A child can’t manage what they can’t name. If everything that happens to them fits into three words, good, bad and angry, the rest is going to come out through the body: through the hallway floor, through their stomach, through a slammed door.
Widening the vocabulary changes the behaviour
This sounds like theory and it is one of the most practical things there is. When a child can say “I’m nervous because there’s a test tomorrow”, they no longer need to shout to express it. The word does the work the shout used to do.
In highly sensitive children this counts for more, because they feel more shades than they can name. They have the experience and they are short of the language.
The thermometer, to start with
Before variety comes intensity. Many children operate in two positions, zero or a hundred, and learn to tell the intermediate steps apart with a visual scale.
Draw a thermometer together with five marks, from calm to exploded, and give each one a name of their own choosing. What matters is that they pick the names, however odd they are.
From then on it gets used daily and without drama: “what number are you on?” It is a question that can be answered in two seconds, even angry.
The real goal is for them to learn to spot the three, because at three something can still be done. At five it can’t.
Emotions as characters
For the youngest it works better to personify them than to classify them. What is Mr Anger like? What colour does he wear? When does he turn up? What makes him leave?
Asking them to draw them has two advantages. The first, that talking about a character is far easier than talking about yourself. The second, that in drawing it they put it outside: it stops being them and becomes something that visits them.
That distance is exactly what they need in order to be able to look at it.
Where it shows in the body
A step almost nobody takes and that pays off a lot: asking where they feel it. The stomach, the throat, the head, the legs.
Sensitive children usually have very clear locations, and when they learn to recognise their physical signal, they have an early warning. The stomach sounds the alarm before the shout arrives.
You can do it with an outline drawn on a sheet of paper and some colouring pencils, colouring in the area.
What you say counts for more
No exercise teaches as much as hearing you. Name your own emotions out loud, matter-of-factly and without turning it into a lesson:
- “I’ve come home tired and short on patience today, tell me if I get snappy.”
- “What happened at work made me angry.”
- “I’m happy and nervous at the same time, both things.”
That last one is important. That two emotions can coexist is one of the most useful things they will learn, and it is learned by seeing it, not by having it explained.
What to avoid
Correcting the emotion: “you can’t be sad about that”. It teaches them that some emotions have permission and others don’t, and that the second kind get hidden.
And the interrogation. Asking every half hour how they feel wears anyone out. Better a little, in calm moments, and above all by example.
Identifying emotions takes up a whole section of Corazones Valientes, Niños Sensibles, with worksheets and exercises.