Healthy emotional development in your young child is just as important as healthy physical and cognitive development.

Whether you like it or not, your child will experience all sorts of emotions (sometimes all in one day!) and will routinely face circumstances they don’t like.

Healthy emotional growth begins with you validating your child’s emotions and then providing an environment in which they feel safe to express their emotions. Kids who feel safe are more likely to develop skills to deal with difficult feelings. 

Helping your young child to grow emotionally involves teaching them to recognise certain emotions in themselves and then to express these appropriately. It also involves helping them to learn ways to manage their emotions and to be able to calm themselves down when their emotions are overwhelming.

The way you manage your own emotions will also help shape your child’s emotional growth. Hence, it’s important that you develop emotional awareness.  

Children’s pretend play has been found to be important in helping them to develop emotionally. Here they get a chance to ‘try out life’ and to learn ways to respond to their emotions. Allowing them time to pretend play is an important part of your role. 

Top tips   

• Bring your child’s attention to emotions. When your child or someone else (family members, friends, character in a book or on TV) is expressing an emotion, use the opportunity to label the particular emotion. “I can see you are feeling annoyed, tell my about how you are feeling”.  

• Never discount their emotions. If your child talks about their emotions, always encourage this and if they are feeling unpleasant emotions let them know you can help them to find ways to feel better.  

• Help them learn the names of emotions. Discuss the everyday feelings they experience and encourage them to use descriptive words to describe how they feel. “When I am feeling a little bit angry, I might say I am feeling frustrated or I am feeling annoyed”  

• Talk about how you feel. Demonstrate the use of different language to describe how you feel to demonstrate how feelings can change throughout the day.    

• Model self-regulation. Children learn through observation. If you feel yourself getting frustrated, angry or upset at something try and model an appropriate emotional response.   

• Teach breathing and calming down. Encourage your child to use these strategies when they begin to get upset. 

• Create a ‘safe place’ in the home. This could be a corner of the house with comfy cushions, a rug and soft toys, or a tent or large box and allow your child to use this space whenever they need it. Removing themselves for a short time can be like a ‘reset button’ for your child and is a powerful emotion management skill to learn. 

DADS WELLBEING

As fathers,  you play an important role in helping your children develop their emotional skills and understandings and their resilience to cope during difficult times. It is important to watch how you respond during these times and the strategies you use to cope. When you are aware of your own emotional wellbeing, you naturally become a positive role model for the kinds of skills, attitudes, and behaviours your children need to master.