Help Children Manage Their Emotions

Emotions. Everyone experiences them, but not everyone understands them. As a nanny, you are responsible for both the physical and emotional well-being of the children in your care. Not only do you keep children safe, but you must also dedicate yourself to their emotional growth and development. It's important to be able to understand how to handle your own emotions and teach children to do the same. While children have other caregivers who are also responsible for teaching them about emotions and feelings, such as parents, grandparents, and teachers, taking it upon yourself to play an active role in helping them with their emotional development is essential. 

Here are five tips on how you as a nanny can help children manage their emotions. 

Patience and Empathy 

Before anything else, you’ll need to keep in mind that helping guide children through their emotional experiences can be a challenge that takes plenty of patience, mindfulness, empathy, and dedication. Children are new to the world, and therefore, new to how it all works. They will act out and have emotional outbursts that will sometimes lead to tantrums. Children do not know why they’re feeling these feelings, and they do not know how to properly move through their emotions without guidance. Making sure you bring this knowledge to every emotional outburst or interaction will help you to stay centered and have empathy for what they’re experiencing. 

Give Words to Their Feelings

When children are overwhelmed with emotion, they don’t necessarily know what they’re experiencing. This is where you come in to help them pin down and name their emotions. Emotional labeling is a term used to describe the act of labeling and putting names to emotions. Naming our emotions reduces any psychological distress and provides emotional clarity. Before children can speak and use language to express their feelings, they rely on showing us how they’re feeling with their behavior. Yet, when they reach the stage in development where they can start expressing themselves with language, we must help them make the switch to label their emotions so they can know what they’re feeling and clearly communicate that to others. Once you and the child have identified the emotion they’re experiencing, you can then move on to the next steps of helping guide them through their emotional experience. 

 

Validating Their Feelings 

When our emotional experiences are validated, we feel truly understood and accepted. Offering verbal validation to a child who is in emotional distress will help them to feel truly seen, which is how children build identity and a sense of belonging.  We validate children by first naming the emotion with/for them depending on their stage of development, then provide verbal acknowledgment outlining the experience. 

Example of validating children's feelings: 

“I can see you’re feeling sad because Mom left for work.” 

The child will listen to these phrases and start to understand the connection between words and feelings.

Redirection 

After we validate a child’s feelings and reflect it back to them verbally, it’s time to redirect their emotion into a healthy way of coping. Using the two examples before, redirection can look like:

“I can see you’re feeling sad because Mom left for work. She misses you so much too. Let’s paint her a picture for when she comes home!”

Utilize Resources and Have Honest Discussions 

As our society becomes more aware of the importance of emotional intelligence, plenty of books, games, and activities have been created to help educate children on their inner world. You can also be proactive by having open discussions about emotions. Share about times when you experienced fear, happiness, sadness, etc. This can show children that it's okay to be open about their emotions and teach them that emotions are a universal experience everyone experiences.