Understanding your child’s feelings (a taster course)
- 6 months to 19+ years
- English
- Modules
- Voiceover
- Course Modules
1.1 What is this course about?
1.2 A few instructions
1.3 What's coming up
1.4 Behaviour is communication!
2.1 How we know we're happy
2.2 How we know we're sad
2.3 How we know we're tired
2.4 How we know we're anxious
3.1 Understanding when your child feels happy
3.2 Understanding when your child feels sad
3.3 Understanding when your child feels tired
3.4 Understanding when your child feels anxious
3.5 Your child's feelings
4.1 Reading behaviours
4.2 Other parents' examples
4.3 Reading your child's behaviour in these situations
4.4 Look, think, say!
5.1 How our behaviour affects our children
5.2 Feelings, behaviour and developmental age
5.3 The challenge of reading behaviours
5.4 The three key questions
6.1 A recap
6.2 Time to have a go!
7.1 Acknowledgements
7.2 Congratulations and feedback questionnaire
About this course
The important relationships in your child’s life help shape their emotional health and wellbeing. This transformative course offers a reflective space to think about your child’s feelings and how this relates to their behaviour.
Understanding your child’s feelings is important for all parents, grandparents and carers of children aged between six months to 19 years. The resources are tailored so that whatever their age, you can use the ideas and techniques to help better understand your child’s feelings and behaviour to nurture them. This is a short ‘taster’ course. When you’ve finished this course, if you want to know more, then try Understanding your child: from toddler to teenager.
Why is it important that children name feelings
Understanding your child’s feelings has been developed by a team of Clinical Psychologists, Child Psychotherapists, Health Visitors, Child and Family Practitioners and, importantly, parents. Everything you will follow and learn in the course has been informed by experience and is designed to be practical to help you and your family in your everyday interactions. You’ll also learn about the foundations of wellbeing and mental health, as well as how different behaviours may indicate different feelings and ways to read that behaviour.
The course follows 7 Modules, each taking less than 20 minutes and broken up into manageable chunks called Units.
The first few Modules cover some ways of thinking and how to understand feelings that will help shape the approaches and ideas around the later sections, so this means it needs to be followed in order, one Module at a time. You don’t need to do it all in one go, and our advice is to take breaks and spread out your learning.
Understanding your child’s feelings is designed for all parents in any situation, but you might find that perhaps you begin to feel you would benefit from more personalised or specialist support, so there are some additional resources signposted throughout to guide you.
We know that there are many different families, with different backgrounds, shapes and sizes. We have tried to consider some of the different needs of families in this course, but it hasn’t been possible to account for all backgrounds. If your personal situation isn’t reflected, we still hope that you find something helpful in the main ideas about developing close, connected relationships between parents and children and welcome your feedback to improve its relevance.