A book can help with
For the child swamped by a feeling they can’t yet name.
Children feel everything at full volume, and that is exactly as it should be. What they haven’t got yet are the words. A child swamped by something enormous who can’t name it has no way to tell you about it, so it comes out through their body and their behaviour instead. Cross, sad, jealous, nervous, all of it can arrive as one great undifferentiated storm.
Books are wonderful for handing a child the words. A story that gives each feeling a name, a colour, a character, lets a child point and say ‘that one’, which is the first step to feeling less at the mercy of it. Once a feeling can be named, it can be talked about, and once it can be talked about, it shrinks.
These are the ones I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there.
First feelings
For the very youngest it’s the simplest idea of all: that feelings have names, and that all of them are allowed. These lay that first foundation gently.
A little monster wakes up with all his feelings in a tangle, and a child helps him sort them out, one colour at a time, happy yellow, sad blue, angry red. It’s a brilliantly simple way to give a very young child the idea that feelings have names and can be separated out. A worldwide favourite, and often the first feelings book a family reaches for.
or on Bookshop.org
Each page opens up one big feeling, describing exactly how it sits in your heart and your body, from the flutter of happiness to the heavy weight of sadness. The die-cut heart running through it makes it lovely to hold and share. A warm way to help a small child notice what a feeling actually feels like.
or on Bookshop.org
Feelings with a face
Now they can follow a proper story, and giving a feeling a character to watch helps a child see it as something they have rather than something they are.
Jim Panda wakes up in a thoroughly bad mood for no reason at all, and everyone keeps telling him to cheer up, until he learns that sometimes you just feel how you feel, and that’s alright. It’s very funny, and it makes the freeing point that a child doesn’t have to justify or fix every feeling straight away. Grown-ups tend to love it as much as children do.
or on Bookshop.org
A little boy feels everything enormously, so much so that his feelings sometimes spill right out of him, until he discovers he’s not the only one and that big feelings aren’t something to hide. It’s a tender, reassuring read for the deeply feeling child who can be overwhelmed by their own heart. Good for the sensitive one who feels too much.
or on Bookshop.org
Understanding the mix
Older children can begin to understand what feelings actually are, and how to read the signals their own body is sending. A book that teaches as well as tells earns its place here.
A clear, friendly guide that takes the four big feelings, happiness, sadness, fear and anger, and explains where they come from, why we have them, and a little of the science behind them. It treats an older child as capable of understanding their own inner workings, which they are. A good reference to keep on the shelf and dip into when a feeling needs unpicking.
or on Bookshop.org
Everyone in this family gets a colour for the mood they are in. The boy has the blues, his grandmother has the yellows, and nobody is told to snap out of anything. It gives children a way of describing how they feel without having to find the right word for it, and the jazzy rhythm reads aloud beautifully.
or on Bookshop.org
Naming it at eleven
By eleven a child has all the vocabulary and usually keeps it to themselves. What follows is written straight to them rather than to you, which at this age is the only version that gets read.
A mental health handbook pitched exactly at the first years of secondary school: sleep, phones, friendships, low days and what can actually be done about them. George is a doctor and writes without any of the usual awkwardness. Short bright sections, made to be picked up and put down.
or on Bookshop.org
A frank guide to mental health for young teenagers, with a clinical psychologist contributing throughout and a good deal of humour in it. It goes further than most books at this age and is written for the older end of the band, so read it yourself first and decide when. Right for the child who has started to wonder about how they feel.
or on Bookshop.org
Book links are Amazon affiliate links, meaning I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. More on this.
Something to do together
A simple feelings chart a child can point to when the words won’t come, so ‘I don’t know’ can become ‘that one’. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
Naming a feeling genuinely changes what it does to a child. The psychiatrist Dan Siegel calls it ‘name it to tame it’: putting words to a feeling helps settle the part of the brain that’s flooded by it. A child who can say ‘I’m frustrated’ rather than lashing out already has a hand on the wheel.
There are no bad feelings, only feelings, and a child who is told otherwise learns to hide the difficult ones rather than bring them to you. So name your own out loud where they can hear you, welcome the awkward ones as readily as the easy ones, and hold the line on behaviour rather than on the feeling underneath it. The rest gets easier once the words are there.
These pages are written for the grown-ups looking after a child: parents, teachers and carers. A good book can sit beside a worried child, though it never stands in for a real conversation, or for proper support when something feels too big to carry alone.