Family Resources

To recognize emotions, families can:

• Pay attention to your emotions and the emotions of your children.
• Point out and discuss the facial expressions, vocal changes, and body language that reflect different emotions.

To understand emotions, families can:

• Anticipate, manage, or prevent unwanted feelings in ourselves and others
• Promote wanted feelings in ourselves and others
• Support children’s emotional needs

To label emotions, families can:

• Use a wide range of emotion words with children.
• Encourage children to find the best word to describe their feelings

To express emotions, families can:

• Talk about what your body looks like when you are angry, excited, sad, calm, etc.
• Help children evaluate the best time, place, and way to express their feelings

To regulate emotions, families can:

• Model different effective strategies for children when you manage your own feelings 
• Help children find useful and successful strategies for managing the range of emotions they experience

You are not the only one experiencing what you’re feeling (ex: some children may be happy or excited, about this, some may be mad, frustrated, let down, etc.)

• You are not the only one feeling __________. Lots of young people are also feeling ________.
• All feelings matter, and it’s okay if you feel _________________.
• When I have felt, ___________ some of the things that were helpful for me were…….

When listening to your child share their feelings, listen for areas of strength underlying their emotions

• You sound really disappointed that you’re not yet in school. This tells me that you really love school, and that your relationships with your friends and teachers is really important to you, and this is great
• You sound excited to continue learning remotely at home. This tells me that you feel super comfortable at home and learning with your family.

This helps our children to label and express their feelings and encourage emotional expression, and build a strong emotional vocabulary

• It sounds like you’re feeling ______________.  Can you tell me more about that?
• Ask: how are you feeling? Why are you feeling this way?

When difficult things happen that are out of our control, it is helpful to identify elements of our situation that we CAN control, and to focus our energy on these.

• Sometimes when hard things happen, we can feel powerless. Let’s identify a few things that we can control… what are you excited to continue doing that’s working?
• Is there a way that you’d like to express your feelings about this to someone? Can I help you write some things down, create something, or get your feelings out?
• When I have felt trapped, stuck, or limited in my choices, I chose to focus on _________________ and this helped me regain a sense of control over my options.

• You are going to be okay, we will get through this together
• Lots of adults and students in our family, community, and schools care about you and are here to support you