FREE Printable: Emotional Check-Ins With Your Child
Photo by Xavier Mouton Photographie on Unsplash
The Institute of Child Psychology is offering a free printable worksheet of Emotional Check-ins for parents to use with their child, to help children identify and name emotions and to relate them to experiences.
The Institute of Child Psychology website states, “When a child is able to name their emotions, it helps them to understand that emotion and how it makes them feel. This extra knowledge helps them feel safe, calm and in control of their emotion.”
The worksheet, available at here on their web page helps parents to do an emotional check-in with their child.
In a connected short video here, with one of the Institute’s Co-Founder, Tammy Schamuhn, a Registered Psychologies and Registered Play Therapist Supervisor, she talks about how she has used emotional check-ins both in her private practice and in her former work as an elementary school teacher in Edmonton prior to completing her Masters in Psychology. For a child who is experiencing anxiety, learning to name their emotions is a step towards feeling more in control of their environment. Her recommendation is to use the worksheet as a talking point with the child a couple of times a day to begin to develop an emotional vocabulary.
In the video, Tammy gives a number of suggestions of how parents can use the worksheet with their child:
Looking at the pictures in the worksheet can help the child to connect to times when they have felt like the expression shown in the images and to talk about the feelings they have experienced. The child can look at the faces on the sheet and say, “Which one do I feel like today?” and then the parent can help the child to learn the name for the feeling.
With difficult emotions, like sadness, the parent can start discussion by asking about a time when the child may have experienced the emotion shown on the sheet. It also gives the parent a chance to tell the child a story of a time when they themselves experienced this feeling, helping the child to normalize their experience, begin to see the universality of emotions and to build empathy.
Taking it a step further, the parent can talk to the child about where they experience a feeling in their body, given that emotions start in the body and then move to the heart and the mind. This can then be a starting point for linking emotional regulation tools to recognition of physical cues the child observes themselves experiencing.
Another way of using the vocabulary from the worksheet is when watching favourite movies, looking how the animation characters communicate what they are feeling through their movements and facial expressions. As the child’s emotional vocabulary develops, the parent can then use it in conversation with their child to observe how other children are experiencing emotions during playtime, for example at the park.