Talking about feelings and emotions with your children

As a parent, this can be much easier said than done. You might not be used to talking about feelings so openly yourself. You might have tried to protect your child from difficult feelings as far as possible. Some children might squirm and resist efforts to talk about tricky feelings. Sometimes these things can just be really hard to talk about.

Yet we also know how important it can be to support a child’s emotional understanding and expression. Not only does it support their ability to identify, label and make sense of their feelings, it also gives a clear message that it is OK to have different feelings. It teaches children that letting someone know how they are feeling can be helpful; they don’t have to hide away, bottle things up or try to manage things by themselves. For those children who struggle to calm down or manage their mood, supporting their emotional literacy is often the first step towards them developing strategies for staying well-regulated.

So how can you start to introduce these conversations?