How Children’s Emotions Really Work and What Adults Can Do to Help
Children are not born knowing how to handle their feelings. They learn it slowly through the adults around them. When parents and caregivers understand how emotional development works, everything becomes easier. Behaviour makes more sense, outbursts feel less personal and supporting a child becomes far more effective.
Why Children Feel Everything So Strongly
A child’s brain is still developing. The part that reacts quickly to danger becomes active very early in life. The part that helps them calm down and think clearly develops much more slowly.
This is why children:
• get overwhelmed easily
• cry or shout suddenly
• find it hard to explain what they feel
• need adults to help them calm their bodies
This is not a child trying to be difficult. It is simply how a young brain works.
Your Response Shapes Their Emotional Skills
Research in developmental psychology shows something important. Children build emotional skills through relationships. When a child feels safe with you, they learn to feel safe inside themselves.
What truly helps is:
• staying close when they struggle
• naming feelings gently
• showing you understand their experience
• helping them breathe or take a break
Children do not learn by being told to stop feeling something. They learn by seeing and experiencing what support looks like.
Naming Emotions Helps the Brain Settle
Studies show that when children learn emotion words, their brains calm down faster. Naming an emotion helps the body shift out of a survival state and into a more regulated one.
For example:
“You are feeling angry because your tower fell. I am here. You are safe.”
Short, simple and grounding. Over time this builds strong emotional intelligence.
Why Visual and Repetitive Tools Work
Young children learn best through pictures, rhythm and repetition. Visual tools, stories and characters help them recognise feelings much more easily than verbal explanations alone.
This is why emotion books, picture charts or rhyming stories are so effective. They create a familiar pathway. With repetition, children eventually begin using the steps on their own without prompting.
What Happens When Children Do Not Learn These Skills
Avoiding feelings never makes them disappear. It pushes them deeper. Research shows that children who are not supported to understand emotions often:
• react with bigger outbursts
• hold feelings inside until they become anxiety
• struggle to make sense of frustration
• have difficulty with friendships
• become fearful of their own feelings
Supporting emotions early gives children the tools they will use for the rest of their lives.
What Parents and Carers Can Start Doing Today
You do not need to be perfect. You simply need to be present. These small steps make a real difference:
• slow your own body down before reacting
• validate the feeling even while setting limits
• describe what you see
• Stay close until the child settles
• Use the same calming steps each time
Consistency shows children that emotions are not dangerous and that they never have to handle them alone.