Emotional Literacy For Your Toddler, Pre-Schooler, and Beyond [VIDEO!]

As parents, we read books to our young children nightly before bed.  We participate in weekly story times and join the library’s summer reading program all in efforts to help teach the skill of early reading literacy.  This is spectacular.  Way to go moms, dads, grandparents, and caregivers!  You are helping your child succeed!   

But did you know that early emotional literacy is equally important to a child’s mental health. 

What is emotional literacy you ask?  Emotional Literacy is a term that describes many components of a child’s emotional life. Theses components include:

• Your child’s vocabulary of feeling words.
• Your child’s ability to discriminate between individual feelings states.
• Your child’s ability to accurately communicate their feeling state.
• Your child’s understanding of how their feelings influence others or are influenced by others.
• Your child’s understanding of how their feelings or other’s feelings impact situations.

Goodyear-Brown, P. (2010). Play therapy with traumatized children: a prescriptive approach. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons (pg.168).

In normal child development, children enter the world with strong emotional responses but no words to express them.  This is why infants cry to get their needs met and young toddlers tend to throw more tantrums than older children.  They do not yet have the word to express their feelings at this early stage of development.

It is our job as parents and caregivers to help children form a vocabulary that includes feeling words like happy, mad, sad, scared, frustrated, worried, or confused.  As caregivers we have a job to help children form associations between feeling states and behavior and learn how to articulate feelings appropriately. 

So now you ask… how do you do all of that?

Luckily you can utilize your love for early reading literacy to help teach your young children emotional literacy as well.  Starting as early as infancy, read to your child books that address emotional states and utilize feeling words.  Then use the pictures and feeling words in the book to engage your child in further dialog.  

To help get you started, here are several of my favorite children’s books that promote positive emotional literacy. I like these books because they are simple, fun, and beautifully illustrated.  

Board Books:

• Duck & Goose How are you Feeling? By Tad Hills
• Happy Hippo, Angry Duck by Sandra Boynton
• The Feelings Book by Todd Parr

Toddler:  

• Move Your Mood by Brenda Miles
• Sesame Street: Happy and Sad, Grouchy and Glad by Constance Allen
• My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss

Pre-school and Beyond:

• Glad Monster, Sad Monster: A Book about Feelings by Ed Emberley
• Feelings by Aliki
• The Way I Feel by Janan Cain

There are many more great children’s books about emotions.  Go to your local library and check out a book today.   

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Photo by Daniela Rey on Unsplash