Teach Your Child to Express Themselves with Words

Young children experience a lot of everyday stress as they develop, discover and learn about the world that surrounds them. What may seem like an enjoyable or easy task may cause the child much frustration and, having limited vocabulary the child may not be able to tell the parent what he is feeling. The child may also express inevitable emotions such as hunger or tiredness, and not knowing how to express these feelings the young child will cry and the parent in effect will become frustrated and deem their behavior as misbehavior. Young children do not need to have a limited vocabulary; parents can take the initiative to introduce age appropriate words into the child's vocabulary.

When a parent teaches the child a word to express his emotions, the parent is giving the child the ability to easily communicate his direct feeling. When a child is able to use a simple word to explain his emotion he is minimizing his stress level as well as the parent's, or caregiver's stress level, this also makes it easier and quicker to deal with situations as opposed to letting a child cry it out because he does not know how to express himself with words.

It is a great idea to start using words to define emotions at an early age such as the age of 6 months, it is through listening (to the parent talk), that children learn to speak so it will be of an advantage to both parent and child, if the parent introduces words to describe emotions at an early age. If the child is young like 6 months of age the parent could easily sit in front of the child and repeat 2-3 simple adjectives that describe emotion 4 times each for about a week or two.

Introducing words to children is relatively easy for instance, if the parent wanted to express the emotion, happy, the parent would first slowly, and clearly pronounce the word happy and after pronouncing the word happy, the parent would make a happy face to show the child what it looks like to be happy, this should be briefly repeated 4 times in a row, if the child is very young like 6-9 months it will be easier to understand what an emotion looks like as opposed to what an emotion feels like. This process should be repeated for every new word.