Navigating the rollercoaster of emotions is a challenge at any age, but for
young kids, this is especially true. For young ones, trying to understand their
feelings and emotions can feel like trying to solve a complex puzzle without
seeing the original picture.

But learning to understand our emotions as kids is an important part of
social-emotional learning and our development into emotionally intelligent adults.
When we are able to understand our emotions, we’re able to form happier
relationships, pursue more meaningful goals, and navigate life’s challenges with
resilience and strength. In many ways, understanding our emotions is like tuning
into our inner compass.

So what can you do, as a parent, educator, or mental health professional,
to help young kids begin to understand their emotions? Keep reading! In this
blog, we’ll dive into a few easy steps you can take to make the complicated world
of emotions a little less complicated.

Develop Their Emotional Vocabulary

The ability to identify and express emotions in a healthy way is one of the
key goals of social-emotional learning (SEL), and this begins with developing a
strong emotional vocabulary.

Developing a strong emotional vocabulary helps kids express and clearly
communicate what they are feeling. When kids are able to communicate their
feelings clearly, they are less likely to engage in disruptive behaviour or
behaviour that is otherwise harmful. Often, some kids might appear to be ‘acting
out,’ when really, they just don’t have the vocabulary to communicate what they
are feeling and experiencing in that moment, and so reach for other tools to
express their distress.

By teaching kids how to identify and describe their emotions by giving them
the words to describe these emotions, you can help kids understand their
emotional experience and ask for the support they need in a more effective way.

Make Use of Resources

MindSparks Kids’ resources, such as our Emoji Feelings printable or our
Empathy worksheet, can be super helpful tools in teaching emotions to young
kids. They take complicated concepts like ‘feelings’ and ‘empathy,’ and make
them simple and easy to grasp.

For instance, our Emoji Feelings printable helps teach kids words for
different emotions, including words like happy, jealous, frustrated, proud, and
excited, by pairing them with fun, colourful emojis to help engage kids’ attention.
This printable can help you teach young kids the different words to describe their
feelings, and can even help you teach kids how to recognize what others might
be feeling based on their facial expressions.

On the other hand, our Empathy worksheet guides kids through different
questions, asking them to imagine how someone might feel in different situations
and how they could show empathy in that moment. This can be such an effective
way of helping young kids understand others’ emotions and develop empathy
and compassion. Empathy is a skill that can be honed with practice, and
worksheets like this can be a great place to begin.

Model Emotion Check-Ins

Parents, educators, and mental health professionals can also help young
kids learn about emotions by modeling their own emotional awareness. For
example, adults can try regularly expressing and describing how they are feeling,
using the emotional vocabulary of the worksheets and printables.

Do you have a big deadline coming up at work? Do you have to make a
speech in front of the school? Try telling them, “I’m nervous because I want to do
well.” By sharing what you’re feeling in a given moment, kids can more easily
make mental connections between situations and emotions and become more
familiar with what their new emotional vocabulary words look like in practice. This
also helps them develop more empathy for those around them, by helping them
become more aware of the emotional experiences of others.

While the idea of teaching something as complicated as emotions to young
kids might seem daunting, you can see that there are so many simple steps you
can take. By developing their emotional vocabulary, utilizing resources effectively,
and demonstrating your own emotional check-in skills, kids will quickly develop
the social and emotional skills needed to understand their emotions and let their
inner compass guide them.

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At MindSpark Kids, we help parents, caregivers, educators, and mental health professionals teach children how to develop necessary life skills. Why? Because socially and emotionally intelligent children grow up to be healthy, happy adults.

MindSpark Kids is an online membership with a database of social and emotional learning videos and worksheets to help children understand their emotions, make good decisions, and think critically.