You probably encounter hundreds of complex emotions each day in school. There’s the child who is frustrated with their work; the usually lively student who is suddenly withdrawn; the colleague who is stressed about their ever-increasing to-do list.

It takes time and effort to understand these feelings and their associated behaviours.

At the heart of my work as an educational psychologist is the belief that all behaviour is communication. When young people behave in a certain way, they are telling us something they need us to understand. Until they can fully explain their feelings in words, they use behaviours to communicate with us.

Children’s brains work differently from adults’ brains. The amygdala ensures survival by expressing big emotions of anger, anxiety, distress and joy - feelings that are untamed and sometimes irrational.

In contrast, the pre-frontal cortex, responsible for thinking logically and regulating feelings, won’t be in its full adult form until our mid-twenties. This makes it harder for children to make sense of their feelings and deal with them in a helpful, socially appropriate way.

One way to help them with this is to label and recognise feelings, providing crucial emotional vocabulary.

What is emotion coaching?

Imagine a Year 2 boy, displaying behaviours that we may consider disruptive: picking up papers from the table, slamming them down, his face becoming redder and redder as his frustration grows. Rather than addressing the behaviour, the adult in the room says: “It looks like you’re feeling very angry today.”

The little boy gradually calms, his feelings recognised and labelled, like someone had put in the passcode for his internal alarm system.

Read more:

• What is emotionally based school avoidance?
• Why every school should teach ‘emotional vocabulary’
• Is your school really trauma informed?

When children struggle to manage their feelings and behaviours, our instinctive reaction may be to put a stop to the issue quickly, but this often has the reverse effect. If we feel angry, being told to stop isn’t going to make us less angry. If we feel fidgety and anxious, being told to stay still is not going to get rid of our nervous energy.

One evidence-based strategy to use in response to big feelings is emotion coaching. It is based on the idea that to support children in regulating their emotions, we need to provide both empathy and guidance about how to resolve the issue.

At times, we may use approaches that provide guidance but no empathy (“Stop doing that”, “Be quiet” and so on). At other times we may fail to provide either empathy or guidance (“Don’t worry about it”, “It’ll be fine”).

Emotion coaching aims to validate and recognise feelings while still giving children ideas about how to manage them. It has three simple steps:

Step 1: empathise

The first step is to show that you understand the feelings, while validating that feelings are OK.

“Are you feeling a bit worried about reading out loud to me? It’s OK to be nervous about showing me your reading. Can you help me understand how you’re feeling?”

Step 2: set the boundaries and limits of acceptable behaviour

Here, you communicate that there are some behaviours that are unhelpful - such as refusing to give reading out loud a try.

“I’d really love to hear what your reading is like so I can help you properly, otherwise I won’t know what you’re good at and what you need help with.”

Step 3: find a solution

Finally, you help the child to solve the problem of what to do next.

“What would help you to read out loud to me?”

At this stage, you can give the child options to choose from, to give them ideas and a sense of control.

How to talk to teenagers about feelings

You may be wondering how to start a conversation where you recognise feelings, particularly with older children who may not be forthcoming with expressing them.

Here, the acronym “WINE” can be useful:

• Wonder: “I’m wondering if the test might be worrying you a bit?”
• Imagine: “I imagine you might be a bit frustrated after what happened at break time?”
• Notice: “I’ve noticed you’ve got your hood up today and look a bit down. How are you feeling?”
• Empathise: Communicate understanding and acceptance of feelings.

I have frequently come across situations where, had an emotion coaching approach been taken or the language of WINE used in the first instance, the crisis point reached could have been avoided.

The combination of empathy and acceptance of feelings with boundaries and joint problem-solving for how they’re managed is crucial to teaching emotional regulation and de-escalating difficult situations.

The most powerful first step you can take to help children recognise and manage their feelings is to listen and show that their thoughts and emotions are important to you. We must then support their underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex to interpret and manage these difficult feelings so that they can find a new way forward.

Our aim should always be to de-escalate and calm. The ability to acknowledge and support difficult feelings is a powerful tool for your kit.

Cathleen Halligan is an educational psychologist working for a London council