The Emotional Book, A Story For Children
In recent years, The emotional has become fashionable for its ability to link parents and children from emotions. Its first edition dates from 2013 and is currently recommended by educational psychologists and teachers.
Most of its connoisseurs identify this text as a “dictionary of emotions. ” And certainly, the book gives our children and tweens a starting point to recognize their emotional state.
All this makes this well-known book a very useful affective communication tool for parents. Used with a little intelligence, it can help us build better relationships with our children in the future.
The emotional, what does it consist of?
The emotional book is a book where the explanation of 42 emotions typical of the human being is presented. Each one is well described, so that children can internalize how they feel; in addition, readers have an illustration that will allow them to better conceptualize them.
In this way, the little one will meet his feeling head on. By reading it you will be able to rationalize it and generate a concept to better understand what is happening to you. This is the same teaching mechanics that we use to teach colors, animals, and letters.
The best thing is that, as with colors, we can do dynamics to reinforce the child’s learning and emotional communication. In this way, this text offers parents the opportunity to bond emotionally with our children.
Changing emotional communication
In general, parents always ask our children the same questions : “How did school go?” , “How are your friends?” . At first we may get some information, but over time this changes.
Being authorities and under the repetitive coexistence, we fall into an attenuation of the communication with our children. The emotional book helps our little ones to describe what is happening to them and allows them to establish a climate to communicate it.
To do this, we break the normal patterns of conversation and try to carry out a didactic activity. At first, we must get our children to read the book and get used to using it as a communication tool.
A dynamic to communicate what we feel
Instead of asking the typical question, you can change the dynamics. When the little one has gotten home and is a little calmer, we can invite him to take The Emotionalist . The next thing is to tell him to look for an emotion that he has felt during the day.
In the case of the little ones, we can ask them to describe the feeling based on the illustration ; then we or they will read the description of the selected concept.
Following this, we could ask the standard questions: “Did you feel like this today because of something in particular?” or “could you explain that feeling to me using an example?” . In this way, parents can explore how the child has felt and why.
Parents can also comment on what they think
Parent-child emotional communication can also cool down when we wait for only them to open up their emotions to us. In this sense, The Emotional Dictionary can be a tool that allows us to explain to our children how parents feel.
This is how parents can perform the dynamic: we take the book, we show the child the emotion we feel and we read its description. The curiosity of the little one will lead him to ask, or we ourselves can look for ways to externalize them.
The good thing about this modality is that children will be intrigued by the emotions that their parents may feel. And by establishing routine, two-way communication, we will build mutual trust from this exercise.
How to read the emotional book according to age ranges?
In the segment of children from three to six years old, it is advisable to use the resource of illustrations. In these cases, parents will be in charge of reading the descriptions and explaining them successively to their children.
With children from seven to nine years of age, communication can develop at its best. It is at these ages when adults can share our feelings in moderation; the ideal result is the creation of much stronger bonds.
Now, 10 to 12 years old The emotionary can become a more private reading for children. In these cases we can complement with The Journal of Gratitude. The objective of this second book: that children write what they feel.
