Emotional intelligence or emotional literacy is a capacity for a person to be able to understand and recognise emotions in themselves and other people and this means they can then move on to regulate how they’re feeling to really promote emotional growth.
This means that as parents, it’s important that we can encourage our children to be able to express the way that they feel in a safe, trusting and contained way to support their emotional well being. It might be worth thinking, can my child express a wide range of emotions? Can they recognize emotions in others?
Do they have the vocabulary to label different types of emotions? Happy, sad, frightened and cross are the four most common emotions. basic emotions. So we can build from there. And then we can think about, expanding children’s, understanding of the severity of different emotions. For example, for happy, we might have pleased, happy, overjoyed, ecstatic.
These are a range of different emotions to describe, uh, the intensity of happiness. Children can then learn to recognize these in themselves in the moment. Visuals could be a helpful way to achieve this. For example, using colours, blue for sad, green for happy, red for being angry and then encouraging young people to recognise in the moment when perhaps they’re feeling green or yellow or red.
As a family, you might be able to utilise this by, doing this as a family, perhaps at breakfast or at dinner time, so going around the table and asking everybody to maybe rate how they’re feeling using a colour or perhaps a rating scale from one to ten. And this really encourages the family to really think about how we’re feeling now, and doing that together.
It’s also worth reflecting on the role us adults have on creating a space for children to express their emotions. For example, do you, express how you’re feeling? Do you share with your children when you’re feeling both positive and negative emotions? As a parent, it’s important to model that actually it’s okay to not always be okay.
And we can show that we can model that to children, perhaps saying, I’m really frustrated today because I’ve been sitting in traffic on the way home and this has meant I’m home later than I wanted to be. That’s showing them that actually it’s okay to not always be feeling green or feeling happy. And then also, for some children, it might be difficult for them to recognise when they’re feeling red or yellow or green.
And therefore, adults might need to do that for them. Verbalising and labelling what they’re seeing in your children. For example, I wonder if you’re feeling frustrated right now because you can’t finish your game and I know you really want to. Let’s move you onto the yellow card on maybe a visual tool that you have at home.
That’s really, again, normalising and validating and labelling the feelings that they’re experiencing. The most important thing to remember is about creating a space for children to feel that they can voice how they’re feeling and it will be accepted and contained rather than dismissed.
Children need to be taught about a range of vocabulary to express different emotions, not just about happy and sad, but actually expressing a whole wide range of vocabulary.