Emotional Awareness

This is a simple and fun activity to teach your little one emotional awareness. 

If you are just starting to teach your child to label emotions, I recommend choosing a very simple book with images of real children/people expressing an emotion. I paired our book with a small hand mirror so A could see herself imitating the different emotions. This makes it very fun for toddlers to learn. Sometimes my daughter would grab other props to imitate the children in the book too. We spent time talking about the different emotions, situations in which one may feel a particular emotion and how they may express it. 

Toddlers are little people with big feelings that don’t yet have the words to express them or the means to regulate them. This activity is especially helpful for language development and beginning to identify emotions. Teaching children the vocabulary to express their emotions is important because over time it gives them the ability to talk about their feelings without acting out. 

Toddlers learn through play. My daughter was about to turn 2 at the time of this activity and beginning to express more complex emotions so it seemed logical to begin to include this type of activity in a shelf rotation to ensure we set a foundation for identifying and coping with emotions in the future. You can start even earlier than this.

Emotional intelligence is among the top social skills we can help our children with. I want her to know that all emotions (not all behavior) are to be accepted and honored, to be felt and to be released. 

She also loves “doing” yoga so I taught her that, when we feel big emotions, one coping strategy is to take deep breaths. Over time this has become one of her go-to strategies when she is feeling really upset. Remember teaching should happen when the child is in a neutral state for the brain to absorb new information. If the child is having a meltdown, it is not the time to teach. It is the time to focus on co-regulating – that is, offer a calm nervous system for the child to sync to.