was my devastated kid that was near bursting.

When I figured out his meaning, I realized, I always taught my boys that emotions were okay to feel. I think I concentrated on the “it’s okay to cry” for boys since that was the “biggee” in our society at that time.  I did not, however, teach them a healthy way to get let everything they felt out. I don’t know if I had ever really thought about it.

It is time to think about it.  Your child will feel everything. When they are gushy in love, spitting mad, indignant with injustice, etc what are the realistic ways you are going to encourage them to express those powerful feelings?

Do you need ideas?

• Listen to music, LOUD
• Physical activity (I like loud music and a mini-trampoline)
• Draw
• Journal (everyone will recommend this, I am very cerebral and this one is hard for me, although it worked wonders for me as a kid)
• Allow your body to physically express the emotion (cry, scream, sleep, fist clenching, etc) and hit a punching bag or have a scream corner or a cuddle couch for tears.

Cyclical

Do you ever get the hang of something, work really hard to learn it and then think, “Thank goodness, this is done,”?  You may feel like this when you are talking with your children about expressing emotions or when an ‘event’ happens and it is successfully managed.  Learning how to express emotions is kind of like the “sex talk” it is not a “one and done” kind of thing.  You will get to have many do-overs. The success you have when they are 6 may differ completely from how they need your support when they are 16.

The great news is that the steps are the same and you have already been talking about feelings.  Emotions are difficult for many people to have conversations about since there are absolutely no facts necessary for them.  We just all need to remember, regardless of how we feel about something, the emotions our children are feeling are real, powerful and need to be expressed.

I am curious, what is the most difficult conversation/lesson for you in your household with your children? I compared teaching your children how to express their emotions with talking to them about your values on sex. Are there other “tough topics?”

“You gotta be ready to listen to your children, even if they have nothing to say.”
~Buck, Chicken Little