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.

What Happens When Children Don’t Learn About Anger?

When kids don’t learn what anger is or how to deal with it, the feeling doesn’t disappear. It slips beneath the surface like a shaken soda can waiting to burst. Sooner or later, it pops.

Below are some of the most common outcomes when children aren’t taught how to understand or manage anger.

1. Bigger Outbursts

Kids who can’t name anger or make sense of it often express it through loud reactions: tantrums, hitting, yelling, or shutting down. They aren’t “bad.” They’re overwhelmed and unequipped, trying to communicate with tools they don’t have yet.

2. Bottling Everything Up

Some children take a quieter route. They swallow their feelings to avoid trouble. On the outside, they seem calm, but inside, they carry emotional tension like a heavy backpack they never take off. Bottled-up anger doesn’t stay small; it slowly shapes how they see themselves and their relationships.

3. Trouble With Friends

When kids can’t explain what they feel, misunderstandings grow faster. They may push people away, react too strongly during conflicts, or feel constantly misunderstood. Healthy friendships rely on communication, and communication begins with knowing your own emotions.

4. Low Self-Control Later On

Managing anger in childhood helps build a sense of self-control that carries into adulthood. Without that early practice, teens and adults may struggle with impulsive reactions, emotional swings, or difficulty setting healthy boundaries.

5. Shame Instead of Understanding

When anger is never talked about, many kids begin to believe the emotion itself is “bad.” This turns a normal feeling into guilt, confusion, and fear of disappointing others. Instead of learning that anger is a signal, they learn to see it as a flaw.

What Helps?

Teaching children about anger isn’t about shutting the feeling down. It’s about helping them understand it and handle it safely. A few simple skills can make a huge difference:

• Naming feelings
• Noticing body signs like a fast heartbeat or temperature pathway. 
• Using calm-down tools such as breathing, taking space, or asking for help
• Seeing adults model healthy ways of expressing anger

When children learn these skills early, they grow into adults who can face tough emotions without being controlled by them. They become people who can feel anger, express it safely, and return to calm with confidence instead of shame.

Psychologist David Huffines and I created the “Willy Woo’s Feeling” series to help children understand their emotions, accept them, and develop effective strategies for managing them. 

Each book in the series guides children to notice the physical sensations that come with their feelings, identify what they are experiencing, and choose healthier ways to respond. 

The books are written in rhyme to make learning engaging and easy to revisit. When children feel angry, sad, etc., they can return to the relevant book in the series, follow the steps, and practice the calming pathways it teaches. 

You can now find the very first book in the series, Willy Woo’s Feeling Angry, available on Amazon!

You can find the link below.