Teaching Kids Emotion Words Builds Better Self-Regulation

Vocabulary might be the secret weapon for managing meltdowns.

Imagine a six-year-old crumbling onto the floor because their favorite cup is in the dishwasher.

To an observer, it looks like a tantrum over kitchenware.

But inside the child’s mind, a storm of disappointment, frustration, and powerlessness is brewing—feelings they may not yet have the labels to identify.

If they can only identify “happy” or “mad,” they lack the precision required to solve the problem.

New research suggests that giving children the specific words to describe these internal states acts as a key to unlocking better behavior and emotional control.

In a recent cross-sectional study involving 252 children and their caregivers, researchers used path analysis to map the complex relationships between family dynamics, language, and emotional skills.

Naming the Feeling to Tame It

The study’s most compelling finding is that “emotion word knowledge” acts as a scaffold for self-regulation.

Researchers assessed children aged 4 to 8 by asking them to define various emotion terms, ranging from simple concepts like “sad” to more complex ones like “annoyed” or “lonely”.

The results were clear: children who could accurately define these concepts were rated by their parents as having better adaptive emotion regulation.

This means they were better at responding positively to neutral situations and displaying appropriate reactions to negative ones.

Crucially, this wasn’t just because these children were smarter or more talkative.

Even when researchers accounted for general verbal intelligence (IQ), the specific knowledge of emotion words remained a significant predictor of how well a child could regulate themselves.

It suggests that knowing the difference between “furious” and “frustrated” offers a child a specific mental handle to grasp their experience, making it manageable rather than overwhelming.

The Limit of Parental Modeling

We often assume that children simply absorb emotional skills by watching their parents.

However, this study revealed a surprising nuance in how emotional skills are passed down.

The researchers measured “implicit parental emotion socialization”, essentially, how parents express and regulate their own emotions in daily life.

Unexpectedly, a parent’s ability to regulate their own emotions did not predict their child’s emotion word knowledge.

Simply being a calm parent doesn’t automatically teach a child the vocabulary of calmness.

However, parents still played a major role in the emotional climate of the home.

When parents struggled with their own emotion regulation, their children were more likely to show “emotional lability”—intense, dysregulated mood swings.

This creates a distinction: a parent’s mood influences the intensity of a child’s reactions, but specific word knowledge provides the toolset for the child to handle those reactions adaptively.

The Socioeconomic Gap in Emotional Language

The research also highlighted disparities in how this knowledge develops.

Children from families with higher socioeconomic status (SES) – measured by education and income-to-needs ratio – demonstrated significantly higher emotion word knowledge.

This aligns with previous research suggesting that higher-SES environments may offer more opportunities for “social-cognitive enrichment,” such as time spent discussing complex topics or using decontextualized language.

This finding is critical because it suggests that emotion vocabulary is not merely a biological trait but a skill shaped by environment and opportunity.

If a child isn’t learning these words at home due to environmental stressors or lack of time, they may arrive at school with fewer tools to manage the social and emotional demands of the classroom.

Girls and the Language of Feeling

The study also noted a gender gap, with girls outperforming boys in emotion word knowledge by a notable margin.

This likely reflects socialization rather than biology.

Parents often engage in more elaborate conversations about feelings with daughters than with sons, providing girls with more opportunities to practice and refine this specific vocabulary.

This suggests that we may be unintentionally under-equipping boys with the linguistic tools they need to process their experiences effectively.

Why it matters

This research moves the conversation about child behavior away from “discipline” and toward “skill-building.”

If a child is struggling to behave, they may not be willful; they may simply be ill-equipped.

The findings support constructionist theories of emotion, which argue that we build our emotional experiences using the concepts and words we have learned.

For parents, teachers, and therapists, the takeaway is actionable: explicitly teaching emotion words works.

We cannot rely solely on “modeling” good behavior.

We must act as translators for our children, narrating their experiences and offering them the precise words, like disappointed, nervous, or relieved – that turn a terrifying flood of sensation into a manageable human experience.

What you can do:

Instead of just asking “What’s wrong?”, try to help your child build their dictionary.

When reading stories, pause to ask, “Is that character mad, or just frustrated?”

The more words they have, the more resilient they can become.

Shipkova, M., Milojevich, H., Lindquist, K. A., & Sheridan, M. A. (2025). Children’s emotion word knowledge is associated with adaptive emotion regulation: Links to family-level and child-level factors. Emotion, 25(8), 1982–1996. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001543