One of the joys of parenting is teaching our kids to express themselves. When they are babies we teach them to name objects, people and experiences. We thrill to their responsiveness to language. One thing we know about language development is that we, kids and adults, learn receptively before we learn expressively. What that means is that we understand language long before we use it.

What does this have to do with feelings? Well, we have a wonderful world of emotions in our experience of the world. As parents, we are responsible for teaching children about their feelings. When we help kids to know that the experience they are having can be described, named and learned from, we are giving them one of the most valuable tools they have available to them as human beings. Validating feelings gives children a feeling vocabulary.

Our feelings give us information. They help us to know what we don’t want and what we DO want. As parents we may be guilty of trying to talk our kids out of their feelings.

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