How to use books and other materials to help your child build Emotion Knowledge

Books and materials with emotions are an important tool for helping children build emotion knowledge. But before we jump into using them, it is important to understand a bit about the process of how this knowledge develops.

Emotion knowledge is a two part, gradual learning process

A child’s understanding of emotions is actually a two-part skill: being able to discriminate one emotion from another (emotion recognition) and being able interpret emotions in context (emotion situation knowledge) (Basset et al., 2012). Together, emotion recognition and emotion situation knowledge build the child’s emotion knowledge, an element of emotional intelligence.

Here’s an example of these two parts:

Emotion recognition: “That is a sad face, there are tears and the mouth is frowning: that child is sad”

Emotion situation knowledge: “That child just got his toy taken away, now he is crying, his face looks sad. Losing his toy made that child feel sad.”

As you can probably tell, these two go hand in hand—you need to know what a sad face looks like in order to recognize sadness as a result of a behavior or event (whether it happens to you or to someone else). This is the same process their development follows when learning about emotions. Children first learn to identify the different faces and to discriminate positive ones from negative ones. They later learn the words that describe them, as they also gain gradual understanding of the situations that bring them up, within themselves and in others.

Why help a child build emotion knowledge?

Emotion knowledge is a skill that children need in order to engage in socially adaptive behavior like expressing empathy when seeing someone in trouble, practice emotion regulation and build more positive relationships with peers. Children with poor emotion knowledge can have greater difficulty with peer relationships, attention problems, academic performance and more challenges regulating their behavior (Peltola et al., 2011; Denham et al., 2003).

As you can also probably guess, this is a lot of work for the young brain and it takes years to develop. While humans can discriminate emotions from infancy, accurately labeling and understanding them within the social environment is a process that takes a bit longer. So how can we support them in this journey? Books and other materials are a wonderful tool to help children build emotion knowledge.

Below are some tips and suggested books/materials to guide you as you help your child (and infant!) practice emotion recognition, which will support the overall development of their emotion knowledge.

Strategies with infants

We know from science that children are able to discriminate between different emotions in faces as early as seven months old! This means that your work exposing them to emotions through books can start early.

Share with your baby examples of positive and negative emotions through board books or picture cards with large faces. These options are engaging and enriching, and an entertaining tool for tummy time!
Be dramatic! While books are a helpful tool for infants, don’t forget about your own face, which your baby is fascinated by. Make exaggerated faces, labeling the emotions as you go and describing your face in the process: “Did you laugh? Is that a smile on your face? Look at my face, you made me smile! I feel so happy!”

Strategies with young toddlers

By about 18 months, the sensitive period for language often explodes and you have a toddler eager to use and learn new words. This is a wonderful time to turn up the volume for emotion recognition work!

When you begin using books and language materials for emotion recognition with a young toddler (18-24 months), begin presenting only 3-4 emotions at a time including happy, sad and angry. By about age two, children begin to accurately identify these emotions.
It is not until age 3 that children are able to more accurately label more complex emotions such as surprise, fear or disgust (Peltola et al., 2011; Denham et al., 2003). Follow your child but introduce these or additional emotions gradually. Considering this gradual identification process helps your child solidify knowledge and make stronger connections in their environment.

At this age they are gaining vocabulary and confidence for labeling some emotions, but their understanding about how they come up during different situations is still evolving.

At around 24 months, books portraying simple examples of children experiencing positive and negative emotions within context are a helpful way to enrich this knowledge (for example, a book showing a child feeling happy when getting a hug, or sad about having missing their parent while at school).
Couple the use of books and materials presenting social situations with your continued use of vocabulary and identification of emotions that come up in your children and yourself throughout the day: “we got to see grandma on FaceTime today, that made me feel very happy”, “it is not your turn yet and I see that is making you feel very angry. I understand, it is very hard to wait.”

Strategies with older toddlers

While older toddlers are able to identify various positive and negative emotions, accurately labeling fear, disgust, shame, surprise and neutral faces develops slowly, becomes more accurate by about five years of age (Peltola et al., 2011; Denham et al., 2003: Trentacosta & Fine, 2010; Widen and Russel, 2003). As your child reaches 36 months, continue providing language and exposure to a wide range of emotions, but practice patience as your child learns to identify them in materials and the environment.

Close to age 3, children also begin gaining more accurate understanding of the social situations and context that bring certain emotions, linked to the drastic increase in emotion recognition for additional emotions (as vocabulary continues expanding). As you continue presenting books and materials showing emotions, materials including social scenes with different emotions are helpful (with potential for matching work as they gain more mastery of emotion recognition).

Books and Materials to support Emotion Knowledge

The ages below are for suggested use only—always follow your child and their own development trajectory, interests, and your family’s needs. Focus on integrating your own observations of your child’s interests and the needs you have at home, with what we know is developmentally appropriate for their age. This may result in presenting these suggested items earlier or later than suggested.

Similarly, think of how creative ways to use emotion books beyond their obvious use. Simple board books with single faces can lead to bigger conversations and serve as matching material for older children, just as emotion books with rich language can be used as simple tools when only focusing on the images and your own narrative for younger children.

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