Emotional Literacy

Using Emotional Literacy to Guide Children

Understanding the biology and functions of emotion is not merely an academic exercise. For educators and caregivers, this knowledge has practical implications for how we respond to children’s behavior and how we support their emotional development. If emotions play such a powerful role in attention, decision making, memory, and behavior, then effective guidance must take emotional processes into account.

Who we are and how we interact with children are the guidance tools that help children develop their own emotional competence and the ability to manage their emotions productively. They learn this critical ability through relationships and through observing how the important adults in their lives experience and regulate their own emotions. For this reason, emotional literacy begins with us. The emotional climate created by teachers and caregivers becomes the environment within which children learn how emotions are understood, expressed, and regulated.

Developing Our Own Emotional Literacy

Because guidance often occurs in emotionally charged situations, conflicts between children, frustration over rules, moments of fear or disappointment, we frequently find ourselves responding in the midst of strong emotions. If we are unaware of our own emotional reactions, it becomes easy to respond automatically rather than thoughtfully.

Emotional literacy for educators begins with self-awareness. The ability to recognize our own emotional states allows us to respond intentionally rather than react impulsively.

Paying Attention to Our Own Emotional States

The first step in emotional literacy is learning to notice what we are feeling and how intense those feelings are. Mild irritation is very different from intense anger, just as being concerned about something differs from intense fear. When we become aware that our own emotions are escalating, it may be wise to pause before intervening with a child.

Attempting to guide children while we ourselves are emotionally disregulated often leads to responses that escalate the situation rather than resolving it.

Taking a moment to breathe, step back, or briefly delay the interaction allows our nervous system to settle. This not only leads to more thoughtful responses but also importantly models emotional regulation for children.

Looking Beneath Anger

Anger is often the emotion we notice most clearly when children behave in challenging ways. However, anger is frequently a secondary emotion that masks other feelings such as fear, worry, embarrassment, or frustration. For example, a teacher may feel angry when a child repeatedly ignores instructions. Beneath that anger may be concern that the child will get hurt, disrupt the classroom, or fail to learn an important skill.

When we communicate primarily from anger, children often experience the interaction as threatening. Feeling threatened can close off the connection between our limbic system and our prefrontal cortex. It can block thinking when thinking about the child’s behavior is exactly what we want them to do.

When we communicate the underlying concern instead, the interaction feels very different. For example, saying “I’m worried that someone might get hurt when you run inside the classroom” expresses concern rather than hostility. Leading with the underlying feeling invites cooperation rather than defensiveness.

Avoiding Interactions That Feel Threatening

As discussed earlier in this chapter, when individuals perceive a threat, the brain’s emotional alarm system activates the sympathetic nervous system and prepares the body for defense. Children are particularly sensitive to perceived threats from adults. Tone of voice, facial expressions, public criticism, or physical intimidation can quickly activate a defensive emotional response.

When children feel threatened, embarrassed, or shamed, their nervous systems shift into survival mode. In this state, they are far less able to reflect, reason, or learn from the experience. Guidance is most effective when children feel emotionally safe enough to remain open to reflection and learning.

Reframing Our Perspective

One of the most powerful tools educators can use is reframing. Reframing involves consciously shifting our interpretation of a child’s behavior. Instead of viewing challenging behavior primarily as defiance or disrespect, we can approach it with curiosity. We might ask ourselves:

• What might this child be feeling right now?
• What need might this behavior be expressing?
• What skill might the child be missing or not fully developed?

This shift in perspective transforms frustration into curiosity and sometimes even hope. The situation becomes not simply a behavioral problem but a potential learning opportunity for the child. We need to keep in mind that the primary function, the purpose of guidance and discipline, is to teach.

A Note About Mindfulness

Many of the abilities involved in emotional literacy, such as noticing our feelings, pausing before reacting, and responding intentionally, are closely related to mindfulness practices. Mindfulness involves paying attention to present-moment experience with openness and without judgment. Research suggests that mindfulness practices can strengthen emotional regulation, increase self-awareness, and reduce stress.

Because mindfulness plays such an important role in developing emotional awareness and regulation, the final chapter of this book will explore mindfulness in greater depth and examine how it can support both educators and children.

Understanding the Emotional Experience of Children

In addition to developing our own emotional awareness, understanding several important principles about children’s emotional experiences can help us manage them more productively.

Emotions Are Often the Real Reason Behind Behavior

Too often in responding to children, we overly focus on the behavior that’s being exhibited. Children’s behavior is frequently driven by emotions that they may not yet understand or be able to express in words. Frustration, fear, jealousy, disappointment, excitement, or fatigue may all influence how children behave.

When adults respond only to the behavior itself without considering the emotional experience underneath it, the deeper issue may remain unresolved. This creates a missed learning opportunity and more work for us. Since the child is likely to repeat the behavior that is problematic, the child not only misses what they could have learned, but we also have to respond again to the unproductive behavior.

Allowing Time for Emotional Recovery

As discussed earlier in this chapter, when emotions become intense, the brain shifts into a more reactive state. The limbic system becomes highly active while the regulatory capacities of the prefrontal cortex are temporarily reduced. In these moments, children are often unable to listen to explanations, consider consequences, or generate alternative solutions. Attempting to lecture or reason with a highly upset child is usually ineffective.

Adults sometimes attempt to reason with children immediately after an emotionally intense event. However, until the child begins to calm down, the prefrontal cortex cannot function optimally. Allowing time for calming, offering reassurance, and helping the child regulate emotionally increases the likelihood that the child will be able to reflect on the situation and learn from it.

In an earlier chapter, I shared the story of the kindergarten teacher who used a “think about it” chair, supposedly as a place for a child to rethink what they had done. Everything about this strategy did not work to achieve the teacher’s goals. Many decades ago, there were even psychotherapists who thought it was useful to “vent” by hitting a pillow, or a tennis racket against a couch while expressing the strong anger they were feeling. This was not only unhelpful, but it made the issue much worse.

Humans cannot productively “think” about a problem or issue until their parasympathetic nervous system has allowed reconnection to their prefrontal cortex. This means not thinking about what elicited the emotional reaction until we’re ready. An elementary school I worked with in Oregon had the right idea. When students were sent to the office to talk to the Principal about something they had done, they were “sent to Hawaii” for at least 20 to 30 minutes. This was a little space that had beautiful posters of the islands, the sounds of waves at the shore, and a variety of materials students could use to calm down. When they were ready, and by their choice, there was a simple reflective sheet they could choose to fill out, explaining what happened, how they were feeling then, what they would like to happen, and how they might be able to make amends or restitution if appropriate.

Emotional Safety Supports Learning

Children learn best in environments where they feel emotionally safe. Fear, shame, and humiliation may stop behavior temporarily, but they rarely promote understanding or long-term behavioral change. When children feel respected and emotionally supported, they are more willing to reflect on their actions and consider alternative choices.

This has several important implications for us. It is so critically important that no matter how bad or what the behavior is that is being dealt with, the child feels that they, as individual human beings, are always accepted and respected. Our connection to them must remain strong if we are to have any influence on the issue at hand.

Another important implication is that we, as adults, are responsible for the emotional safety in our classrooms. As said by Haim Ginott (1972, pg. 13), “I’ve come to a frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather… In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.”

We must ensure that any learning environment welcomes all children equally and is free from emotional threats from all within it. Bullying is a common problem that can sometimes occur under our radar. We should be aware of and deal with all threats to a child’s emotional safety.

Emotion Can Strengthen Learning

Emotions also play an important role in academic learning. Experiences that are emotionally meaningful tend to capture attention and strengthen memory.

Teachers can take advantage of this by incorporating emotional engagement into lessons through storytelling, humor, curiosity, surprise, and meaningful connections to children’s lives. When learning experiences evoke interest, excitement, or personal relevance, children are more likely not only to remember and understand the material, but they are also more likely to demonstrate prosocial behavior.

Teaching Emotional Literacy to Children

Just as children learn language and social skills, they can also learn emotional literacy. Educators can support this development through thoughtful classroom environments, responsive teaching practices, and direct instruction in emotional skills.

The Importance of Instruction in Emotional Literacy

In recent decades, the concept of social and emotional learning (SEL) has emerged as a framework for understanding how these skills can be intentionally cultivated in educational settings. (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning [CASEL], 2020).

A large body of research demonstrates measurable benefits. A meta-analysis of 213 school-based SEL programs involving more than 270,000 students found that participants showed significant improvements in social behavior, emotional skills, attitudes toward school, and academic achievement (Durlak et al., 2011). These findings highlight the importance of addressing emotional development as a core component of education rather than treating it as secondary to academic learning.

For young children, emotional literacy is particularly important because early childhood is a period of rapid development in emotional regulation, empathy, and social understanding. Children who develop strong emotional competence during this period tend to experience more positive peer relationships, greater engagement in learning, and fewer behavioral difficulties (Denham et al., 2012; Jones & Bouffard, 2012).

Creating Environments That Support Emotional Regulation

Classroom environments can be designed to support children’s emotional regulation.

Many classrooms include calming areas sometimes referred to as Peace Places, Calm Corners, or Quiet Spaces. These are designated areas where children can go voluntarily to regain emotional balance when they feel overwhelmed.

The goal of these spaces is not punishment or isolation but emotional regulation. They provide children with an opportunity to settle their nervous systems and return to group activities when they are ready.

Pedagogical Practices That Support Emotional Learning

Daily teaching practices also play an important role in helping children develop emotional understanding. Teachers can support emotional literacy by:

Acknowledging and naming children’s feelings

Labeling an emotion activates language-processing regions in the left hemisphere of the brain. This process helps integrate emotional signals coming from the limbic system with regulatory functions in the prefrontal cortex. As a result, simply identifying and naming a feeling can reduce emotional intensity and help a person regain regulation. Dan Siegel uses the phrase “name it to tame it” to summarize this strategy (Siegel & Bryson, 2011)

Instead of telling a child, “Stop crying. You can rebuild it,” a purposeful educator might say, “It looks like you’re feeling really frustrated because the tower fell down.” As discussed in Chapter 9 on Active Listening, it’s important to use tentative language (“looks like..”, “sounds like…”, “that could be”, etc.). By naming the feeling, the adult helps the child organize the emotional experience, feel understood, and begin regulating the emotion.

Modeling calm problem-solving during conflicts

Conflicts between children are inevitable in classrooms where young people are learning to share materials, negotiate roles, and manage frustration. These moments, however, are not merely disruptions to be controlled. They are opportunities for teaching emotional awareness, communication, and problem-solving.

This technique can be used for conflicts between you and children or to facilitate the process between children. When teachers consistently model calm problem-solving, they create a classroom culture in which conflicts are viewed not simply as behavioral problems but as opportunities for learning. Children begin to understand that emotions can be acknowledged, understood, and managed in constructive ways.

Encouraging perspective-taking and empathy

Once emotions have begun to settle, you can guide children toward understanding each other’s perspectives. Young children are still developing the cognitive ability to see situations from another person’s point of view, so this process often requires support.

Questions like these invite the child to take the perspective of another person. Through these guided conversations, children begin to develop empathy and social awareness.

Guiding children through conversations about social situations

When issues or problems arise, they often revolve around social situations. These are golden opportunities to help children develop the critical social skills and understanding needed in life. Conversations when these occur can help children learn about:

• Their own emotions
• The effects of their behavior on others
• Points of view or differences in perspectives
• The emotions of others
• Empathy for others
• Negotiation
• The need for compromise in certain situations
• Conflict resolution (Chapter 13 explores this in detail)

Helping children identify constructive solutions to problems.

As adults, we often have a tendency to solve problems for children, rather than helping them to develop the skills and abilities to solve those problems themselves. This is often so much quicker and easier for us. We also don’t like to see children we care about suffer, and we want to quickly fix things so that they’ll feel better.

These are mistakes that rob children of important opportunities to grow and learn. It is disrespectful because it implies that they are not capable. Young children are in the process of learning these important skills and don’t have them fully developed, so it doesn’t mean that they don’t need our help and support. Like all good scaffolding that we do across the academic curriculum, it should be used in that zone of proximal development described by Vygotsky (1978), that range of tasks that children cannot yet perform independently but can accomplish with guidance and collaboration from a more knowledgeable other.

Emotional and social problem-solving skills develop in the same way as academic skills. Children rarely learn these abilities by being told what to do; they learn them by participating in problem-solving with supportive adults who gradually transfer responsibility to them. When adults guide children through problems in this way, we are not solving the problem for them. Instead, we are temporarily providing the structure and language that allow children to participate in the solution-making process. Over time, as children gain experience and confidence, they become increasingly able to manage similar situations on their own.

Asking guiding questions rather than giving immediate answers

As a school counselor, sometimes I had a very clear idea of what an ideal solution would be for a child. If I had exhausted all the open-ended questions I could think of, and the child still hadn’t come up with a possible solution, instead of me suggesting what he should do, I would say something like, “You know, last week, Billy had a very similar thing happen to him. He decided to…..” Then I would ask, “Do you think that might work for you?” or “What do you think about his solution?”

These questions signal that the child is capable of contributing to the solution and encourage them to think about alternatives. This allows them to have ownership of the solution to their problem.

Helping children generate multiple possible solutions

Young children often see only one option—usually the one they want most. It can be very useful to help them brainstorm more than one option. We can expand their thinking by encouraging them to consider several possibilities. Generating options helps children learn flexibility and consider outcomes before acting. We can also support children in evaluating whether a solution is workable or fair.

This helps children develop critical thinking skills and begin to consider the perspectives and needs of others. As children develop these skills to solve problems for themselves, we’ve not only allowed them to develop these important life skills, but we have also contributed to creating learning communities that productively support all members while reducing the work we have to do as those responsible for those communities.

Direct Teaching of Social and Emotional Skills

Although emotional learning occurs naturally through relationships and social interaction, young children benefit greatly from explicit instruction and guided practice in emotional literacy. Direct teaching helps children develop the vocabulary, awareness, and strategies necessary to understand their emotions and interact constructively with others. Research suggests that when teachers intentionally teach emotional skills through structured activities and discussions, children demonstrate improvements in emotional understanding, social competence, and classroom behavior (Denham et al., 2012; Durlak et al., 2011).

Emotional literacy is most effectively taught through interactive experiences such as stories, games, role-playing, and guided discussions that allow children to practice emotional skills in developmentally appropriate ways.

One widely used framework for organizing emotional learning is provided by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). According to this framework, emotional literacy involves five interconnected competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making (CASEL, 2020).

Chapter Summary

For much of history, emotions were viewed with suspicion and seen as obstacles to rational thought. We know now, however, through research in psychology and neuroscience, that emotions play an important central role in human thinking, decision-making, memory, and relationships. Emotional processes are deeply connected to the full functioning of the brain, particularly the interaction between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. These systems influence how individuals perceive threats, regulate behavior, and respond to challenges. Because emotional experiences strongly affect attention, motivation, and memory, emotions are not separate from learning they are integral to it.

For educators and caregivers, understanding the role emotions play has important implications for how we guide children. Emotional literacy involves recognizing emotions, understanding their causes, regulating emotional responses, and responding constructively to the emotions of others. Children develop emotional literacy most powerfully through our deep relationships with them and our own emotional literacy. We do this not only by modeling emotional awareness and self-regulation, but also by creating emotionally supportive environments and intentionally teaching social–emotional skills. Through guided problem-solving, emotion coaching, and direct instruction in emotional competencies, educators help children develop the abilities needed to manage their feelings, build healthy relationships, and engage fully in learning.

References

1. Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. (2020). What is SEL? CASEL.
2. Denham, S. A., Bassett, H. H., & Wyatt, T. (2012). The socialization of emotional competence. Child Development Perspectives, 6(2), 137–143.
3. Ginott, H. (1972). Teacher and child: A book for parents and teachers. Macmillan.
4. Jones, S. M., & Bouffard, S. M. (2012). Social and emotional learning in schools. Social Policy Report, 26(4), 1–33.
5. Siegel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2011). The whole-brain child: 12 revolutionary strategies to nurture your child’s developing mind. Delacorte Press.
6. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.