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"But in fact language is a double-edged sword... It drives a wedge between two simultaneous forms of interpersonal experience: as it is lived and as it is verbally represented... Language, then, causes a split in the experience of the self" — Daniel Stern, 1985
When you put a word to a child's feelings, you are essentially translating from toddlerspeak to adult speech. This is best done by labeling the feelings. In fact, you will be especially effective if you use the actual names of the nine feelings - interest, fear, enjoyment, and so on. Or use variations: "I think that scared you" or "that little car really excited you." Or get playful with synonyms: "You sure are interested and excited... and elated, exuberant, ecstatic!"
Children learn much faster than we used to think they could. They can readily learn these words. And when a child learns words for feelings, they are doing what we term symbolically encoding their internal feeling states. This allows for increased thoughtfulness, self-reflection, and decreased impulsivity. For instance, a child who begins to label her tantrums as feelings of "distress" and then "anger" becomes increasingly capable of recognizing the sequences involved in the tantrums, what triggered them, whether she was feeling "very distressed" and "very angry" or less so.
"Label the feelings" or "put words to the feelings" become the mantras. A child who is able to label her feelings as "interested" or "excited" or "angry" or "scared" has a huge head start on her tension-regulation capacity, that is, her capacity (conscious and unconscious) to manage her various feelings to soothe herself, and to calm herself down when she gets anxious or frustrated. Learning to control one's self when challenged by the outside world is an ability that has lifelong benefits. Teens who learn this early are better able to think before they act and can stand up for themselves in the face of peer pressure much more effectively. This is where the environment and inner world of the child come together.
Here's another example. I was seeing a child who was having a lot of trouble adjusting to preschool. Often when she came home from school, she would be angry and it was difficult to communicate with her. She threw tantrums and called her mother names. She swore at her, which upset her mother enormously. The only thing that seemed to clam the little girl down was if her mother would read to her. But the mom would get so mad at her child's behavior that she would refuse to read to her until she calmed down. [The very tool at the mother's disposal for helping her child was used to try to bludgeon her into "good" behavior. ] The results were dismal.
So I suggested to mom that her daughter was expressing her feelings of distress and anger — that is, her child was sending an SOS signal that something was wrong. Now, mom was able to gain control of her own emotions and enjoy reading to her child for a half an hour, a soothing little ritual, after school every day. Mother began to realize that the reading was a soothing mechanism for her daughter. She began to use the reading appropriately as a tension-regulator. This in turn helped the little girl to strengthen her own self-soothing capacities.
By reading the book, the mother was able to use translation. The child's difficult behavior and harsh words after school were understood as expressions of the feelings of distress and anger. Mother was able to talk with her daughter about what was upsetting her at school. The trick was to not get caught up in the child's expression of a strong negative emotion, but to translate the behaviors and words back to the feelings, to understand, and help the child with whatever triggered those feelings.
