Helping My Son Manage His Emotions

My son used to have emotional meltdowns when he was younger. I realized that there were three things causing this:

1. Inability to recognize his feelings and emotions.

2. Inability to express his feelings and emotions.

3. Inability to manage or cope with his feelings and emotions.

Once I realized this, I began teaching him to identify, express, and manage his emotions. I taught him four emotions to begin with - happy, sad, angry and scared. I explained these emotions to him using words, pictures, and actions. I told him the name of the emotion, showed him pictures of faces expressing the emotion, and acted out the emotion in person. Once he learned the emotions, I showed him pictures of people's faces expressing different emotions and asked him to guess the emotion. We did this until he was able to identify the emotions on people's faces easily.

Helping My Son Communicate His Needs

When I set about teaching my son to communicate his needs, I realized that there were two distinct processes involved in communicating needs:

1. Recognizing the body's needs

2. Communicating these needs

Recognizing Needs

We experience the world through our senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell are the five basic senses. There are three additional senses that are recognised now, bringing the total number of senses to eight: