How to Develop Your Child’s Emotional Vocabulary

How can you develop your child’s emotional vocabulary?  This has been a question I have asked myself over the past year.  I grew up in an age that didn’t fully embrace emotion.  Thankfully, I had a mother who would encourage me to cry and get it all out when she could see that I was overwhelmed and trying to hold it in.  But the world was still full of messages to “be strong” and “suck it up.”  I didn’t learn until I was an adult how to recognize what my body felt like in response to anxiety or anger.  Now that we know so much more as a society about emotions and emotional intelligence, I want to be able to help my kids grow in these ways.  Developing their emotional vocabulary is a simple place to start.

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Get an Emotions Chart to Develop Your Child’s Emotional Vocabulary

It may seem like just a silly paper, but an emotions chart is a great tool when trying to build emotional vocabulary!  There are so many different emotions with slight nuances to them all.  It is easy to get stuck in just happy, sad and mad.  But challenging your kids to think more deeply about emotions will begin to deepen their emotional vocabulary.  Are you mad or is frustrated a better word?  Are you happy or is hopeful a better match?  The more words our kids have to explain their emotions the more likely they will be able to name their emotions when they come.

You can get an emotions chart in lots of different places!  If you don’t already have one, I created one you can have for free!  Look for the purple box at the bottom of this post to grab it.  We have our emotions chart on the refrigerator and we pull it down and use it as needed.

 Start Feel and Deal Time

If you know me in real life, you have probably heard about our feel and deal time.  I give credit for this to my husband.  Naming his emotions has not always been an easy task for him, so he decided he wanted to grow in this area along with teaching our kids so we started feel and deal time at dinner.  We go around the table and everyone says one emotion that had that day.  Whatever they want to share.  Sometimes it is silly and light hearted and sometime it is deeper.   And if there is more that needs to be dealt with we can ask questions and help process anything needed.

As an added bonus, we all get to practice responding respectfully and appropriately to each person’s emotions too.  We have talked about what it sounds like to validate someone’s emotions too.  Of course my preschooler doesn’t understand and apply as much of this as my oldest does, but hopefully they are all growing in their emotional intelligence.

Try a Different Perspective

I will be honest with you and tell you feel and deal time comes much easier for my girls than it does my son.  Many nights he mumbles, “I didn’t have any feelings.”  I typically try to prompt him with a situation I witnessed or that he told me about and usually he will then admit he did have a feeling then.  

One night I decided to try something new.  I gave them an emotion.  I think I picked jealous because it isn’t one they pick very often.  We talked through what being jealous means and not surprisingly my 5 year old hadn’t really known what it meant!  Then I asked them to think about a book they had read, or a TV show that they had seen that had a character who felt jealous.  Guess who had the first answer?  My five year old son!  Turns out it was much easier for him to recognize the emotions he saw in someone else than the ones he felt inside.

Obviously, we still want to continue naming our own emotions, but changing our perspective and naming another persons emotions helped us dive deeper into a single emotion and expand our emotional vocabulary in that way. 

These are just a few of the ways we have been exploring emotional vocabulary in our family, but there are many more!  I would love to hear what ways you have been using too!!

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