Explore everyday ways to help children understand feelings and build confidence, connection, and emotional wellbeing.
Bell Let’s Talk Day is on January 21, serving as a meaningful reminder to explore simple, everyday strategies that support your family’s overall wellbeing and mental health.
For young children, understanding feelings is an important part of that journey. Emotions show up early in life, often before children have the words to explain what they’re experiencing. Learning how to notice, name, and feel safe with those emotions helps children build confidence, connection, and emotional awareness over time.
A child might feel excited and nervous at the same time, happy one moment and frustrated the next, calm at home but overwhelmed in a busy space. For children, emotions often arrive all at once and without warning.
Children often express emotions through behaviour long before they can explain them. Tears, silence, laughter, restlessness, or big reactions are all forms of communication.
A child might not say “I feel overwhelmed,” but they might cling, withdraw, or become frustrated more quickly than usual. When adults pause to look beyond the behaviour, it shifts the response from correction to connection.
Helping children understand their feelings starts with noticing these signals and responding with curiosity rather than urgency.
One of the simplest ways to support emotional understanding is by naming feelings calmly and without judgment as they happen.
This can sound like:
Naming feelings doesn’t require a long conversation. It simply gives children language for experiences they’re already having. Over time, they begin to recognise these feelings in themselves and others.
It’s natural to want to make uncomfortable feelings disappear quickly. But children learn emotional safety when their feelings are allowed to exist.
Saying things like “It’s okay to feel sad” or “Big feelings can be hard” helps children understand that emotions aren’t something to hide or fix. They’re something to move through, with support.
When adults stay present instead of rushing to distract or solve, children learn that feelings are manageable and temporary.
Some children talk openly about how they feel. Others share their emotions quietly, through play, drawings, or short comments that appear out of nowhere.
Families can support this by creating gentle openings:
Conversations about feelings don’t need to happen at a table or at a specific time. Often, the best moments come when children feel relaxed and unobserved.
Children learn about feelings by watching how adults handle their own. When adults name their emotions in simple, appropriate ways, children see that feelings are part of everyday life.
Saying things like “I’m feeling tired today, so I’m going to rest” or “I felt frustrated earlier, but I feel better now” shows children that emotions change and can be handled with care.
This modelling teaches children that talking about feelings is normal and safe.
Predictable routines help children feel secure, which makes it easier for them to understand and manage emotions.
Regular meals, rest, movement, and quiet time all support emotional balance. When children feel physically cared for, their emotional world feels less overwhelming.
Small rituals like a calm bedtime moment or a check-in at the end of the day create natural opportunities to reflect on feelings without turning them into a task.
Helping children understand their feelings is about building trust, language, and safety around what they feel.
On Bell Let’s Talk Day, we’re reminded that open conversations matter and for children, those conversations often begin quietly, in everyday moments of connection. When children feel heard, accepted, and supported, they learn their feelings matter, and they don’t have to face them alone.
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