Author: Yanna Noboa LICSW, CCPT| Child Mental Health Therapy & Play Therapy
In child-centered play therapy there are 4 pillars or foundational skills that allows us therapists to bring about healing and important lifelong skills to children. Out of those pillars, we have the skill called reflecting feelings. In sessions, we are constantly reflecting and naming all the feelings and emotions your child is experiencing at any given moment such as “you are excited to be here!” you are disappointed, the toy broke”. Often, as adults we ask children “tell me how you feel?” especially in situations where they are sad, angry or frustrated. Many children have difficulties expressing how they feel, especially when they are experiencing big emotions and when we ask kids how you feel, unless they have a great emotional skill this can be hard for some. However, there is a very simple solution to help build your child’s emotional skills, and that is to name and reflect all their emotions and feelings positive and negatives one. For example, let’s say is morning time and you’re getting your child ready to go to school, he asks you “can I bring my monster truck to school?” you respond by saying no, you cannot bring your toy to school. Your child then storms off and begins to cry. Which emotions do you think they are feeling at this moment? Often, our first instinct is to prevent the behavior from escalating but this is also a great opportunity to teach emotional skills. In this example, an effective response with a calm and supportive tone would be: ” You are upset, that you cannot bring your monster truck to school, but the monster truck is for staying home” There are many other emotions you can also name here such as disappointed, sad, angry, frustrated etc. in this specific example, you are doing a couple of important things such as 1. naming the emotions- which allows your child to gain insight into his emotions and behaviors. 2. You are validating their emotions in this experience- which makes the child feel supported, understood and that it is acceptable to feel all kinds of emotions. 3. You are helping your child connect certain experiences with their emotions, thereby building their future emotional recognition and identification in similar experiences.
In addition to the emotional skills a child learns through child-centered play therapy, when adults in their lives are also naming and reflecting their emotions the benefits are so much greater. These are lifelong emotional skills that will be useful in their adult life.
One last important thing to remember is that there are so many more emotions than happy, sad, angry, or afraid. The more variety of emotions were expressing and naming for children the greater their emotional vocabulary. Here is Plutchik’s wheel of emotions. Robert Plutchik, Ph. D was a psychologist who created this circular graph that depicts the range of human emotions and how they relate to one another.
I hope you find this information helpful and that you feel comfortable in naming your child’s emotions.
