Feelings and emotions in a person shapes the way one sees the world. Feelings create an action-reaction cycle around our relationship with the self, our family, friends, peers, colleagues, and neighbours. The feelings stem out from the interactions with your surroundings, and then reflect back to these people around you. Once you learn to manage your emotions, your relationships with the world and people around you improve further. It also affects your overall well-being, happiness quotient, as well as your personality. Emotional Quotient (EQ) has become as equal a consideration as Intelligence Quotient (IQ).

As we grow old, we have known and experienced most of our feelings and we also get to know what feelings constitute the part of our strengths and weaknesses. For instance, you may have observed over a period of years that when in anger, you end up saying regretful things to the people you love the most. So most probably you might have made yourself to learn to control your anger by staying silent or avoiding any particular trigger in those moments. Or maybe, it is only through the feeling of experiencing guilt when you become more determined to change yourself for better and to adapt good habits.

But when it comes to children, they are only experiencing these feelings for the first time. And when they experience the same feelings with different intensities, it too is a new thing for them. It brings shift in their mood, reactions, body language etc., and it usually is something new your child is going through. Moreover, younger kids haven’t even learned the vocabulary of these feelings. They may feel bad without knowing that what they are feeling is something bad. How then do you help your kids find out what they are feeling, and help them express it rightly without them creating a mess?

Please note that you ought not to expect immediate results. You yourself sometimes find it difficult to manage certain emotions in you despite being a grown up, likewise your child needs their own time. All you can do is be with them and let them know that you understand what they are going through, while helping them understand it for themselves too.

Here are some of the ways you can try —

1.      Encourage your children to read stories. Sometimes read out stories to them. From comic books, magazines, short stories, mythological tales, fairy tales, to even reading novels or poetry, let your child indulge in Literature. It will help them to understand what the characters are feeling, identify with their emotions, observe and analyse their reactions, as well as the consequences of their actions. They will learn through stories how those characters deal with their emotions.

2.      Tell them it is okay to feel bad or sad. That everyone feels bad or sad many times in their life. But what matters is what you do once you are feeling sad. Do you keep on feeling sad or do you want to come out of this bad feeling and make yourself feel better. Help them figure out what can make them feel better.

3.      Many a time children experience different feelings on having realized that they are helpless in a given situation. A friend didn’t come to play, a toy broke its leg, lost a favourite piece of trash, not being able to colour a circle perfectly even after trying too hard, not being able to fold clothes like a pro, not being able to go to the playground due to bad weather, having missed their favourite show on TV, accidently dropping a cone of ice-cream — the helplessness could be about anything. And sometimes children have to learn acceptance here. Help them instead of getting irritated by their behaviour.

4.      Ask them to figure out what they are feeling. Ask them to give words to their feelings. If they are not making sense the way adults do, don’t discourage them. Tell them they are doing well while speaking out how they feel. Also help them understand different kinds of emotions, what they feel like, how they look like. Sometimes share your feelings with your kid in simple language. You’ll be shocked to see how much of it they are able to understand. And don’t laugh if they say that they are feeling like a mashed potato. It rather shows their level of empathy which extends out to even inanimate objects.

5.      It is important to understand the difference between expressing your feelings and playing a blame game. For example, instead of telling your kid that they have caused so much trouble in your life by not obeying you or listening to your instructions, tell them that it is becoming difficult for you with so much going on and a little cooperation from them will help you a lot. I am sure that they would want to cooperate a bit with you with this new-formed understanding.

You can bring about your own approaches too. The important part is to have patience, try not to be too impulsive, and extend a hand of mutual understanding and respect. Once your child knows that you respect their emotions, they will start respecting yours too.