Written by Janine Appleby / Early childhood teacher with over 20 years' experience & Rebecca Marshall / Artist, cowriter and illustrator
Children who can name what they feel are better equipped to manage it.
That is not an opinion. It is one of the most consistent findings in developmental psychology, that emotional literacy. The ability to identify and name emotions, is directly linked to self-regulation, social competence, empathy, and resilience. Children who have words for their inner experience are less likely to act it out, more likely to seek help, and better able to navigate the inevitable difficulties of childhood and beyond.
Most parents and educators know this.
Most also feel a quiet uncertainty about how to build it.
The phrase emotional vocabulary tends to conjure something formal, a feelings chart on the wall, a structured circle time activity, a lesson with objectives. These things have their place.
But the most effective emotional vocabulary work with young children happens nowhere near a lesson plan.
It happens in the small moments. The ones that are already there.
Here are five approaches that work, not as programs, but as habits of language that gradually give children more words for the interior life they are already living.
1. Name your own feelings out loud
This is the simplest and most underused tool available to any adult who spends time with young children.
Children learn emotional vocabulary the same way they learn any vocabulary, by hearing it used accurately, in context, by people they trust. When you name your own feelings in the ordinary course of a day, you are giving children a live demonstration of what emotional language looks like in practice.
Not a performance. Not a teachable moment. Just accurate, matter-of-fact naming.
"I'm feeling a bit frustrated right now, I can't find my keys."
"That made me laugh so much. I feel really joyful when that happens."
"I'm a bit nervous about this. I'll take a breath."
You don't need to explain it or make a lesson of it. Say the word, let it sit in the air, move on. The child hears the word matched to the situation and files it away. Over hundreds of these moments, across months and years, a vocabulary builds.
The side benefit of this practice is significant. When children see adults naming and managing their own feelings, rather than suppressing them, performing them, or being overwhelmed by them, they learn that feelings are survivable. That the adults around them have inner lives. That managing emotion is something real people do, not just something they are supposed to do.
2. Reflect feelings without fixing them
When a child is upset, the adult instinct is almost always to resolve the feeling as quickly as possible. To stop the tears, solve the problem, redirect to something better.
This instinct is kind. It also, inadvertently, teaches children that difficult feelings are something to be removed rather than something to be moved through.
Reflecting a feeling back, without immediately trying to fix it, does something different. It tells the child that what they are feeling has been heard and that it makes sense. That they do not need to stop feeling it in order to be okay. That the adult can tolerate being present with it.
This sounds like:
"You're really disappointed. That makes sense, you were really looking forward to it."
"That felt scary. I understand."
"You're so angry right now. I can see that."
Notice that none of these sentences solve anything. They don't offer a silver lining or a distraction or a reason not to feel what the child is feeling.
They just name it and validate it.
Children who are consistently responded to this way develop a richer emotional vocabulary and a greater capacity to tolerate difficult feelings, because they have learned that difficult feelings can be named, witnessed, and survived.
3. Go beyond happy and sad
Most children arrive at school with a functional vocabulary of about four emotions: happy, sad, angry, scared.
These are real emotions and they are useful. They are also the surface layer of a much more complex inner world. It is one that children are already experiencing but may not yet have language for.
The gap between what a child feels and what they can name is often where difficult behaviour lives. The child who hits when they are overwhelmed may not know the word overwhelmed. The child who shuts down when they feel embarrassed may not know the word embarrassed. The child who becomes rigid and controlling when they feel anxious may not know the word anxious.
Introducing more specific emotional vocabulary, gradually, in the moments when it's relevant, closes that gap.
- Frustrated.
- Disappointed.
- Embarrassed.
- Proud.
- Jealous.
- Anxious.
- Relieved.
- Overwhelmed.
- Lonely.
- Excited-nervous (which is its own distinct feeling that almost every child knows and nobody has named for them).
"It sounds like you might be feeling a bit jealous, like you wanted what they had?"
"That face looks like embarrassed to me. Does that feel right?"
"I think I'd feel relieved if that happened. Is that what you're feeling?"
The last example matters, framing it as a question rather than a declaration. You might be wrong. The child might correct you. That correction is itself a piece of emotional literacy, a child asserting that actually this is what they feel, which requires them to know what they feel.
4. Let characters in books do the heavy lifting
A child will often go somewhere in a story that they will not go directly.
When a character in a book feels something: fear, jealousy, loneliness, joy. A child can engage with that feeling from a safe distance. They can talk about what the character is feeling without having to claim the feeling as their own. They can wonder about what the character might do next. They can ask whether the character's feeling makes sense.
These conversations are often more emotionally rich than direct conversations about the child's own experience, precisely because the child is not on the spot.
The discussion prompts at the back of 'The Hoot Hoot Way' are built around this principle. Rather than asking children to report their own feelings, they invite children to notice and wonder about the feelings of characters they already love. That wondering is the beginning of empathy and the beginning of vocabulary.
You don't need a structured activity. You just need to pause occasionally during a reading and wonder aloud.
"I wonder how Benny felt when no one could find him."
"Miss Owl looks worried here. What do you think she's worried about?"
"How do you think Kangaroo felt when his body finally went still?"
Let the child answer or not answer. Either way, they have spent a moment inside someone else's emotional experience, which is exactly the practice they need.
5. Make feelings ordinary
The deepest thing you can do for a child's emotional vocabulary is to make feelings a normal, unremarkable part of daily life.
Not a big deal. Not something that only comes out during difficult moments. Not something that signals that something has gone wrong. Just part of the weather of being a person.
This means mentioning feelings when things are good as well as when they are hard. Noticing positive emotions with the same attention you give difficult ones.
"You look really proud right now"
Lands differently than reserving feelings language only for meltdowns, anger or sadness.
It means responding to a child's emotional disclosure with curiosity rather than alarm. When a child says, "I feel weird", the response should be vocabulary that builds and tells me more about weird. What does it feel like in your body? Rather than you're fine or don't be silly.
It means, sometimes, sitting with a child in a feeling without trying to change it. Not every uncomfortable feeling needs to be resolved. Some of them just need to be sat with, named, and allowed to pass on their own.
A child who grows up in an environment where feelings are named, validated, and ordinary will not necessarily have an easier time emotionally. Life will still bring them difficult things. But they will have a language for those things, and language, in hard moments, is one of the most useful things a person can carry.
The world we are creating is built around this idea.
Every character in Miss Owl’s world has a distinct emotional register; Benny's delight, Kangaroo's overflow, Sloth's contented stillness, Turtle's patient processing. The stories give children multiple emotional models to identify with and language to talk about each one. The educator guides extend that language into daily life: phrases to use during the day, prompts to return to across the week, ways of naming what children are already experiencing.
The Hoot Hoot Way is where it begins, with Miss Owl's class, a shared language, and the understanding that feelings are something you can talk about.
Start with the story. The words will follow.
Rebecca Marshall is the illustrator, co-writer and co-creator of The Hoot Hoot Way and the Together Wood Forest program, developed in collaboration with early childhood expert Janine Appleby.
0 comments