6 ways to help your children express themselves, including why you shouldn’t tell them to be happy
In honour of Children’s Mental Health Week this February, we’ve put together a few quick tips for supporting children to talk about their mental health, following on from this year’s theme of ‘express yourself’.
#1 Mirror them
The very first way that children learn about themselves is through us. We naturally mimic a baby’s smile, or frown when a child is sad. Even if an adult is upset we will tone down our expression and lower our voice a little. They quite literally (in a psycological sense) see themselves reflected back in our faces. “Ah, I see. That’s what my feeling looks like”.
The picture at the top of this article is a great example of this. The baby is smiling and leaning in, and the other person matches this perfectly while holding their gaze. She acts as a mirror for the child to see themselves in.
Children can express themselves more freely when they know what it is they’re expressing. Matching their emotion helps them learn about their feelings from the first moment they look into your face.
#2 Name that feeling
We learn to express our feelings the same way we learn to talk about everything else: people around us point to things and say ‘it’s called x’. But while we’re very good at saying ‘you must be hungry’ or ‘you look a little tired’, we’re a bit more reluctant to do the same with emotions.
This makes it harder for children to put into words what they’re feeling. Their emotional vocabulary is the foundation of other emotional skills, such as recognising what others feel, regulating their own emotions, and deciding how to behave based on what they feel. Just like traditional literacy, emotional literacy starts with having some words to work with.
So give them the words by saying what you see.
‘You seem upset’, ‘you look a little angry right now’, ‘you’re acting very happy’ are all phrases that can be used with even the youngest children, including babies. Expand their vocabulary with more nuanced words as they grow older. ‘You’re looking very euneirophrenic today, dear’.
And finally, always add a bit of uncertainty, such as ‘I think’, ‘perhaps you’re feeling’, etc. as you will get the feeling wrong from time to time and this invites consideration and correction. That can be great, as your emotionally-fluent child can now help you improve your emotional literacy by pointing out that they are not feeling a bit miffed, as you put it, but utterly devastated thank you very much.
#3 Model it
Children are little sponges, they soak up everything around them (but while somehow also leaving the place messier than before). The single best way to help them express themselves is for you to show them how to do it.
Express yourself by labelling your own emotions, e.g. ‘I’m feeling a bit cross’, ‘I’m really enjoying myself right now’. This has the added benefits of developing children’s empathy skills and giving them a head start on how to react to your emotion, as well as letting them know it’s OK to say how they feel.
As an example of how others affect how we express feelings, emotional researcher Dr Paul Ekman listed several ways in which white middle class adult Americans in the 70s and 80s learned (not) to display their emotions:
Males hid sadness and fear in almost all public places
Females hid anger, especially if they are in the “pre-matron” (*cough) age bracket
When two or more executives competed for a job, the successful candidate de-intensified displays of happiness when among colleagues, while the unsuccessful one masked sadness with happiness
We all follow certain cultural rules, whether we’re aware of them or not. Make sure you’re showing your children how you want them to express themselves.
#4 Feelings are not wrong
This point is the opposite to Ekman’s example of emotional display norms. Feelings are like opinions; they’re not wrong although they may be inconvenient. Yet we quite often label emotions as wrong and penalise children especially for showing them.
‘I don’t like going to Granny’s house.’
‘Yes you do, you loved it last time.’
‘But I don’t want to go!’
‘Shh, you’ll be fine, get in the car.’
‘Nooooooooo!!!’
When we’re told our feelings are wrong, it’s more likely to lead to some kind of emotional fallout.
Expressing negative emotions such as anger and sadness are more likely to be frowned upon (in Western cultures at least), although any emotion can seem out of place in certain circumstances, like excitement at a funeral.
We tend to conflate the feeling with the way it is expressed. If we give out messages that the feeling itself is the problem (like not wanting to go to Granny’s) rather than the way it is communicated, then children eventually stop saying how they feel. Critically, they still feel the same way but now they can’t talk about it and feel wrong on top. This is more likely to provoke angry outbursts because a) that’s how they feel now, and b) that isn’t being acknowledged.
The hardest thing for us to do as responsible adults around children is to say ‘OK, that’s what it is’ and accept all their feelings, not just the convenient ones.
#5 Describe feelings with interest rather than judgement
“Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face.”
-Erving Goffman
There is a subtle difference between not labeling some emotions as wrong and labeling some as right. But you tend to end up in the same place.
All cultures encourage people to show a positive face to the world at least some of the time, like Ekman’s 1970s Americans. Modern western societies in particular are quite good at nudging people towards the idea that we should all be happy.
As a goal, that’s great.
But that idea that we ‘should’ be happy makes it a moral imperative, with the whispering undertones of anything else being slightly immoral. When there’s too much of “it’s good that you’re feeling happy now, darling” and “what you need is to think more positively,” it is by extension rather bad that you weren’t happy earlier.
Which takes us back to the previous idea about labelling emotions as bad, but with an extra layer of ‘this is how I must be all the time’. It is a lot harder to see how your children are truely feeling if they think you want them to show you happiness all the time.
The power of positive thinking compels you! Demons of negativity, leave this child!
Warner Bros. Entertainment (1973)
There are two key problems with thinking you must always be happy.
positive thinking is not the same as realistic thinking, which makes it harder to adapt to situations that are distinctly un-positive. Like that person who insists you always look on the bright side, even though your pet died on their birthday in a gas leak set off by the birthday candles, ripping through your entire house and uninsured Swarovski ornament collection. “At least he got to see how nice his cake looked”. Not now, Barbara.
no one is always happy, which creates a bit of a disconnect between your inner world and your people-facing ‘mask’. At best you feel slightly insincere, at worst you become cutoff from the ‘bad’ feelings entirely.
To avoid nurturing a Disney-esq saccharine doll-child, show interest in whatever emotional state they’re in, and avoid judgement words like ‘good’ and ‘positive’, as well as the afore-mentioned ‘bad’. If you’ve practiced mindfulness before, you may already be familiar with this kind of non-judgemental approach to feelings.
To show your interest (if, and only if, you are feeling it in that moment) ask them questions like what they were doing that made them feel that way, where they feel it in their body, and what they would like to do now.
Or just smile and give them a hug if that’s what they need, and save the questions until the time is right.
#6 Listen first, brainstorm second
The last tip is skill that we tend to get worse at the older we are. As adults with our superior knowledge, wisdom, and all round experiential expertise - as well as our genuine hearts of gold - we tend to try and solve people’s problems for them as quickly as we can. This makes us incredibly annoying.
“Dad, I had a rubbish time at school today”
“Why, Little Timmy?”
“Lily stole my pencils and wouldn’t give them back, then I got into trouble for talking and not doing my work”
“You should have stood up, gone over to Lily’s desk and taken them back”
“I would have got in trouble though”
“You got in trouble anyway. Did you try telling the teacher what happened?”
“Yes but she didn’t listen”
“Well I’ll give her a call first thing tomorrow and set her straight”
“Um, thanks”
This isn’t a terrible exchange, although it could be made better with one simple difference: start by acknowledging Timmy’s rubbish-day feeling. By jumping straight in to trying to make the feeling better, the feeling is, weirdly, ignored.
As a general rule of thumb, if you are suggesting things and all you hear is “Yes, but…” that means there’s something about the situation you’ve missed, often that the other person doesn’t feel listened to.
This is as true for adults as for children. When we have a problem (and just generally) we like to know we are understood. As soon as that happens we:
feel like the way we are is acceptable; in Little Timmy’s case it’s OK to be not OK
feel more confident in what the other person is saying about our issues
Feelings of acceptance and confidence are not just warm fuzzy feelings, they also help put us in a good problem-solving mindset. So not only are children more likely to listen to whatever you have to say, they can help come up with better solutions too. Brainstorming ideas together encourages them to think through problems and ultimately express themselves more.