How to help children recognize their emotions: 9 useful exercises

A series of tips to help children learn to identify their emotions.

Throughout our lives and from birth, human beings do not stop learning. But undoubtedly the greatest and most important learning takes place during childhood and adolescence.

One of the most relevant learnings has to do with how to relate to oneself, as well as learning to recognize one's own thoughts, beliefs and emotions. This is something that requires learning, and in some cases there may be difficulties in recognizing and managing one's emotions.

How to help children recognize their emotions? Throughout this article we are going to see some propositions or strategies that can be useful in this sense.

Emotion and the recognition of emotions

We denominated emotions to those subjective reactions and of physiological-cognitive-behavioral character that arise from the confrontation of internal stimulations (corporal sensations, thoughts or ideas) or external (the events that come from the environment) and that have as main function the one to direct or to alter our conduct in order to achieve our adaptation and survival.

Emotions have a neurobiological originThey have their origin in the activation of the limbic system, but they are also strongly influenced by our life experiences and learning.

In fact, as we have already mentioned, they are reactions to what happens in our life, which activate our organism and predispose us to action, motivating us and encouraging us to act in a certain way and allowing us to bond with others.

Emotions usually appear suddenly and innately and for a short period of time, and allow us to give some kind of value to what happens to us. We often divide them into positive, negative or neutral emotions depending on the type of activation or sensations they generate in us (such as joy, sadness or surprise), but all of them are deeply adaptive and have allowed our species to have developed and survived until now.

They differ from feelings in that they are maintained over time. and arise from the awareness and cognitive elaboration of emotions and their link with the causes of their appearance.

We can find and experience a great diversity of emotions, and many of them have characteristics or ways of expressing themselves that can sometimes be confused with each other.

Throughout our development and as we experience them, these emotions become easier and easier to recognize, but the truth is that the mere recognition of our own emotions is a skill that requires training, and for which external help may be needed.

Emotion recognition would fall within the basic cognitive skill known as the basic cognitive skill known as emotional awareness, which is defined as the ability to recognize one's own emotions.This is defined as the capacity to grasp and recognize one's own and other people's emotions and to be able to classify and identify them with a name or within a basic category.

Emotional awareness is one of the main components of emotional education, which allows children to cope with everyday problems, to be able to understand, react and adapt to their environment and to generate a healthy self-identity and self-esteem.

How to help children to recognize their emotions?

Emotional awareness or the recognition of one's own emotions is a basic skill that is generally a basic skill that as a general rule develops naturally from infancy onwards, but which requires a process of training.However, it requires a learning process in which the provision of external support could be useful.

Unfortunately, in the usual formal education there is generally little support for the development or training of this skill, so that often the ability to recognize emotions can be relegated as something secondary and that depends rather on the subject himself and the experiences and learning that he acquires from family and friends. But it can be reinforced.

Here are some examples of ways some examples of ways we can help children recognize their emotions through everyday learning. through everyday learning.

1. Talking about emotions

In order to recognize emotions, it is very important to know what we call joy, sadness, anger, disgust, fear or surprise in the first place.

In this sense it is useful for the child to be able to talk freely with adults or people in the environment about their feelings and desires, and what they notice in different situations, in order to be able to give a name to the feeling itself.

It is important that if we define an emotion we do it in a simple and understandable way for the child. in a simple and understandable way for the child's level of development.. Without using very abstract concepts and using examples.

2. Give examples of situations in which they may appear

As is also the case in adulthood, using examples can enable the child to understand what a particular emotion implies. It can be especially useful to describe situations in which it is common to feel each of the emotions.

However, it should be kept in mind that the same situation can provoke different emotional reactions in different people. in different people.

3. Facial expressions: emoticons, pictures and drawings

A classic way to train the recognition of emotions is by the identification of facial expressions in drawn faces or photographs.. They do not need to be of great complexity, but simply to be able to observe the type of gestures that are carried out when experiencing an emotion.

4. Mimicry and imitation

Just as important as seeing them can be learning how we express them ourselves. It can be useful to rehearse with the child different manners and gestures that we make when we feel a specific emotion, so that the child imitates them and can recognize some of the physical sensations that his body carries out when feeling a certain emotion.

A method that can be useful is to rehearse faces and gestures rehearsing faces and gestures both in the company of an adult and in front of a mirror..

The free physical representation of the sensations felt by the child is also very useful, so that the child himself tries to express the sensations generated by the emotion he feels. he/she feels.

5. Videos and films

All or almost all children like to watch children's movies, and this is something highly beneficial if we take into account that in most of them there are characters that feel different emotions and situations that can arouse them to the children themselves.

It is possible to use this type of stimulation, which they also enjoy and find reinforcing, in order for them to begin to learn to internalize emotional situations intellectually, and even to identify emotions or physical expressions that reveal the existence of a specific emotion. and even to identify emotions or physical expressions that reveal the existence of a specific emotion.

It is especially useful to use films that are meaningful to them, although there are also several short films that can be useful.

6. Expressing feelings in words

Although describing an emotion is something that can be complicated at any age, one way to learn what emotions we are feeling is to try to express them in words. In this sense, it can be useful for the adults in charge to express through gestures as well as through words how they feel or the type of stimulation that generates a certain emotional reaction.

7. Do not recriminate or censure an emotion

Although we often divide emotions into positive and negative, the truth is that each and every one of them has a function and it is necessary to learn to recognize them. It is important not to It is important not to censor emotions or their expression or make them believe that it is wrong to feel a certain way, a common mistake.a common mistake.

It is not about motivating them to have tantrums or get their own way, but to make them understand that feeling angry is not bad per se, or being sad. They are natural emotions that they must learn to interpret and recognize in order to be able to manage them later on.

8. Dramatize situations that generate emotions

Another way that can be useful to learn to recognize one's own emotions is to make simulations and dramatized representations of situations that generally tend to provoke an emotion such as anger, joy, sadness or surprise.

This helps the child to experience the emotion, and then reflect on how he or she after that he/she can reflect on how he/she has felt and what type of and what kind of sensations it has generated at a physiological or mental level.

9. Describe situations in such a way that they can say what they would feel.

In the form of ethical dilemmas, the description of emotional situations can be used to ask children what they would feel if they were in an emotional situation. ask children what they would feel in such a situation.. Although the answer does not necessarily have to be exact, reflecting on what they would feel can help children learn to identify their emotions more easily in similar situations.