Emotional Literacy and Building Emotional Resilience in Children and Young People

What is it?

Emotional literacy is the understanding we have about ourselves, our feelings and the feelings of other people. It’s thinking about what may make us act out in poor behaviour or choices or, acting in with low self-esteem or withdrawing ourselves. It’s also about our communication, either verbally or through body language and expressing our feelings in an appropriate and regulated way.

Why does this matter?

It helps us to get our needs met and to build healthy relationships with ourselves as well as others. It can help in preventing the use of negative coping strategies. When we have emotional literacy we can build stronger self-efficacy, confidence and self-esteem and is important for our social development. In short it will help us navigate and manage life’s difficulties.

Let’s look at this further

We can learn about our felt sense, that real visceral layer and about our feelings, through adults reporting on themselves, noticing us and having them reflected back to us. A good way to help children learn, is by sharing our experience and being curious for them and help them to label their emotions and feelings. For example, by saying “I know when I had a baby sister, I felt jealous of the attention and presents she was getting, I wonder if that’s how it feels for you?” or “I think I might feel angry if that happened to me.”

Using our own capacity to empathise in a given situation, we can help the child to explore how they might feel and offer a different feeling vocabulary to the usual happy, sad, angry. When we have an awareness of our own emotions, physical sense and feeling, we can begin to understand others and build empathy by recognising similar experiences and how someone else might feel.

Psychologist Claude Steiner of warm fuzzy fame, broke this down into five categories:

1. To know your feelings,
2. To have a sense of empathy,
3. To manage your emotions (be able to self-regulate)
4. To repair emotional problems 
5. Emotional interactivity.

Building Emotional Resilience

Firstly we can help build on executive functioning (processes to enable planning, focus, carry out multiple tasks and retain instruction):

• Establish routines
• Model healthy social behaviour
• Creative play
• Board games such as chess and Jenga help with impulse control, planning, turn taking and consequences
• Provide opportunities for decision-making and independence, e.g. asking a child if they would like peas or beans for dinner, or if they would like to walk in the park or the woods.
• Mindfulness creates resilience to stress-go on a listening walk or mini beast safari
• When possible and practical, let children set their own goals (even if they are small goals it will help build their self-esteem and confidence once achieved)
• Challenge negative explanations by reframing a situation, e.g. “You are not rubbish because you list 7-0, it’s just that the other team are good.”
• Resist rescuing or solving problems for them
• Encourage new activities and challenges
• Encourage the child to think of three ways a situation could be worse to help them shift their perspective
• If things go a bit wrong, encourage the child to think about that they learnt from the experience that they could use next time
• Help the child to develop a problem-solving toolbox including strategies that have worked for them before and prompts such as “What would … do in this situation.”
• Role reversal – play the scenarios as a child and see what strategies and ideas the child can come up with for you.

Emotional Awareness and Regulation

• Feeling faces – encourage the child to guess the emotion being felt
• Breathing – breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth (imagine blowing up a balloon)
• Impulse control – make a strategy card, such as ‘Count to 10’, ‘Walk away’, ‘Go somewhere quiet’ or ‘Control breathing’ to remind the child of helpful coping techniques
• Optimism – help the child to reframe negative self-talk, perhaps by encouraging them to think about what they would say to a friend in that situation.
• Flexible and accurate thinking – help the child to balance their viewpoint in order to avoid unhelpful thinking styles such as generalising, all or nothing thinking, catastrophising, filtering out the positives, should and musts, and jumping to conclusions. (David Burns, 1980)
• Self-efficacy – promote “I can” and “I will” statements.
• Connecting/reaching out – make time for peers, family and friends as this helps us to understand ourselves in relation to others and learn how to interact.