Feelings have names

When researchers went through 90 children’s books, half for three- and four-year-olds and half for five- and six-year-olds, they found a word about thinking, wanting or feeling about every three sentences.¹ What a child takes from those words may depend on the adult turning the pages. Moments like that are a good place to help children name their feelings, and the research on doing so is both more interesting and more modest than the slogans suggest.

Does putting a feeling into words help?

The best-known evidence comes from a brain scanner. In 2007, Lieberman and his colleagues showed 30 adults, aged 18 to 36, pictures of faces. When the adults chose a word for the emotion on a face, such as “angry” or “scared”, the amygdala, part of the brain’s threat response, was less active than when they chose a name to fit the face’s gender. A region at the front of the brain became more active instead.²

A 2011 follow-up found that people reported less distress while they were putting emotions into words, and yet, in the researchers’ words, “people do not believe affect labeling to be an effective emotion regulation strategy”.³ It seems to work better than we expect.

Parenting books turned this into “name it to tame it”, a phrase popularised by Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson’s The Whole-Brain Child (2011). There it is a strategy for “Telling Stories to Calm Big Emotions”: helping a child retell an upsetting experience, which is more than labelling one feeling.⁴ But the scanner studies were of adults looking at photographs, not of four-year-olds in the dark. So the honest summary is that, in adults, naming a feeling seems to calm the brain’s alarm response, and these studies didn’t look at children.

Does understanding feelings matter for children?

For children, the stronger evidence is about knowing what feelings are, in yourself and in other people. In a US study of 72 children from economically disadvantaged families, skill at recognising and naming emotions at five was linked with how they got on with others at nine, and with how they were doing at school, even after allowing for verbal ability and temperament.⁵ In another, of 143 preschoolers, emotional skills at three and four were linked with getting on with others in kindergarten.⁶

The links hold up, but they are not large. A 2010 review of many such studies called them “relatively consistent yet modest”.⁷ And an analysis of six long-term studies found that measures of children’s social and emotional behaviour at school entry were generally not significant predictors of later school achievement; early maths skills were the strongest.⁸ So the case for feelings talk is not better marks. It is friendships, and a child who can say what is wrong.

What does South Africa’s curriculum ask?

Feelings are in the curriculum from before school to Grade 3. The framework for children from birth to four hopes that, from about four, children are learning “to calm themselves; to recognise feelings and put them into words”, and it gives adults a plain job: “Help children to put feelings into words”.⁹ CAPS picks up the thread in the first term of Grade R.¹⁰

Grade 3’s topic on feelings gets six hours, and its note to teachers could describe a good bedtime: “Use pictures, stories, rhymes, puppets and masks”.¹⁰ There is more on the first school year in what children learn in Grade R, and on the years before it in early learning from birth to four.

CAPS is our reference; the Department of Basic Education doesn’t endorse us. The quotations keep the DBE’s own wording and punctuation.

How do I talk about feelings when we read?

Ask more than you tell. In two small US studies of toddlers aged 18 to 30 months, children who helped and shared more readily had parents who asked them to name and explain the feelings of characters in picture books. How many feeling words the parents used showed no such link. In the authors’ words, “it is the quality, not the quantity, of parents’ talk about emotions with their toddlers that matters”.¹¹

South Africa has its own evidence. In a 2021 trial in Khayelitsha, 140 caregivers of children aged 21 to 28 months were split into two groups, and half joined eight weekly book-sharing sessions in a church hall. The programme built from “using a lively voice” in the first session to “using facial expression and tone of voice to convey characters’ feelings” in the fourth. Their children gained in language and attention, and the caregivers became more sensitive and less verbally and psychologically harsh. There was no effect on behaviour problems, on helping, or on the children’s early understanding of other minds.¹³

As children get older, link the book to their own lives: “Have you ever felt like that?” Grover Whitehurst, who developed dialogic reading, calls these “distancing” prompts and suggests saving frequent use of them mainly for four- and five-year-olds.¹⁴ There is more on this way of reading in what the research says about reading aloud.

Why is bedtime a good time to talk about feelings?

Because the day is over and the light is low, and because the book is already open. When 59 experts agreed in 2020 on what a good bedtime routine looks like for children aged 2 to 8, “reading or sharing a book with children or simply telling a story before bed” was part of it.¹⁵ What the longer studies of bedtime stories found, and what they can’t show, is in what the research says about reading aloud.

Our Second to the Right is built for exactly this moment. It starts with the light going off and a child saying, “I feel scared”. Then Peter Pan flies in with a refrain, “Name it, say it, breathe it out”, and over Table Mountain and the sea to Neverland the hero names one feeling after another: surprised, happy, calm, cross, loved, homesick, proud.

When a Lost Boy says he misses his mum, the hero answers, “Thank you for telling me.” Even Peter, who says “I never feel anything”, ends up saying, very quietly, “I feel a bit sad.” The night ends where it began, with a child who still feels “a little bit scared”, and safe, and sleepy. Whether the book itself helps hasn’t been tested, since it is new; what it practises, naming a feeling and saying it out loud, is what the NCF hopes children are learning from about four.

When should I ask for help?

Every child has big feelings, and naming them won’t make them vanish. Fears of the dark, tears at the school gate and storms over the wrong cup come with being small. Ask for help if a feeling is very intense, goes on for weeks, or gets in the way of sleeping, eating, playing or school; if your child seems withdrawn or unlike themselves; or simply if you are worried. The teacher, a clinic sister or your doctor is the right first stop, and can say whether anything more is needed.

Feelings talk leads naturally to fairness. The next skill in this section is sharing and taking turns.

Sources

1. Dyer, J. R., Shatz, M., & Wellman, H. M. (2000). Young children’s storybooks as a source of mental state information. Cognitive Development, 15(1), 17–37. doi.org/10.1016/S0885-2014(00)00017-4
2. Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
3. Lieberman, M. D., Inagaki, T. K., Tabibnia, G., & Crockett, M. J. (2011). Subjective responses to emotional stimuli during labeling, reappraisal, and distraction. Emotion, 11(3), 468–480. doi.org/10.1037/a0023503
4. Siegel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2011). The Whole-Brain Child. Strategy #2, “Name It to Tame It: Telling Stories to Calm Big Emotions”.
5. Izard, C., Fine, S., Schultz, D., Mostow, A., Ackerman, B., & Youngstrom, E. (2001). Emotion knowledge as a predictor of social behavior and academic competence in children at risk. Psychological Science, 12(1), 18–23. doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00304
6. Denham, S. A., et al. (2003). Preschool emotional competence: Pathway to social competence? Child Development, 74(1), 238–256. doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00533
7. Trentacosta, C. J., & Fine, S. E. (2010). Emotion knowledge, social competence, and behavior problems in childhood and adolescence: A meta-analytic review. Social Development, 19(1), 1–29. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9507.2009.00543.x
8. Duncan, G. J., Dowsett, C. J., Claessens, A., Magnuson, K., Huston, A. C., Klebanov, P., … Japel, C. (2007). School readiness and later achievement. Developmental Psychology, 43(6), 1428–1446. doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.43.6.1428
9. Department of Basic Education (2015). The South African National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four. Pretoria: DBE. Well-being, Towards Grade R (p. 30). education.gov.za (PDF)
10. Department of Basic Education (2011). Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS): Life Skills, Foundation Phase, Grades R–3. Pretoria: DBE. Grade R Term 1 (p. 15), Grade 2 Term 4 (p. 45), Grade 3 Term 1 (p. 54). education.gov.za (PDF)
11. Brownell, C. A., Svetlova, M., Anderson, R., Nichols, S. R., & Drummond, J. (2013). Socialization of early prosocial behavior: Parents’ talk about emotions is associated with sharing and helping in toddlers. Infancy, 18(1), 91–119. doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7078.2012.00125.x
12. Mar, R. A., Tackett, J. L., & Moore, C. (2010). Exposure to media and theory-of-mind development in preschoolers. Cognitive Development, 25(1), 69–78. doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2009.11.002
13. Dowdall, N., Murray, L., Skeen, S., Marlow, M., De Pascalis, L., Gardner, F., Tomlinson, M., & Cooper, P. J. (2021). Book-sharing for parenting and child development in South Africa: A randomized controlled trial. Child Development, 92(6), 2252–2267. doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13619
14. Whitehurst, G. J. Dialogic reading: An effective way to read to preschoolers. Reading Rockets (WETA). readingrockets.org
15. Kitsaras, G., Goodwin, M., Allan, J., & Pretty, I. A. (2021). Defining and measuring bedtime routines in families with young children: A DELPHI process for reaching wider consensus. PLOS ONE, 16(2), e0247490. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247490