Acknowledging and Expressing Feelings
Suppressing or denying emotions teaches children that certain feelings are not permitted, or bad, and damages the self-esteem a child needs to make difficult decisions with confidence. Children are also sometimes frightened by the intensity of their feelings. Therefore three of the most helpful skills you can develop as a teacher are close observation, active listening, and modeling how to express feelings with words.
Close Observation
Close observation, or monitoring how children seem to be feeling and looking for signs of distress, gives you the opportunity to invite a child to open up and talk before losing control. Especially with infants and toddlers but also with older children, you focus on interpreting their body language, as sometimes children don’t know an appropriate word or the ones they do know seem inadequate to convey their feelings. As you get to know the children, you begin to recognize signals and can guess at describing how they are feeling.
Particular emotions have recognizable features, such as a red face or clenched fists (anger), diverted eyes or a crumpled body (guilt), or tears (sadness) (Bruno, 2011). Picking up on these cues, you might say to a child, “Your body seems all stiff and tight; I’m wondering if you are feeling mad about something.”
Active Listening
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Active listening means giving a child your undivided attention and accepting what is said without judgment. You reserve your approval or disapproval and focus on how the child chooses to act on his or her feelings. Active listening conveys and models empathythat you care about how children feel and acknowledge that their problems are real and important (Hendrick & Weissman, 2007). Further, if you paraphrase, or repeat back in your own words what you heard a child say, you help teach the subtle difference between lashing out with words (to hurt another in an attempt to make oneself feel better) and the more constructive process of reporting to another person how you feel as the first step in solving a problem.
For example, LaToya, a 4-year-old playing in the housekeeping center, is pretending to make pancakes and goes to the refrigerator where play food is stored to get some milk. Mario is already there and takes out the very item LaToya wants. She turns to Mario, stomps her foot, and says, “No, no, stupid, that’s mine!” and then proceeds to try to take the milk away from him. The teacher steps in, saying, “LaToya, your words tell me that you are upset because Mario has something you wanted to use” (paraphrasing). The teacher might follow with, “but you hurt his feelings with the words you used; can you try again to tell him what you need and see if he can help you with that?”