Talking about Emotions

With the movie Inside Out 2 recently available for streaming, now is a great time to talk about emotions, emotion identification and regulation in young children, and the new movie. 

Basic Emotions 

The field of psychology has established that there are six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. More specific and nuanced emotions feed from each of these basic categories, as can be seen in this emotion wheel. 

Emotions in Kids

Emotions, and emotion recognition and regulation in kids has become an increasingly hot topic among parents. The original Inside Out movie was released in 2015, and helped many children learn about their basic emotions, and also helped parents and caregivers start a conversation with their kids. Inside Out 2 was released into theaters in June of this year, and recently became available on streaming platforms. Both movies do a great job of introducing basic concepts to children in age-appropriate and helpful ways, with the first movie focusing on the more basic emotions, and the second movie including more complex emotions that “come on line” when the main character, Riley, reaches adolescence and puberty. Both movies do an excellent job at portraying the emotions and how to recognize them, and are a great tool to help parents start conversations about emotions with their kids. However, this is only the first step, as these types of conversations should be frequent and intentional. 

Young kids can often experience some big emotions, which can result in externalizing behaviors such as yelling, screaming, crying, or tantrums. These behaviors are often frustrating and challenging for parents to manage. However, it’s important to keep in mind that often, children behave in these ways when experiencing big emotions not because they are wanting to misbehave and act out, but because they are emotionally dysregulated and they do not know how to manage their emotions (and often may not even be able to identify the emotion). As with many things, emotion identification and regulation are skills that we all need to learn, and little kids are no different.

Emotion Regulation 101

The first step is to help your child identify and label their emotions. Help them figure out how their body feels when they are feeling a specific emotion (e.g., anger may be felt as shortness of breath, tensed muscles, etc.). Examples about yourself, your child, and characters from stories or TV shows can help them learn about their emotional experiences (i.e., what the emotions feel like in their body), the emotional experiences of others (i.e., how to tell when others may be feeling an emotion), and the language to talk about it.

The next step is to ensure that you are also appropriately validating their emotional experiences. As parents, it can be easy to unintentionally convey that big emotions are bad, when in fact, it’s not the emotion that is “bad”, but the unhelpful behaviors that result from emotions. Intentionally communicating this with your child can go a long way in increasing their ability to emotionally regulate themselves, as sometimes just feeling heard and knowing that mom or dad understand why they are upset can help extinguish some of the fire behind the emotion. 

The next important step is to help your child learn specific tools and skills to manage their big emotions. This often includes relaxation or mindfulness skills (e.g., belly breathing/ deep breathing, 5 senses grounding exercises, calming sensory tools/experiences) and the management of their environment (e.g., giving space/ taking a break or problem-solving to avoid common triggers, such as sibling arguments). Sometimes during big emotional outbursts with older children, it can also be helpful to ask your child what would be helpful for them in that moment - do they want to use regulation skills together, problem-solve, or would they prefer to just have you listen to their frustrations. 

Lastly, it is also important to regularly model healthy emotional regulation yourself. This not only helps children learn through experience and gives them the language to recognize their own experiences, but also conveys that emotions are a normal and acceptable part of being human. Even moments where we lose our cool as parents can be good learning opportunities.

For example, perhaps it had been a long and busy day and you were trying to quickly get dinner cooked and on the table for the kids so that you could get them to their evening activity. However, in your haste, and because the kids and dog were underfoot, dinner was accidentally dumped on the ground. You probably felt some big emotions, such as frustration, panic, anger, helplessness, or feeling overwhelmed. Perhaps these emotions resulted in you yelling at the kids to get out of the kitchen and crying over the spilled dinner.

These sorts of situations are extremely frustrating and not ideal, but may provide a good learning opportunity for your kids too, and should be addressed afterward when everybody is calmer. In this example, this type of conversation might include:

A) an apology for losing your cool and yelling at them when you felt angry;

B) labeling the emotions you were experiencing, including how it felt in your body (e.g., “I felt so angry and frustrated that dinner was ruined, and I was stressed out because I knew we had to leave to get to soccer. Because of this, my body felt super tense and I had trouble breathing”); and

C) talking about what you will try to do differently in the future (e.g., “I probably should have taken a minute to take a break so that I could take a deep breath and calm my body before yelling at you. In the future, I am going to try and do better at noticing what emotion signals my body is sending me so that I can use helpful skills before my emotion gets too intense and more out of control”). 

Again, there will always be situations similar to the above, as having big emotions is part of being human. Helping your child understand that it’s how we handle these situations and our emotions is what matters most, and being able to see you make mistakes and grow from them helps them understand that making mistakes is a human experience too. 

If you or your family could benefit from additional information about emotion identification and regulation, talk with your therapist to incorporate this into your treatment plan.