When it comes to teaching emotions, what do parents and educators usually think of first?
For many adults supporting children in emotional learning, their experiences often include activities such as identifying facial expressions, choosing emotion cards, or naming emotion words.
At the same time, many adults feel confused and frustrated. Why do some children seem to have learned many emotion wordings, yet rarely use them in daily life—or use them incorrectly? Some children can name and match multiple emotions, but still struggle to identify how a character in a story is feeling. These situations are very common in consultation settings.
Today, I would like to share something that many adults tend to overlook, based on years of observation:
Emotion is more than a facial expression or an emotion card.
Emotion is an internal response to what is happening around us. It includes sensations in the body, the brain’s interpretation of those sensations, and how we feel inclined to respond.
In emotional learning, words and cards are important—but learning to notice what is happening in the body is equally important.
If we observe carefully, emotions usually begin in the body. Bodily reactions are often the first step of an emotion: a faster heartbeat, muscle tension, the urge to move away, or the desire to move closer. All of these are parts of emotional experience. But why is it important to notice these bodily reactions?
When a bodily reaction occurs, the brain begins to make sense of it by asking questions such as: What is happening right now? and What does this feeling mean? Gradually, this process may develop into a facial expression, a behaviour, or an emotion word.
Through this process, children can observe their own bodily responses from a first-person perspective, connect them with what is happening, and begin to understand their emotions. Therefore, learning to notice bodily sensations helps children better understand how emotions arise and lays the foundation for emotional learning.
Many children actually perform well when learning emotions through teaching materials. They can recognise emotion cards and match emotion words correctly. However, when they return to real-life situations, they may easily lose control or struggle to describe how they feel.
This often means that children have not yet been able to generalise what they learned from structured materials into everyday life. This is a very common situation, and many adults encounter the same concern. When adults understand this clearly and provide appropriate support, this difficulty can be gradually improved.
To enhance learning effectiveness and meet the needs of most children, emotional teaching materials are usually designed to be clear, simple, and predictable. You may notice that the pictures used are often bright and concrete, and characters are presented in consistent ways—for example, when children are asked to infer a character’s emotion, the character’s clothing may remain the same to reduce distractions during learning.
However, in real life, emotional situations are often immediate, complex, and constantly changing. Without adult support to help children connect these two contexts, emotional learning may remain at the level of “learned,” without becoming something children can truly “use.”
Emotions can be learned through teaching materials, but they do not exist only there. Emotions appear in daily life, every single day.
Children need adults to gently help them, within real-life situations, connect the emotions they have “learned” with what is happening right now. This process is not about correcting or disciplining children, but about accompanying them as they build understanding.
How appropriate tools and everyday situations can be used together to support this process will be explored further in the next part of this series.
