3 Keys To Teaching Children To Express Their Feelings
Teaching our children to communicate emotionally may not be an easy task but it will be something that helps us support the development of their potential innate emotional and cognitive abilities.
Thus, by offering our children this type of emotional education we will help them to be happy and guide their development as a person. For this reason, taking advantage of the information that his environment gives him, we can help the child express how he feels.
We must know that if we do not teach them this, our children could become excessively vulnerable to both internal and external conflicts. That is why when it comes to “training” them for life it is important that they learn to translate their feelings into words.
The nature of emotional communication
A child who begins to speak will find it very difficult to express feelings, so he will often have tantrums. On the other hand, thanks to the development of the cerebral neocortex, a 5-year-old boy who has already acquired the necessary language will be in a position to specify something more about his emotions.
However, understanding and communicating feelings and the ability to do so are very different things. That is why it is important that children grow up in an environment in which feelings are openly expressed and discussed in order to acquire the habit of expressing themselves.
Let’s see below some simple keys to make our children proficient in this:
1. Make a dictionary of feelings
To begin we can ask our children to name all the feelings that come to mind. We will write each of them on a blank page and arrange them according to the alphabet.
A good way to facilitate this is to browse through snapshots from magazines (not posed) and ask our children what they think each person is feeling at that moment. So we write it on the sheet and ask him to tell us when he has felt this way.
2. Feelings games
Children become more talkative if we use feelings to play. It is about analyzing our day to day and innovating.
If we travel a lot or on the way to school there are many cars we can use the letters on the license plates to form words that evoke feelings. For example, if we see the letters AM and the child says LOVE, we will offer them points that at the end of the week they can exchange for a special meal or something that is rewarding. These terms have to be raised beforehand.
Also how to play with the colors and the moods they evoke. With the photographs and the stories and the feelings they evoke, etc.
3. Play without putting words to feelings
Learning to feel is the first step in describing how we feel. In fact, non-verbal communication is more than 50% of emotional communication, so we must put special emphasis on this. We give you some ideas:
- The muted sound game (7 to 12 years old)
To play this game we have to record an age-appropriate program and show it to our child with the volume turned off. We will then ask you to describe how you think each person in the video feels.
We can stop the tape whenever he wants. We can also award you points each time you know how to describe how a posture, facial expression, or gesture can reveal a feeling.
This game can last 15 minutes and we can award a maximum of 15 points that you can exchange for something previously agreed or simply win the game.
- Charades of feelings (from 6 years old)
With a group of three or more children or family members we have to form a deck with about twenty emotion cards. The youngest member should pick up a card and act out the feeling without words for at least 3 minutes.
The person who guesses the sentiment will keep the card and continue playing. Thus, whoever gets the most cards will be the winner. As children increase their dexterity with this deck, new and more subtle feelings should be added.
- Guess the feeling (Between five and ten years)
The idea is to read and record a simple sentence five times, changing the tone of voice to reflect a new feeling. For example, “I left my books in the car” as if I was sad, happy, angry, scared, or worried. Each hit will be a point. The child must do the same with another sentence.
- We are going to describe ourselves with feelings (between the ages of five and twelve)
It is important that children learn to explore their own feelings and express them through the face and body by creating a dictionary of how emotions are expressed non-verbally.
For this we will need an instant camera, loose sheets of paper and a folder. If asking the child to make a face to express a feeling is difficult for them, then we can ask them questions to help them recall. For example: You feel angry when your friend Juan annoys you, right?
If it still costs you, we can ask you to look in the mirror and shape your face until it looks angry. Then we will take the photo and place it in the folder and then ask you to write on that sheet all the times that you experienced that particular feeling.
Bibliographic source consulted: Emotional intelligence in children. By Shapiro E. Lawrence
