But, if you think about it, this rough sequence of learning about our feelings makes sense. Of course, children don’t always learn these things in this order and that’s OK. These understandings are the foundations of emotional health. This is a summary of the 12 things children need to learn about their emotions. Enter, a range of wonderful picture books about feelings and children’s books about managing emotions! Happily, there’s now a lot of information around about emotional literacy and how to support children as they develop these skills. You can read more about how to nurture children’s emotional and mental health here. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that this lack of attention to children’s emotional wellbeing is what underlies the difficulties many of us encounter as adults when it comes to understanding and managing our emotional states: we simply never learnt how to do this when we were kids. It’s only fairly recently that we’ve begun to understand that babies and children even have emotional needs, much less how parents and carers can help to meet those needs. Now, if you’re like me, you may have grown up with little or no understanding about the importance of our emotions, how they work or how to manage them. Crucially, they also need their parents, teachers and carers to understand how emotions work and to support them as they learn to manage their big, difficult emotions.
Children need to learn the vocabulary which will enable them to talk about their emotions and they learn this from the adults around them. It’s also important to understand that developing emotional literacy requires the support of caring adults. Children cannot develop empathy unless they’ve first developed the ability to understand their own emotions. This is really important and something that’s often poorly understood. It is on this foundation of emotional literacy that a child will eventually learn to recognise, identify and show empathy for the feelings of others. Given the right environment, as they grow, they learn to recognise, identify and talk about their own emotions. Interestingly, babies start to develop emotional literacy from birth as they experience different emotional states and begin to recognise how these feel in their bodies. Emotional literacy is basically the ability to understand and express our feelings in healthy ways.
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