Key points
- Emotional development is a complex process that begins in infancy and continues into adulthood.
- Children experience complex feelings, just like adults.
- Recognising and naming emotions helps children understand emotions.
What is typical?
Children experience complex feelings just like adults and get frustrated, excited, nervous, sad, jealous, frightened, worried, angry and embarrassed. Children don’t have the knowledge, understanding or words to be able to talk about and express how they are feeling to adults. Instead they communicate their feelings in other ways.
Children develop emotional skills as they are exposed to different situations and scenarios. Recognising and naming emotions helps children understand and manage their own emotions. Managing emotions is called emotional regulation.
There are four main components to emotional development in children:
- learning what feelings and emotions are.
- understanding how and why they happen.
- recognising their own feelings and those of others.
- developing effective ways of managing them.
Babies start to develop basic emotions such as joy, anger, sadness and fear shortly after birth and then develop more complex emotions such as shyness, surprise, shame and guilt as they get older.
What are the common concerns?
Emotional dysregulation is when a child experiences difficulty with registering emotions and responding with emotions in an appropriate way.
Some common signs of emotional dysregulation to look out for are:
- Overly intense emotions.
- Impulsive behaviour.
- Lack of emotional awareness.
- Trouble in making decisions.
- Inability to manage behaviour.
- Avoid difficult emotions.
- Temper tantrums.
- Tearfulness.
- Unprompted outbursts.
What can I do?
Being a parent means you’ve got a really important role to play in helping children understand their feelings and behaviours.
Some of the ways that you can help your child learn about and express their feelings:
- Understand your child’s behaviour — try to understand the meaning and feeling behind your child’s body language and behaviours and the emotion that is driving that behaviour.
- Teach the name the feeling — help your child name their feelings by giving them a label and helping children to identify their feelings.
- Be a role model — show your child how you identify and manage your own feeling about different situations and how you deal with those feelings.
- Encourage with praise — praise your child when they talk about their feelings or express them in an appropriate way.
- Listen to your child’s feelings — support your child to identify and express their feelings so they are heard. Don’t minimise or dismiss their feelings.
- Encourage your child to take some deep breaths — by having them blow bubbles or pretending to blow out birthday candles.
- Have your child imagine they are a floppy doll and to give themselves a shake to release the tension they are holding in their body.
- Expressing their emotions in productive ways — this might include drawing, using playdough or acting their feelings out with toys.
Who can I speak to?
If you are concerned about your child’s ability to manage their emotions you can speak with your general practitioner (GP), paediatrician or Maternal Child Health nurse.
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