How to Teach Children About Emotions: What the Research Says

Teaching children about emotions is one of the most
important things a parent can do — and one of the
least explicitly taught. Most parents assume that
children will simply learn to understand and manage
their emotions through experience. The research
suggests that explicit, intentional emotion education
makes a significant difference — and that the way
parents talk about emotions with their children
shapes emotional development in ways that last
well into adulthood.

This article covers what the research shows about
how children develop emotional understanding,
what the most effective approaches are, and
what the specific daily practices look like
that make the biggest difference.

Why Emotional Education Matters

Research on emotional development consistently
finds that children who have a rich emotional
vocabulary — who can name, describe, and
differentiate their emotional experiences —
show better emotional regulation, stronger
social relationships, better academic performance,
and better mental health outcomes than those
with more limited emotional language.

Research by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA on
affect labeling — the process of putting
feelings into words — finds a specific
neurological mechanism: naming an emotion
reduces activity in the amygdala — the
brain’s alarm system — and increases
activity in the prefrontal cortex —
the regulatory system. In plain language:
naming a feeling makes it smaller and
more manageable. This is not just
a metaphor. It is a measurable
neurological effect.

This finding has profound practical
implications: every time you help a
child find words for what they are
feeling, you are literally helping
their brain regulate the feeling more
effectively.

How Emotional Understanding Develops

Children’s ability to understand and
talk about emotions develops gradually
across childhood:

Birth to two years: Infants experience
and express basic emotions — joy,
distress, anger, fear, surprise —
from birth. Emotional understanding
at this age is primarily experiential
rather than cognitive. Parents support
emotional development by naming emotions
during interactions: “You’re happy!
Look at that smile.”

Two to four years: Children begin
developing the cognitive capacity
to understand that they and others
have inner emotional states. They
can identify basic emotions in
themselves and others, and they
begin connecting emotions to
causes: “She’s crying because
she fell down.”

Four to six years: Children develop
more sophisticated emotional understanding —
including the concept that people
can feel two things at once, that
feelings can be hidden, and that
the same situation can produce
different feelings in different people.
This is a critical window for explicit
emotion education.

Six to twelve years: Children develop
increasingly sophisticated emotional
vocabulary and understanding of
complex emotions — pride, guilt,
shame, embarrassment, jealousy.
Research finds that the quality of
parent-child emotional conversations
during this period significantly
predicts adolescent emotional
competence.

What the Research Shows Works

Emotion coaching. Research by John Gottman
at the University of Washington on what
he calls “emotion coaching” — a specific
parenting approach to children’s emotional
experiences — is among the most robust
in this area. Gottman’s longitudinal
research found that children of parents
who consistently noticed, acknowledged,
and helped label their emotions showed
significantly better outcomes across
academic, social, emotional, and even
physical health domains.

Emotion coaching involves five steps:
being aware of the child’s emotion,
recognizing it as an opportunity
for connection, listening and
validating, helping the child label
the emotion, and setting limits
while problem-solving. The crucial
feature is that validation comes
before any attempt to fix or redirect.

Building emotional vocabulary explicitly.
Research on emotional literacy finds
that children whose parents consistently
use a wide range of emotion words —
not just “happy,” “sad,” and “mad”
but frustrated, disappointed, nervous,
embarrassed, proud, overwhelmed,
confused, relieved — develop
significantly richer emotional
understanding than those exposed
to a narrower emotional vocabulary.

The practice is straightforward:
use emotion words often and specifically.
Not “you seem upset” but “you seem
frustrated — like you’ve been trying
really hard and it’s not working the
way you want.” Not “she’s sad” but
“she looks disappointed — like she
was really hoping for something
that didn’t happen.”

Emotion talk during calm moments.
Research on emotion socialization
finds that conversations about emotions
during calm moments — not in the
heat of an emotional experience —
are particularly effective at building
emotional understanding. Reading
books together and discussing
characters’ feelings, reviewing
the emotional landscape of a day
at dinner, asking about how
someone in a story might have felt —
these calm-moment conversations
build the emotional vocabulary
and understanding that children
draw on when they need it most.

Modeling emotional awareness. Research
on parental modeling and children’s
emotional development consistently
finds that children whose parents
name and discuss their own emotions —
“I’m feeling frustrated right now —
I’m going to take a breath” — develop
stronger emotional awareness than
those whose parents’ emotional
experiences are implicit or hidden.
The parent who says “I felt really
proud of you today, and I also felt
a little nervous” is providing
emotional education through their
own authentic expression.

Using books and stories. Research on
bibliotherapy and social-emotional
learning finds that reading fiction —
particularly fiction that explores
characters’ inner emotional lives —
significantly builds children’s
emotional understanding. Discussing
how a character might be feeling,
why they made the choice they did,
and what you would feel in their
situation amplifies this effect
significantly.

What Does Not Help

Dismissing or minimizing emotions.
Research on emotion dismissing —
responding to children’s emotional
expressions with “you’re fine,”
“stop crying,” “there’s nothing
to be upset about” — consistently
finds worse emotional regulation
outcomes, more behavioral difficulties,
and less emotional competence compared
to emotion coaching approaches.
Dismissing a feeling does not make
it go away. It teaches the child
that their feelings are wrong —
which adds shame to the original
emotional experience.

Fixing before validating. The impulse
to immediately solve the problem
that caused the feeling — to fix,
redirect, or cheer up — before
acknowledging the feeling itself
is one of the most common and
most counterproductive patterns
in parenting emotional moments.
Research consistently finds that
validation before problem-solving
produces faster emotional recovery
and stronger long-term emotional
regulation capacity.

Requiring emotional performance.
Telling children how they should
feel — “you should be grateful,”
“there’s no reason to be scared,”
“you’re making a big deal out of
nothing” — teaches children to
distrust their own emotional
experience rather than to
understand and work with it.

Practical Daily Practices

The research on emotion education
points to several specific daily
practices that are highly effective
and require no special training:

Name your own emotions out loud
regularly. “I’m feeling a little
stressed today.” “I felt really
happy when you did that.”

Use a broad vocabulary when
naming your child’s emotions.
Go beyond happy, sad, mad —
reach for specific, nuanced words.

Have a daily “feelings check-in”
at dinner or bedtime. “What was
something that made you feel
proud today? Something that
felt hard?”

Read books with emotional depth
and discuss the characters’ feelings.

When your child is upset,
validate before redirecting:
“I can see you’re really
disappointed. That makes sense.
Let’s figure out what to do next.”

The Bottom Line

Teaching children about emotions
is not a special curriculum or
a designated lesson. It is woven
into the ordinary moments of
daily family life — in how you
respond when your child is upset,
in the words you use to describe
your own experience, in the
books you read together and
the conversations you have
about them.

The research is clear: children
who grow up in families where
emotions are named, validated,
and talked about openly develop
stronger emotional regulation,
better relationships, and better
mental health than those who do not.

The most powerful emotion
curriculum available is you —
your words, your responses,
your own authentic emotional
expression — repeated across
thousands of ordinary interactions
over many years.

Sources

Gottman, J. M., Katz, L. F., &
Hooven, C. (1996). Parental
meta-emotion philosophy and
the emotional life of families.
Journal of Family Psychology,
10(3), 243–268.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I.,
Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M.,
Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007).
Putting feelings into words.
Psychological Science, 18(5),
421–428.

Denham, S. A. (1998). Emotional
Development in Young Children.
Guilford Press.

Dunn, J., Brown, J., & Beardsall, L.
(1991). Family talk about feeling
states and children’s later
understanding of others’ emotions.
Developmental Psychology,
27(3), 448–455.