Why it is Important to Teach Children Emotional Literacy

As a children's author, it has been my goal from the beginning to write stories that are imaginative and heartwarming, while focused on teaching emotional literacy and long-term resilience.

It is my belief that if we gently guide children through emotional expression early on, it will help to form a healthy foundation for coping with life's challenges - including loss and grief, conflict, and change - as they grow into teenagers and adults.

The three stories in my Dizzy Waggle series use imagination, rhyme, and vibrant illustrations by artist Fabienne Joni Sopacua to teach children to identify and label a range of feelings. They also teach children how an emotion might make a person think or behave. This is emotional literacy.

Once children are able to identify and label emotions as they arise, they can begin to understand how to express them in healthy ways and even manage them through self-regulation. This is emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence, as we know, is a hugely beneficial skill to have both at home and in the workplace and according to Psychology Today, it includes:

"...emotional awareness, or the ability to identify and name one’s own emotions; the ability to harness those emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and problem solving; and the ability to manage emotions, which includes both regulating one’s own emotions when necessary and helping others to do the same."

Lulu the Dizzy Waggle in the book Lulu and the Forest Troll: an insightful tale about bullying and self-love.

The Importance of Emotional Expression in Adulthood.

Emotional expression is key for long-term mental wellness and resilience, as well as building healthy and fulfilling interpersonal relationships as adults.

When adults are not able to properly process emotions or trauma around things like loss and grief, conflict, and change, it can manifest into unhealthy coping or 'survival' behaviours that I will call blocks. These blocks are put in place (often unconsciously) to prevent uncomfortable emotions from rising to the surface.

Blocks can include:

• Substance abuse and addiction as a means of numbing uncomfortable feelings.

• An avoidant attachment style in romantic relationships that causes a person to retract and/or not let another person in due to a deep-rooted fear of emotional vulnerability.

• Adopting workaholic or 'the grind' tendencies to avoid having to slow down and sit with themselves and any uncomfortable feelings.

Suppressed emotions can also ‘bubble up like lava’ and eventually erupt, as my main character experiences in The Dizzy Waggle Who Lit the Dark: a glowing tale about the power of big feelings. It can also lead to poor mental health, including anxiety and depression, which we know through our devastating statistics is a major problem here in New Zealand.

It is therefore important to step in early and offer children the skill of emotional literacy to add to their 'life toolbox'. A simple way we can do this is by combining resources around emotional literacy, like my books, with positive reinforcement.

Positive reinforcement connects a pleasant or rewarding feeling with a task at hand. In this case, communicating about feelings. It can involve encouraging and praising kids when they label, express, or work through a feeling.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, positive reinforcement is, “the process of encouraging or establishing a pattern of behaviour by offering reward when the behaviour is exhibited.”

For us as adults, it means taking the time to listen to children when they talk about a problem or situation making them feel a certain way. It means teaching them that it is GOOD to express their emotions, whether it is happiness or anger, pride or worry, and courage or sadness.

Receiving a positive reaction or outcome when we do a something will naturally make us feel good. Think of it like receiving a bonus for doing extra work. If you are rewarded for working harder, it will probably make you want to do it again and again, right?

The Dizzy Waggle Who Lit the Dark: a glowing tale about the power of big feelings teaches kids emotional literacy and resilience tools.

On the flip side is negative reinforcement. People can be put off behaving a certain way when their actions are met with an unfavourable reaction. Negative reinforcement around emotional expression has long seen Kiwi kids grow up being told to "harden up" if they cried, or "keep quiet" and "be good" if they were angry or overly excitable.

This teaches children their feelings are weak, shameful, or bad at a time when their neural pathways are forming. The lesson they learn from this type of negative reinforcement is that it is safer to hide or 'stamp down' their emotions.

WHAT ARE NEURAL PATHWAYS?

Neural pathways are like 'wiring' in the brain, which are formed as we learn or relearn information from experiences. The more the pathways are used (think repetition and practice), the stronger they become. As adults, the narratives we were taught about the world and ourselves as children have a significant impact on our neural pathways today. According to Pathways:

“...the pathways we create as a child can, in many ways, be the foundation of our learning and thinking throughout our lives.”

To conclude this article about the importance of teaching children emotional literacy, I will share one of my favourite quotes by Frederick Douglass, which reads, “It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

Use the Dizzy Waggle books as teaching resources or loveable additions to your home or office bookshelf. The series includes:

• The Dizzy Waggle Who Lit the Dark: a glowing tale about the power of big feelings - teaches emotional regulation around feelings including anger and anxiety.

• Thea and the Dizzy Waggle: a heartwarming tale about loss and grief - sensitively guides readers through understanding and processing death and grief.

• Lulu and the Forest Troll: an insightful tale about bullying and self-love - teaches children why they or another might bully, encourages empathy and forgiveness, and provides tools for self-compassion.

A question prompt from Dizzy Waggle Question Prompts, a digital resource that encourages emotional literacy in children and deepens the adult-child bond.