Building Tools for Feelings: Narration Podcast

Episode Summary

Last week in the Back-to-School Special episode about Preparing for Kindergarten one of the topics that came up was importance of helping children communicate their feelings.

As children head back to school and their busy classroom communities, being able to identify their feelings and know what to do when they have those feelings is a really important part of building relationships. Relationships with their peers, their teachers and themselves.

It's also an essential component of emotional regulation. The reality is, we all have feelings, but we don't all have tools for them. It starts with being able to identify them!

In this episode I'm sharing how you can start building a feelings vocabulary in your home using one of the strategies I teach in my program Building Resilience Through Kindness. It's super easy, effective and doesn't require any additional resources.

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Episode Transcript 

Last week in the Back-to-School Special episode about preparing for Kindergarten one of the topics that came up was importance of helping children communicate their feelings. As children head back to school and their busy classroom communities, being able to identify their feelings and know what to do when they have those feelings can be a really important part of building relationships. Relationships with their peers, their teachers and themselves.

Let’s be honest, it also makes the relationships and dynamics in our homes easier. The more we empower ourselves and our children with tools and skills for navigating feelings, the easier it is to understand and navigate difficult moments. Whether it’s making decisions, dealing with emotional overwhelm or a full on tantrum, feelings at are the root of most things.

In social emotional lingo this is called emotional regulation. The idea that you have feelings and when you have those feelings you need to do something with them.

Now, like all important skills, it takes practice to get good at it.

Typically when children are young they identify with the basics, sad, mad, scared, and happy where happy is seen as the default. You are either working towards being happy or you are in one of those other categories. Typically those other categories are the ones associated with ‘bad’. If we were to rank emotions as good versus bad, happy is a good emotion and sad, mad, scared are all bad ones. This is something heavily reinforced by society and something we need to start moving away from. 

The truth is, all feelings are valid and some of those so-called bad feelings are actually what keep us safe, what motivate us to try new and different things…. 

Now I would be overlooking a huge component of this process if I didn’t say, some of those feelings are often accompanied by something I call unwanted behaviours. You know the ones… yelling, screaming, hitting, biting, crying, whining… so it makes a lot of sense that kids make this connection. When I have those feelings someone corrects my behaviour because what I’m doing isn’t okay versus seeing the feelings as okay and needing different tools for the feelings. That’s pretty complex, so let’s start to break down.

The first layer is, how do we start supporting children with being able to identify their feelings.

I have two strategies I’m going to share with you today.

The first one, is called narration. This is something I teach in my program Building Resilience Through Kindness and it evolved out of a couple different strands. First, adults do a whole lot of emotional problem solving in their heads. The problem with this is that nobody has a clue how you reached where you did and for a child working hard as an emotions detective it’s nearly impossible. Second, kids learn best through experience and modelling. So if adults are constantly internalizing emotions, focussing on happiness as the bench and correcting behaviours related to uncomfortable feelings, we’re in a bit of a hot mess when it comes to helping children with skills for emotional regulation.

So, one way we tackle this is by sharing our thoughts about feelings out loud in age appropriate ways. Now, I’m going to tell you, something I noticed about myself when I owned a preschool and used this strategy. I really needed to work on how I talked to myself out-loud because honestly I really wasn’t very kind to myself, especially navigating difficulty or challenge. So there’s an added layer here that can prove to be quite insightful. If we want our children to embrace feelings, be willing to be persistent and face adversity, we also have to be wiling to look at how we are facing these things and model them.

Here’s the basics: you don’t need to narrate every single thought you have. That would be unrealistic and unhelpful. Instead pick a few times a day that you can get intentional about sharing your thoughts in a way that will support building your child’s understanding of different feelings and start to help them understand feelings aren’t bad and big feelings often need tools.

Here’s a couple examples:

Phew, I’m feeling pretty frustrated that my packed is late. I think I need to pause count backwards from 10-1 and then take a deep breath.

Hmmm, I’ve got a big presentation today and I feel a little nervous and scared. I think I need to take a moment and remind myself that I know I can do it! I can do hard things, even if they feel a little scary.

I’m super excited to see your grandparents today, it’s giving me some extra body energy. I think I’ll take the dog for a walk to help me pass the time and do something with this energy.

So the idea here is, how can you share a variety of feeling in a way that both teaches your child that all feelings are valid, none are good versus bad AND that most need some kind of tool for processing. Narration is a such a great way to do this. And some people say they feel like they are putting on a show. 

No worries, you’re putting on a show to teach your child some important skills that are really hard to learn other ways.

Which leads me to my second strategy. 

Books. Picture books are a fantastic way to build your child’s emotional vocabulary. You can take the pressure off having a conversation, you can explore different characters and settings and it makes things less abstract. 

Narration works amazingly well because children can see and feel the experience. As a part of you going through the process you will have facial expressions and body movement to go along with what you’re saying.

Conversations alone are really difficult for children because they have no visual to guide them and emotions are complex and layered. So, one way we make this more accessible is by reading books and making connections. One of my passions in building skills for social emotional well-being is helping parents with selecting books as well as approaches to reading those books in a way that builds skills. Be sure to head to my website taragratto.ca because I have several blogs on using picture for building skills and tackling big topics.

So, as we start thinking about ways to support our children with back-to-school. One area we can focus on is building out their emotional vocabulary to support them with seeing emotions as part of who they are and understanding that happiness isn’t a baseline, it’s just one of the feelings we experience.