Labelling Feelings Appropriately: Tips to Teach Children Ways to Express Emotions

April 16, 2026

9-year-old Riya wanted a fancy Barbie doll birthday cake, but her dad couldn’t arrange for it. During the birthday tea party, Ria had an uncontrollable outburst, and the guests were stunned by the intensity of her screams right on her ‘SPECIAL DAY’!

Numerous children like Ria face issues in managing emotions. In fact, almost 14% of our children (middle and secondary school stage) reportedly feel extreme emotions, and almost 43% battle with mood swings.

Before we move on, here are some facts about the mental and emotional health of Indian children as per the NCERT survey (2022).

Facts	%
Feeling of Extreme Emotions	14%
Feeling of Anxiousness	11%
Use of Yoga and Meditation for Coping with Stress	28%
Mood Swings	43%

Facts related to emotions and mental health of children | ways to express emotions

Let’s understand the ways of helping our children express their emotions today.

Be with us.

What are Emotions?

As per Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, emotions serve an adaptive role, allowing an individual to respond promptly. This, in turn, improves their chances of survival (or success).

Broadly, there is not much difference in how children and adults experience emotions in everyday life. However, unlike adults, children often struggle to label these emotions accurately. And this makes it difficult for adults to help them manage these emotions well. Helping children express big feelings is crucial to help them identify and manage emotions. So, let’s get ready to delve deeper into this topic.

Why Should Children Learn to Express Emotions?

Children must learn these ways to express emotions for the following reasons/purposes:

To handle complex feelings (difficult emotions).
To build emotional regulation skills that are essential for success in adulthood.
To develop skills like resilience and bounce back from challenges in life.
To understand the healthy, harmless, and creative ways to express emotions.
To create self-awareness and gauge personal strengths and weaknesses.

Ways to Help Children Express Emotions

Make Children Familiar with Common Emotions

Building a vocabulary to express emotions is the first step for parents to educate children about labelling their feelings.

For instance, imagine your child feeling angry while sharing a toy with someone else, reiterate the whole situation, and explain how sharing a toy is making him/her sad. Now you can talk about the satisfaction derived from sharing, and encourage the child to share the belonging.

Make use of simple everyday instances like these to make your child familiar with common emotions.

Help Them Connect Phrases to Their Feelings

It’s natural that while feeling anxious, one can experience muscle tension, accelerated heartbeat, and sweating, etc. So, use the basic physical clues/reactions to help your child understand emotions. You can probe and ask questions about how they feel at a particular time, and relate the child’s responses to explain the specific emotion.

For instance, ask questions like:

Are you feeling sweaty in your hands?

Is your heartbeat fast at this point in time?

Such questions will help the child connect body reactions to specific emotions easily. Once the child is comfortable, explain how a particular emotion can be identified with the body’s reaction (a clue to understand a feeling better) to strengthen understanding.

Talk About Emotions Creatively

Instead of speaking about emotions directly, connect these to other experiences meaningfully.

Try it this way:

Explain how a storybook character feels.
Talk about emotions by citing examples of other children getting excited while playing a game at a birthday party.
Reiterate a scene from a show/movie to explain how a character felt in a difficult situation.
You can also explain about anger, sadness, frustration, etc., while sitting in a restaurant and waiting for the food to be served that is delayed for some reason.

Use Positive Verbiage and Phrases

Negative phrases, unnecessary harshness, negativity, and words of discouragement often make children reluctant to express their feelings. To help them understand their emotions better, we must learn the art of communicating with positivity. This ensures that we are not shutting down their feelings with our poor selection of words.

Imagine saying, “You are always sad without any reason” instead of “I understand how you feel”.

Aren’t these statements totally different responses to the same emotion?

Do pay attention to your language to cooperate with your child while learning about emotions.

Be an Emotionally Literate Adult

Modelling the right responses to emotions is self-explanatory for children. It’s obvious that if adults in the family know how to manage their emotions, children tend to develop this knowledge seamlessly.

Accept and Embrace All Emotions Without Judgment

As adults, our words matter the most to our children. So, if we accept emotions as a normal part of everyday life, it gets easier for children to build an understanding of these in a healthy way. Help your child understand that it is fine to feel a certain way or not feel good about something. These practical reactions and non-judgmental responses are important for your child to learn about all types of emotions, including the big ones.

Develop Empathy

For children, it gets easier to label emotions if they get more experiences and opportunities. Help your child broaden their horizon by asking them how someone else must have felt in a particular situation.

Imagining someone else’s condition provides a window into a particular emotion that a child can easily link to a similar prior experience.

For instance, ask questions like:

Your friend lost his pencil box today. How would you feel if you were in his place?

Final Thoughts

Human life is full of emotions, and it is important for our children to learn about expressing these emotions to lead a fulfilling life. Start helping your child with these strategies today, and collaborate with their schoolteacher to make the process more fruitful.

You can also discover the pathway of online schooling in India with India’s best accredited virtual school, focusing on socio-emotional learning. Learn more about this empowering schooling choice here.

Thanks for Reading!

Frequently Asked Questions

Why should children know how to label their emotions?

Children must know how to label emotions to express their feelings and challenges appropriately. Without the knowledge of emotions, they cannot learn coping strategies and deal with everyday stressors.

How can we help our children label emotions correctly?

Talk about emotions directly and indirectly. You can also cite examples from real-life scenarios and play games to help your child build connections between words and emotions.