The Power of Picture Books in Parenting: Raising Emotionally Intelligent Children

To transform your parenting approach and boost your child's emotional intelligence, picture books are your secret weapon. 

As parents, it's easy to overestimate our emotional vocabulary, as well as your child's. This can pose challenges when you aspire to parent differently from how you were raised. Conversations alone fall short in teaching your children about their feelings, but picture books can change the game. Using them as a tool in calm and connection can help children learn to identify their feelings and develop strategies to handle them.

In this episode, we highlight the power of picture books in shaping a feelings vocabulary - transforming the learning process into a relatable, enjoyable experience. We'll discuss a few of my favourite books to support you in teaching your child about their feelings outside of tense situations. Tune in and discover how picture books can be instrumental in nurturing your child's emotional development and well-being.

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The music for this podcast is written and produced by Jazlyn B with the guidance of Sabine Ndalamba

Note: This podcast is created for educational purposes only. Any references links, resources or content are not intended as a substitute for medical or professional mental health advice.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:48

Today I'm going to take you inside a strategy that I share when I work with Charith. One of the things I've noticed in the last three years specifically, but as long as I've sort of been introducing the idea of social-emotional intelligence, you know, building tools and skills for feelings, be able to identify those feelings, know what to do when you have those feelings. Something I've noticed is we're a little bit overconfident when it comes to what we consider a sort of emotional vocabulary. So if I ask parents to carry it all, it's hey, how well do you think you can identify your feelings? How well do you think your child can identify their feelings? I often get a really overwhelmingly positive response. You know, so-and-so is really great. When they're angry, they can say it, they can do it. And one of the things that I found is, although sort of the surface level stuff is there, we really dig in. We don't have as well established of an emotional vocabulary as I think many of us think we do. And this is really important because in order to sort of build tools and skills for your feelings, you need to be able to identify those feelings. And in order to identify those feelings, you have to be able to step back, because in those tricky moments, those difficult dino brain moments if you know my book, the Adventures of Team Brain I talk a lot about. What is the process look like, right? How does our brain flip to fight, flight, freeze, what are some of the things that we do when we have those big and overwhelming feelings? But in order to sort of sit with that and really build some tools around it, we have to know what those feelings are and something that happens that is totally unintentional. You know, I love talking about the unintentional things that happen. So most people right now in the world who are parenting, who are trying to parent differently, who are showing up for their kids and thinking to themselves I want to parent differently than how I was parented. I hear that a lot. It's very common, right. We're all trying to do things better, different, right? One of the things that sort of missing from the equation of those conversations is we did not grow up valuing, understanding, believing in supporting social emotional well-being or social emotional intelligence, right. In fact, the opposite was pretty true and still is pretty prevalent the idea that you are stronger the more you're able to suppress and control your feelings. Only certain feelings are acceptable. Other feelings are unacceptable. Now, if you're trying to show up to parent and you grew up with that model, it is going to be very hard to parent differently because your toolbox is empty. You don't have the skills and tools that you're trying to implement with your child because you never dealt them yourself. And if you're like most people on the planet this is pretty common Unless you train in psychology or, like me, had a special interest in social emotional intelligence from the get-go unless you've done a lot of thinking about this, most likely you did not develop these skills anywhere and, like right now, you're sort of trying to develop them alongside, or you're trying to get your children to do them, but you don't have them. Right, there's a little bit of a mixed sort of situation. Another major component of this is a lot of the problem solving you do is in tricky, difficult moments, so in those dino brain moments, right. So when your brain is flipped and you can't really think and learn and you're just sort of going through the motions of the stress cycle. That's when we tend to teach kids about their feelings, right, this is an angry moment, this is a frustrated moment. This is and one of the things that I have found super effective when I work with parents is we got to step back from that, because the only way we can build skills for tricky moments is in common connection. Now here's the other piece. It's very hard to teach skills for social-emotional intelligence, especially with young children, in common connection, just using conversation. So a lot of advice, a lot of thoughts sort of encourage these big dialogues with sort of three to six year olds, even older. This sort of this idea that I'm putting out there applies to a wide range of kids and ages and stages. But here's the thing conversations are like lectures. They're not the best way to teach kids how to do something. They're not the best way to empower children to want to try right. Instead, they're sort of like oh, someone's talking to me again. Here we go. I have a lot of parents who call me and say I've been trying to do this and all I get is push back. In the moment. I get a lot of yelling at me, I get right, and that's partially because, as we're trying to build this skill, a talking about feelings is uncomfortable. There's like this unwritten rule in the world whether you're two, 20, right, the whole span. Nobody really likes to talk about their feelings and it's funny, even when we say, okay, we're making this more socially acceptable, there's still this awkwardness because it's such vulnerability, right. So even two and three year olds will push back on conversations. So one of the things I want to talk about today is one of my main tools and why it's a tool. I use lots of different tools. One of them is called narration. It really helps you not only identify your feelings, but identify moments in which those feelings are happening, which is a key component of this whole process. It's not just enough to know that you're having a feeling. It's like what do we do with those feelings in that moment? How can we stop it from flipping the dino brain, right? So that's a process that sort of requires some projection. So I use that strategy. But the strategy I want to talk about today is how to use picture books, or why I use picture books. So picture books, by nature, happen in calm and connection. Right, we're going to pull out of maybe you've tried this, but we're not going to pull out a picture book in a difficult moment and try to like, have a conversation with a clear head, with our child having a clear head. Right, if you have tried that. The reason it didn't work is because you weren't in calm and connection right. So that's going to sort of already create some animosity, some aggression, some frustration around books. So if you found books to be tricky as a tool, that might be one of the reasons. How do we approach reading a book is really really important and something that I share with people I work with with my membership community when I do workshops and presentations. There's a really important approach to using books so that they're enjoyable, engaging and teach skills, but don't become a lecture. There's also a really important process in understanding that sometimes kids push back because they know it's about an uncomfortable topic, and part of the conversation there is we all have feelings and we all need to build tools and skills for those feelings. So one of the things we're going to start doing is reading about different kinds of feelings. So part of pushback might be tackling the topic at hand. The elephant in the room I don't want to talk about my feelings, but hey, I'm actually not making that part of this sort of conversation. This conversation is we're going to talk about feelings and let's read these cool books. It's also about how did you approach reading these books? Is it fun? Is it lecturing? Do you sound a bit annoyed? Right, how do we get into the reading? So one of the things that I talk about when I'm building this idea of a social, emotional or emotions vocabulary feelings vocabulary is a lot of people will say, yeah, we've got a really good handle. My kid can clearly identify a bunch of feelings. The research actually tells us that we're not really great at identifying feelings. We're not really great at identifying other people's feelings, especially our children, and so it's all guesswork. Right, it's all guesswork, and so one of the things that's really critical here is to step back from our association with emotions and say you know what? Let's just be playful. Let's take this in a different format. Let's use a picture book to start facilitating some conversations around different kinds of emotions in a fun and an engaging way. One of the things that happens when we do that. My favorite book for this purpose is the Way I Feel by Jana and Kane. She actually has two books now. What happens there is we're starting to have conversations about feelings, not in a moment of conflict, not in a moment of difficulty, not in a dino brain moment. So now we're taking that learning and we're putting it in common connection, we're opening it to a space where we're more willing and able to learn. So if we're thinking about this as vocabulary, right, we all have vocabulary, basic sort of understanding of how vocabulary might work. So the idea here is we want to build a feelings vocabulary using picture books in playful ways. Now here's another tip about using picture books Don't make every single page a learning conversation, right? Teachers can get away with that, parents not as much. Two or three, right? The more you over talk a book, the more you devalue the book experience. So one of the things that is super important to me when I sort of share resources, and one of the things I'm going to be building into that my membership community is a weekly book where I talk about here's, some topics you can talk about with a book. Here's how I can use the book. But one of the things I'm always taught in all my programs when I taught parents how to use books for various topics is there are ways that you need to use the book for it to be effective. So if you've had a wall and you're like I bought the book, I did the thing, it might be because the way you read, it didn't resonate. It might be because you talked too much, you asked too many questions. So a picture book could be worth a whole bunch of different readings if we just pick one topic here, one topic there, right, if we turn it into a game. So the way I feel, one of the things I teach parents is like how do you place your grades with it? How do you do an art activity with it? I give you like five or six ways that you can make it playful. Again, what are we doing here? We're developing an emotions vocabulary. Why is that important? Well, in order to sit with and understand and identify our feelings, we really need to understand what those feelings look like. And if we only focus on teaching about feelings, particularly the tricky ones, if we only focus on teaching about feelings in tricky moments, that learning is not connecting for tools to regulation, that learning is not connecting to really understanding feelings vocabulary. And often, when I come out the other side of working with parents, something they share with me is I really thought I had a great handle on my emotions. I had a really great handle on like identifying my emotions and through the process of having to teach my child about their emotions and sort of get more comfortable with talking about feelings. Actually, I don't have a great vocabulary and my child didn't have a great vocabulary, even though I thought they did. And here's the thing. This is where you can give yourself some space and grace and some forgiveness. Why would you know this? You never learned it and as a society, we don't like to talk about it. A lot of families I have a lot of families that I work with where a partner will say to me this seems so obvious, this seems so childish, this seems so right. I've heard a lot of different things. When people get really honest with me on feedback and the thing that comes down to is talking about our feelings is uncomfortable and turning them into teachable moments that are engaging and fun and relatable is really hard. It can be really hard for some of us to step outside of our comfort zone. So my number one tool when I'm talking about starting to build out some of these social emotional skills is using picture books. They're concrete, so we take the abstract idea. You're no longer doing these lecturey conversations. You can have a conversation over a graphic, over a picture, over the subtext of a story. We're focusing on not too many lessons per book. We're finding ways to make it fun. How are we using voices? How are we using interactions? Are we playing charades Right? So this idea that SEL programs focus on flashcards and these kinds of things, that's like rote learning, that's like memorization. We can memorize our feelings. In order to develop a emotions vocabulary, we have to start with a foundation of words. Then we need to learn how to apply those words to us and our experiences. But the very first place to think about, to start this to sort of consider, is have you been intentionally building and fostering an emotions or feelings words vocabulary in places of calm and connection? And my number one go-to tool for that is with a picture.