Helping Children Understand Emotions

 

THE “BASICS” OF EMOTIONAL UNDERSTANDING

What do children need to understand about emotions? The concepts that toddler Brenda, as well as the rest of Terry’s children and other young children, are developing probably include the following “basics” (Saarni, 1990):

1. Every one has emotions.I feel happy this morning. So does Brandon, and so does Barry. Terry, my caregiver, has feelings too. She is excited and surprised sometimes, and sometimes she is serious or unhappy .

2. Emotions arise because of different situations. Lots of things make me happy: my toast on my high chair tray, a hug from Terry, the click of beads on the chain when I tug it. When someone takes my toy, or when I fall off my bike, or when I just get tired after lunch, I get angry or sad.

3. There are different ways of showing feelings.Warren fusses alot when he doesn’t have something he really wants, like his bottle. Doreen just comes right over and grabs things. Nina tries to talk me into giving her my toys or gives something in trade. And sometimes I whine and pout.

4. Other people may not feel the same way I do about everything. When I am tired, I want my “woober,” but Barry just sucks his thumb when he’s tired. I like to ride around the patio on my trike very, very slowly, but Nina wants to go fast and get ahead of me.

5. I can do things to change how I feel and how others feel. When I’m sad, I can go sit in Terry’s lap or in the big chair and after a while I feel better. Sometimes when baby Warren is fussing, I make funny faces at him, and he starts to laugh. 

OBSTACLES TO UNDERSTANDING ABOUT FEELINGS

Children do not arrive at this emotional understanding quickly or automatically. As Exploration 3 in Part II emphasises, developmental limitations, family and community environments, and cultural differences may create challenges along the way. Infants and very young children have only limited ability to infer the reasons for others’ happiness, sadness, or anger. And even somewhat older children have a hard time drawing conclusions about the causes of emotion when the situation is unfamiliar, or when the other person’s feelings are different from those the child would have. Young children may also have trouble understanding the cause-effect connections between an event and an emotional response, and they have particular difficulty under- standing complex emotional experiences or mixed emotions (Denham, 1998).

Differences in family expressiveness (Dunsmore & Halberstadt, 1997; Halberstadt, Crisp, & Eaton, 1999) also influence children’s ability to understand various emotional situations. Generally, more expressive families provide richer opportunities to develop emotional understanding. How- ever, there are limits to the benefits of expressiveness. Conflict-ridden families and violent communities offer many emotionally intense experiences, but these environments often leave young children frightened, confused, and unable to process emotion signals in accurate, adaptive ways (Camras et al., 1996; Repetti, Taylor, & Seeman, 2002).

Finally, cultural contexts may complicate children’s development of emotional understanding. For example, rules about how and when to show feelings may be easy for children to understand in the familiar culture of home and community. In Nina’s Mexican American household, children are encouraged to express their feelings less intensely than is permitted in her family child care home. In a culturally diverse child care or school set- ting, the rules may be confusingly different. And for children whose home language differs from that of their early childhood program, even the words that represent feelings can be obstacles.

Teachers should not be discouraged by these multiple challenges to emotional understanding. Teachers can do more than just sit back and wait for children to mature. The emotion centered professional will develop a rich array of strategies to help children of every age, family history, and cultural environment gain a better understanding of their own and others’ feelings.

SETTING THE STAGE

Much positive learning about emotions occurs without direct adult instruction. Terry supports children’s emotional understanding by establishing an environment that enhances concept development, by allowing children opportunities to experience, observe, and express feelings dur- ing spontaneous peer play, and by being attuned to teachable moments throughout the day.

Supporting General Concept Development

In many ways, learning about emotions parallels and is a product of children’s understanding of many other concepts, such as time, space, number, and causality (Scholnick, Nelson, Gelman, & Miller, 1999). By support- ing concept development and learning in all domains, early childhood professionals will simultaneously enhance children’s understanding of concepts of emotion (see Resource Note 3.1 and Exploration 2 in Part II).

As in Terry’s family child care home, children gain conceptual under- standing when their learning is embedded in many real-world exemplars of a particular concept. Young children may use these exemplars to con-struct models or prototypes of particular concepts, including concepts about emotions (Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, & O’Conner, 2001). A child’s mental representation of “sad,” for example, comes to include not just the vocabulary word sad, but also associated causes, frequently observed sad situations, and memories of sad behaviours. 

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