When Your Child Won’t (Or Can’t) Talk About Their Feelings

Whilst some children have a great understanding of what feelings are and how they feel in their body, others have very little insight. It’s not uncommon even for older teenagers not to be clear on what “happy” or “sad” or “angry” actually feels like, or what makes them feel these feelings. Feelings are not always part of their vocabulary.

Your child’s privacy should be respected if they don’t want to tell you the way they feel. However it is also important to realise that they may not be able to tell you how they feel because they don’t know.

Understanding one’s own emotional state is part of emotional intelligence. If we don’t know how something makes us feel, we may make repeated mistakes by doing things that do not make us feel good, or are bad for our mental health. So having insight into how we are feeling matters. Knowledge is power. If we know we are anxious, we can use strategies to manage it. It we don’t, we can’t.

Ideas to try when your child won’t or can’t talk about their feelings

Bodily Sensations Map

Children and young people may find it less stigmatising (or simply easier) to describe physical sensations in their body. Bodily sensations tend to correspond to particular emotions but it’s slightly different for everyone. One anxious child with anxiety may feel strong sensations in their stomach, whereas another may notice tight muscles in their limbs.

How to do it: Draw an outline of a body and place a mark or colour where it feels tight, hot, cold, or any other sensation.

Grading Your Feelings

Make a visual chart illustrating different levels of the emotion you want to raise shared awareness of, and the signs/symptoms at each level. This could be stress, anxiety, worry or any other emotion. For example:

Stress = my mind starts racing, my muscles tense up, I can’t focus.

Next, ask your child to choose a theme for their scale, such as animals. Here is an example:

Very calm (soft muscles, slow heart rate) = Elephant.
“A bit edgy” (muscles tense up) = Zebra.
Highly anxious (mind racing, I freeze) = Gazelle.

Equally, you could create a scale using emojis, colours or Harry Potter characters!

Encourage regular check-ins so your child can learn to spot which animal (or emoji, colour etc) they feel like.

I’m feeling a bit “gazelle” today.

Yesterday was a zebra day and today I am more elephant.

Emotions Cards

The best thing about emotions cards is that they are fun. You can buy many different types online, such as these cards with emoji pictures on them. Use these to play games and make learning about emotions lighthearted. You could even make your own set of cards together!

Emotionary

Emotionary is a book we use all the time in my clinic, Everlief. It describes many complex emotions using words and pictures. It is brilliant to use as a basis for discussion. Your child could also use it on their own to understand complex feelings. I suggest this book is for tweens and teens. For younger children, the book Colour Me Happy is beautifully written and informative.

Free Drawing

Encourage your child to draw exactly what their mind feels like. For example:

It feels like a prison and I am inside.
My mind feels like a sticky bog.
My brain is like a wide open space and I am lost.

This can then form the basis for an open discussion (or not, if they don’t want to).

Code words or signals

Code words or signals agreed in advance will help children express strong emotions when it’s too difficult to use words. Here are some examples:

Code Purple means “I am very on edge today, please give me space”.
Code blue means “I need help”.

Music playlist

Suggest your child creates a music playlist reflecting what their mind feels like. They can share this with you or simply use it as an aid to process their feelings.

Summary: When Your Child Won’t (or Can’t) Talk About Their Feelings

Talking is one of the most effective ways to process and understand feelings. It is important to understand one’s feelings so that we can learn from them. Talking about feelings isn’t achievable for all children. Some children are unable to put the feelings directly into words. There are many other creative options. These options may help your child share their feelings with you, with a friend or relative, or simply to reflect by themselves.

This article was written by Dr Lucy Russell and was originally published here in August 2021. Lucy is a Clinical Child Psychologist with many years of experience working with children and families, both in the NHS (National Health Service) and in her independent clinic, Everlief. Her two children are aged fifteen and eleven.

She founded They Are The Future because her team at Everlief cannot meet demand for face-to-face support. They needed to find a way to reach and support the families who can’t access our face-to-face clinic.

If you enjoy Lucy's article, join her free Facebook group for regular tips on supporting teens and pre-teens with their mental health! Join the group: Parent Tips for Positive Child Mental Health UK.