What the clinic taught me about children and emotional vocabulary.
World Mental Health Day was Thursday
A seven-year-old came to the clinic last week and his mother told me he was 'acting out' — her phrase, not clinical language. He was hitting at school. He was crying at home without apparent reason. He wasn't sleeping well. She had tried talking to him about his behaviour. It hadn't helped.
I asked her: does he have words for what he feels? She paused. 'He says sad and angry. Mostly angry.'
I said: that's two colours in an enormous range. Let's see if we can find more.
Emotional vocabulary — the range of words a person has available to describe their emotional states — is one of the most reliable predictors of emotional regulation we have. This is not intuitive. You might expect that the capacity to manage emotions depends on willpower, or on character, or on the specific experiences a child has had. These all matter. But vocabulary matters too, and in a particular way.
When you have a word for what you feel, you can do something with it. You can communicate it. You can locate it in time — when did this start? You can compare it to other versions — is this more like the sad I felt when my grandmother left, or more like the sad I felt when my team lost? You can watch it — does it get worse or better over time? You can anticipate it — I tend to feel this on Sunday evenings.
Without the word, you have only the feeling — the raw physiological state, pressing against the inside of the child with no handle to grab. The feeling with no name tends to come out sideways: as hitting, as crying, as refusal, as the symptom that brings them to my clinic.
Materials, steps, what to notice — the hands-on part that makes the edition usable at home with your children this week.
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