What really matters- Emotional Expression- Our toddlers experience a broad and rich range of feelings at this early age. It is helpful to make these feelings explicit and to help them reflect on that feeling.  As they become more aware of their own emotions, they can then become aware of emotions and feelings in others-- develop empathy (See Quarterly write-up for full description of “Empathy & Heart Qualities”)

How to put it into practice-

My Experience-

Whitney had great facial expressions that revealed alot about what she was feeling. Most of the time though I felt pretty inept at helping her to identify the emotion, reflect on the feeling and its characteristics and source. In the slide video, I certainly recognize her expression of emotion but was really just interested in her overcoming the fear and going down the slide which she had done numerous times-- resulting in a missed opportunity.

Tuning In-

Our toddlers have a broad range of feelings from fear and anger, shame and jealousy to surprise and joy among others. (see surprise expression in video to right). I know I certainly miss most of this rich play of emotion. Whitney’s expression of fear was so striking that not even I could miss it. Besides the fact that I did not realize the rich teachable moment in real time, now that I watch and reflect on the video, there was a lot of opportunity to tune into what Whitney was up to. She actually had gone down the slide a ton so it is interesting to speculate if she was actually feeling real fear or just playing pretend games with her dada and saying “hey dad, look how steep this is; I should really be scared, shouldn’t I.” Her ease and joyful expression when actually sliding down the slide reveal that she probably wasn’t really too scared but in fact is now playing with emotion and feelings and can call the appropriate one up under her control.

Extending/Bridging-

So if we can meet the first challenge and actually recognize the emotion and the feeling being experienced by our toddler, then we might actually be able to do something with it. Here I could have picked up on her game of expressing fear and played along. I could have validated it and made a fearful expression myself, looking down the slide and said something like “yes, that does look like a steep slide. It is scary. I feel fear-- oohh! (exaggerating expression and sounds).” We could have had a conversation about that. Then when she got to bottom I could have made an expression of joy and said “it was not scary it was fun and made me happy”. Again the more we can dialogue and heighten the awareness around these emotions, the more our toddlers can identify them in themselves and others.