Emotions are vital to your child’s life, influencing their behaviors and overall well-being. However, many children struggle to accurately identify and name their feelings, leading to emotional confusion and difficulties communicating their needs and managing their emotions.

Identifying and naming feelings is a skill that parents or those in a parenting role can teach. Both parents and those in the parenting role and children can benefit from learning and practicing this skill. Identifying and naming feelings is crucial for maintaining healthy relationships, coping with stress, overcoming challenges, and promoting mental health.

This I Want to Know More aims to explore why you should teach your child to identify and name feelings and provide examples of how you can teach this skill while growing your own skills, too.

● Improved Mental Health

○ Developing emotional self-awareness can positively impact your child’s mental health. When identifying and naming their feelings accurately, they can address underlying issues and seek appropriate support or interventions. Emotional identification allows children to develop healthy ways of expressing their emotions, caring for themselves when experiencing big emotions, and learning calm-down strategies to manage their emotions. This self-awareness can help reduce anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges.

● Enhanced Relationship Building

○ Emotional self-awareness fosters stronger and healthier relationships. By understanding their emotions, children can effectively communicate their needs and boundaries, which promotes more fulfilling connections. Parents who understand their emotions can model sitting with difficult emotions and utilize healthy calm-down strategies and emotional regulation to communicate with their children intentionally and respectfully. Additionally, recognizing and empathizing with the emotions of others becomes easier when children have a deeper understanding of their own emotions.

● Better Decision Making

○ Identifying and naming emotions improves decision-making skills. By acknowledging and naming their feelings and thinking about the self-talk that led to them, children can assess how their feelings may influence their choices and behaviors. This awareness allows them to make more rational and well-informed decisions rather than being driven solely by their emotions.

● Clarity and Understanding

○ Identifying and naming their feelings allows children to gain clarity and understanding about how they feel. Often, emotions can be complex and intertwined, making it challenging to figure out what they are truly experiencing. Children bring their emotions into conscious awareness by giving them a name, making them more manageable and understandable.

● Enhanced Communication

○ Naming their emotions enables effective communication with others. When children can accurately express their feelings, they increase the likelihood of being understood and heard. It also helps prevent misunderstandings and conflicts that may arise from miscommunication. For example, instead of saying, "I'm upset," teach them to specify the emotion as "I'm feeling disappointed" to provide more clarity.

● Self-Reflection and...