6 Ways to Help Children Identify & Express Feelings

Learning to identify and express feelings in a positive way helps children develop the skills they need to manage them effectively. Here are some tips on how to encourage your child to express their feelings:

Talking Points

• Take the time to understand your child
• Your child needs to know that you care about their feelings and this needs to be consistently portrayed throughout childhood
• Normalise the act of talking by sharing your own feelings with your child.
• Encourage your children to label their feelings.
• Avoid suppressing the feeling or making your child feel foolish for sharing a feeling.
• Above all, be approachable so that the children always feel comfortable to tell you how they feel.

The following transcript is auto-generated from Youtube

hello my name is Gaynor Dale and I’m the
principal at region international school
for more educational videos please
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in the comments box below today I’m
going to talk to you about how to
encourage your child to share their
feelings the first stage is when your
child is very very small to really learn
and understand how your child feels what
makes them sad what makes them happy
what makes them laugh and what makes
them cry babies and small children need
to know that we care about those
feelings we need to validate them by
responding to them appropriately as
adults we need to model how to share
feelings effectively it’s not always
easy for everybody to open up about
their feelings but the earlier that we
model that it’s okay to express how we
feel and to normalize that in the family
situation the better the children learn
to understand that this is a normal and
natural part of family dialogue
encourage your children to label their
emotions articulate the emotion and
describe it ensure that your child
understands the words to use to describe
how they feel once you’ve created a
culture within the family home that it’s
normal and natural part of your family
culture to share and express your
feelings you’ve modeled the way that
feelings can be shared and expressed
it’s really important then to keep a
balance to ensure that the times when
the children are expressing their
feelings are appropriate but most
importantly that they don’t feel
conscious or feel that they have to
suppress the way that they are feeling
it’s really important that we create
that feeling within the home that the
children can express themselves without
judgment and comfortably ensure that
you’re not too judgmental about the way
that a child has responded and the way
that they’re expressing their feelings
it would only take one time for you to
act in anger or frustration to the way a child
is expressing themselves if they’re
wanting to reach out to you and look for
encouragement and support it’s very very
important that you respond in an
appropriate way to your child’s concern
into their emotion so to summarise
understand your child model well to your
child teach them how to use language of
emotion don’t be judgmental and be
highly approachable thank you