Young Children and Labeling Emotions

When I wrote a post about helping young children with frustration, an esteemed author of The Wonder Years commented on it and recommended emotion labeling as the first step in helping children cope with their emotions. She also recommended her own excellent set of materials on the topic – Kids Problem Solving Binder.

We are pretty big on labeling emotions here. I had a lucky “blind buy” of the book profiled in this post, when Anna was about one year old. When the book arrived, I was disappointed with both its quality (flaps are somewhat flimsy) and with forced rhymes trying to find emotions for each letter of the alphabet (anyone is feeling zany today?). However, the book proved to be an excellent learning tool both for ABC and for emotions labeling. Despite my initial apprehension all the flaps are still in place, but I didn’t let Anna handle this book until she was 2 years old and became less forceful in her page turning. Earlier Anna was more interested in letters and facial expressions of babies featured in the book. However, now we can have more deep discussions about feelings behind the words. For example, we have discussions why whiny and naughty are timeout-worthy behaviors, and what she can do when she feels impatient. I am also telling her what makes me angry or grumpy, because I think it’s important for her to understand that others have negative emotions too and manage to control them… most of the time