What your Lessons on Emotions are Missing - Why it Matters and How to Fix It
Walking down the preschool hallway, I can hear the frantic screams and cries of a child “I’M CALM, I‘M CALM, I’M CALM!!!!!”. Approaching my room, it became clear this was where the cries were coming from. I walked in to find Sarah* standing in the middle of the classroom, tears streaming down her face and screaming “I AM CALM” at the top of her lungs. Her face was bright red, her body was tight with tension and her hands were balled up in fists. She was anything but calm and yet here she was, declaring to the world that she was the epitome of ‘calm’.
Over the years, I had the opportunity to get to know Sarah very well. Looking back on this day, I am confident that in Sarah’s mind, she whole heartedly believed that she was calm. How was that possible?
Sarah believed she was calm because she had a surface level understanding of emotions. Well intentioned adults taught Sarah that when she was calm she could engage in classroom play. Well intentioned adults showed Sarah pictures of emotions (she could identify the major emotions depicted in pictures) and she identified most emotions in others. So what was missing? The more we worked together, the quicker the missing piece emerged and it soon became a *staple* to all of my emotional regulation teaching.
The missing piece was that no one taught Sarah how to notice and recognize the *sensations* that indicated emotional states within Sarah’s own body. She had no idea how each emotion felt within herself.
Are you making the same mistakes?
To fully understand how this can happen and what we can do to prevent this in the future , let’s take a moment to consider what *most* emotion identification activities look like. Teaching emotion identification is necessary and it’s not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination! Let’s discuss how these activities are helpful while also noticing how they fall short when used on their own.
Picture identification (flash cards, picture cards, book reading)
If you search for activities to teach emotion, you’ll become inundated with picture identification tasks. The basic premise is the same: a child is shown a picture (usually clipart) and asked what the person is feeling. If the child isn’t sure, the adult dives deeper by pointing out the facial features and characteristics. Sometimes you’ll find fun variations like bingo games or matching activities.
How this helps: It is important for children to grow and develop their emotional vocabulary. By teaching and modeling emotion words, we are giving children the vocabulary they need to talk about their feelings and emotions. Through encouraging children to identify emotions they can see in others, we’re teaching children how to recognize emotions in others.
How this falls short: When we teach emotions only using clipart characters (or even using real pictures), we’re teaching children what emotions look like in others. Unless a child is standing in front of a mirror, they can’t see what their face and body is doing.
Recreating making emotions in your own body
To take things even further, perhaps the children practice making faces themselves. Sometimes this is done in a group and other times it’s done in front of a mirror. While emphasis is often placed on the facial expression, it’s also helpful to take into consideration positioning of the entire body.
How this helps: This type of activity encourages children to explore how these faces and body positions feel in their own body (keep reading for what this is *really* teaching) and also provides real life examples of what their peers look like when they’re experiencing an emotion. Recognizing emotional states in others is an important social skill - it’s just not the skill we are primarily targeting when working towards *self regulation* (need the steps to self-regulation? Co-regulation is where it’s at!).
How this falls short: The things we can see as observers, are the tip of the emotional iceberg. It’s the culmination and the visual representation of everything that is happening under the surface/on the inside. For children who struggle with emotional regulation, by the time they are visibly showing signs of heightened emotional states, the scales have usually tipped and it’s much harder to implement strategies (if not impossible until their body has calmed). In these periods, children may seem to ‘refuse’ calming strategies. This isn’t a ‘refusal’ as much as a child being completely overwhelmed and unable to process new information. Check out this blog on how to help during these periods of overwhelm.
For some children, use of these strategies is enough. These children pick up on emotional states with increased ease and when adults label emotions for a child (ex: It looks like you’re feeling angry), the child maps that emotion word to what they notice happening inside their body.
For other children, this falls short and results in children like Sarah screaming and asserting she is ‘calm’ while in the midst of a meltdown. So what is the missing piece?
“The things we can see as observers, are the tip of the emotional iceberg. They’re the culmination and visual representation of everything that is happening under the surface.”
The missing piece:
The key to effectively teaching about emotions is to add work on sensations. Sensations are the things we notice inside our body that give us clues about what our body needs or how our body is feeling. For children who are working towards emotional regulation, discussing sensations is vital. Understanding what an emotion looks like on the outside or looks like in others is not helpful if we don’t know what it feels like within our own body.
Having a strong understanding of the sensations we notice in our body when we are ‘calm’ helps us to understand when we have left that baseline. Tuning into our sensations helps us to notice when we are in the beginning stages of feeling sad or frustrated or angry. We notice sensations changing *before* the outward signs appear.
When you are feeling an emotion, you know what you are feeling based on what you notice in your body. It is the sensations that you notice. When you’re feeling nervous, your stomach might feel “fluttery” (butterflies in your stomach - anyone?), your hands might have a slight tremor. You notice your heart beating and your hands starting to break out in a cold sweat. You recognize all of these sensations and notice you’re feeling nervous. As we get older, there are times when we might choose to mask our true feelings by changing our outward appearance. And yet, if you’re tuned into your body, you know that this is a facade - the true feelings haven’t changed.
Okay, we need sensations, but how do you teach that?
Sensations can be tricky for many reasons. They’re often not outwardly visible. They’re harder to notice, understand, and visually represent than emotions. There’s not always a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer. Think about it. If I were to ask you to draw a picture for ‘happy’, you could quickly draw me something that looked like a smiley face. However, if I asked you to draw me a picture to represent ‘shortness of breath’ or ‘increased heart rate’ you would likely be a little stumped (if you’re not, contact me, I need some visuals made!).
Some adults have a harder time wrapping their head around the idea of ‘sensations’ - how do you even explain this concept to a three-year-old? The first time I did a ‘sensations sort’, I challenged my group of four-year-olds (and one three-year-old) to sort sensations into the related emotion bucket. I happened to have two adult helpers with this group. As the children were sorting sensations, I heard repeatedly “Does this sensation go with sad/mad/scared?”. And this was coming from the adults ;-).
Take a few moments to pause and consider what sensations you notice within your own body that tell you you’re feeling happy, or sad, or frustrated, or scared. It’s not easy! Not to mention, sensations change based on the person - what is true for one person might not be true to the next. There isn’t a “right” or “wrong” answer, but there do tend to be some general trends.
To help you out, I’ve written a (free!) social story introducing the concept of sensations and exploring some sensations associated with basic emotions. It’s a starting point with more to come in the future ;-). Be sure to download Sensations: How my Body Talks to Me.
I’ve also put together a list of my favorite books that discuss and highlight sensations: Sensation-al Stories . Finally, I also outline how I work to teach the idea of sensations to children as young as preschoolers. Check out my tips and tricks in: You Know Sensations are Vital, but How in the World do you Teach Them?
When we connect knowledge of emotions with knowledge of sensations, we build a more comprehensive and cohesive understanding of our emotions and how we’re feeling. As Sarah connected with her own sensations, she began to learn what she notices within her body when she was feeling calm - she shifted her understanding of ‘calm’ from “something that I feel to play in centers” to “relaxed muscles, easy time breathing, loose face, controlled body movements”.
The next time you’re discussing ‘emotions’, pause to also spend time noticing and discussing sensations. I know that right now there are not many resources readily available to help with teaching sensations. I’m working on changing that!
To Start:
Grab your free sensations story designed to serve as a beginning introduction to the concept and idea of sensations.
Take it Further:
Sensation-al Stories
Lessons and embedded learning for sensations (all ages!)
Sensations and Emotions: Using Sensations to Teach Children about Emotions
*names and identifying information have been changed.