Making faces
We learn about emotions from our earliest interactions as babies with our parents and carers. For lots of children who have experienced early trauma or neglect, understanding and expressing their own emotions and reading others’ facial expressions can be difficult.
Not knowing how you feel, how to say how you feel or how to work out how others feel leads to misunderstandings in lots of areas including at home, with friends and at school.
We used to play a game when the kids were younger to help with naming and understanding emotions and facial expressions. It’s really easy – you just need a mirror, you and your child…
Step 1 name an emotion – happy/excited/sad/angry etc
Step 2 both look into the mirror and make the face!
Step 3 back to step 1, taking it in turns to name the emotion…
Dead easy and lots of fun. I still do it with the kids now that they are older – we don’t need the mirror, we just make faces at each other!
Other things that can help are naming emotions for your child… ‘it seems to me like you’re angry about that…’, it helps them name what they are feeling and build their vocabulary of emotions.
What things have you found help make sense of emotions?
This post was inspired by Misreading Facial Expressions written by my friend, Naomi Richards aka The Kids’ Coach
Related posts:
Noticing
That’s a brilliant idea – going to make a note of that
Mine are at the age where they are only just realising about emotions and giving them the words has to be something that will help them around it
Muddling Along
July 22, 2011 at 3:48 pm
Hope it helps – bit of fun too, which never goes wrong : )
adoptresources
July 24, 2011 at 9:16 pm
Flattered that you wrote this after mine – good blog and I like the mirror idea.
thekidscoach
July 22, 2011 at 4:27 pm