Nope, not right.
The ability to recognise and relate to our emotions is something we work really hard to support our kids with. It is also something that we don’t always do such a great job of as we get older. Understanding our emotional experiences is something that is at the core of self-regulation – the idea that we are able to understand and respond to our own experiences and manage/cope/respond to them.
One of the things about emotion recognition is that it is SO heavily impacted on by culture. There are universal emotions, but beyond that, all culture’s relate to emotions differently. Celebrating some, condoning others. In Australia, I think we have a tendency to dismiss and downplay emotions
She’ll be right – Not a problem – Not too bad – Get on with it
And on top of that, there are some clear differences in how we think boys and girls should engage with their emotions. Working as a male psychologist, I end up seeing a LOT of boys, and my experience has shown me that boys value talking just as much as girls (though may find it harder). I think the reason behind some of this gender stereotyping is how we engage with our boys and girls when they are younger. My belief is that we use a more restricted range of emotional language with boys than with girls, we socialise them to expect they should generate less/more emotional expression and we reinforce them in particular ways based on their gender. In fact I would argue that each boy is as different from each girl – or simply: we’re all different and it isn’t a “boy thing” or a “girl thing”
Helping our kids recognise their emotions starts with you as a parent or adult helping them. Start with naming it when they are young (“You sound really frustrated that the rules of the game changed”) and continue to help them describe their experiences as they get older (“Are you feeling disappointed that your friend did that? No? Is it more frustrated?”)
A resource I really like is the Feelings Wheel (see below). It starts at the centre and expands each of those more basic emotion terms into more nuanced ones. To return to my earlier argument, I think we expect boys to produce more of the inner circle/s and girls to generate more of the outer circle/s. They can only do that if they have experience with the language and how it relates to their own experiences.
Next blog, I’ll write more about what you can do past the initial recognition
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(Written by: Dr Matt O’Connor)