You’re outside the school gates, waiting to pick up your little one at the end of the day. After a few minutes, you see their teacher emerge, with fourteen children following closely behind. Most of them are chattering excitedly, beaming from ear to ear, and generally looking very happy-go-lucky. Except for one, your child, who is trailing behind the rest of the children.

Your child has always been a bit quiet and subdued, so this doesn’t really surprise you. But seeing all the rest of his peers comfortably expressing themselves is making you think - How can I raise my little one to be more expressive? How can I understand their feelings better, and help them understand them too?

Depending on how you were raised yourself, helping your child be more expressive can either be a significant challenge for a parent, or extremely easy. However, either way, we all need to learn to help our children become more expressive and use whatever tools we have at our disposal to get there.

So, before delving into some ways in which you can do this, let’s first outline why it’s so important to raise an expressive child.

Why is it important to raise an expressive child?

Not every child will be naturally expressive, while others will be. Either way, it should be one of your main goals as a parent to help them get there. Being expressive is the key to your child processing their own emotions, forming meaningful relationships, paving a path to success, and ultimately being happier in their own lives.

Now that we’ve outlined why it’s important to raise an expressive child, let’s talk about some ways in which you can help your child be more expressive!

How can I raise my child to be expressive?

Avoid feeling suppressors. In the heat of frustration with our children, it’s easy to tell them to “stop overreacting” in response to them expressing their emotions. However exasperating your child can be, it’s important to show them that their feelings are important to you. Always try to give them enough time and space to express themselves, and don’t offload your own anger or frustration onto them. If you unintentionally suppress your child’s feelings, then they may clam up in response and believe that you are not accepting of them or their emotions.

Help your child identify their feelings instead. Instead of suppressing your child’s feelings, practice helping them identify them with phrases such as, “I’ll bet you feel good”, “do you think you were bad?”, “ouch! That must hurt.”, or “that made you angry.”

Match mind-sets. Balancing or neutralising your child’s emotional mindset can be a good way to let them know that you understand where they are and what they feel at a particular moment, and that you know where to go from there. For example, if your child scrapes their knee and their emotions are registering at a 10 on how much it is negatively affecting them, match this with empathy at the rating of a 10 also. This will help to calm your child down and bring them to the realisation that the scrape isn’t such a bad thing after all.

Be an empathetic listener. As a parent, it’s common to believe that because you know what’s best for your child, you don’t need to listen to their point of view. However, it’s much better to let your child explain how they feel and what their opinion is, so that you open up an opportunity for understanding and communication between you both. The next time your child puts up a fight about a decision you are making for them, give them the space and time to explain what’s on their mind, and try to refrain from judging them. They may just surprise you with a side of the argument you hadn’t yet considered!

Stress the importance of asking for help. At this age, many children don’t properly understand how to ask for help, or that they are allowed to ask for help. Therefore, it’s important that you convey to them that asking for help is not only ok but also important. A way that you can model this is by asking your child for help with tasks. This will also make them feel needed, valued, and will implant the idea that helping each other out from time to time is a normal, healthy behaviour to engage in.

Avoid playing amateur psychologist. Your child is sharp, and they will catch on when you are trying to psychoanalyse them. Therefore, avoid acting like a therapist and try to use a genuine approach when asking them how they feel. Use your own words and your own style of communicating. This will help your child relax into talking about how they really feel, and work through any difficult feelings organically.

Avoid cover-ups. When a shallow person tries to connect with someone who is a lot more deep-feeling, the relationship doesn’t usually last, as the two simply aren’t on the same page. The same applies to how you relate to your child. If your child happens to be particularly deep-feeling and tries to connect to you on this level, do your best to offer a response that matches this frequency. If they sense that you are responding in a shallow way, it will create a distance between the both of you. Don’t be afraid of your child’s deep feelings, dive in and help them work through them as best you can.

Use empathy before explanations. Some people are naturally more empathetic than others. Whether you find empathy hard, easy, or somewhere in the middle, it’s a big part of bonding with your child, and helping them to be expressive. If your child comes to you with a problem and you believe this problem to be silly or illogical, this doesn’t take away from their need for you to be empathetic towards them. Remember that negative emotions can be extremely powerful, and reason or logic won’t have as much power as you’d think if your child is genuinely afraid or upset about something. Before you try to calm your child down with logic, show them that you are there, and that you empathise with what they are going through.

Feeling puppets. It’s very common for children to clam up when they are asked how they feel. So sometimes, bringing in a middleman can be very helpful! This middleman can come in the form of a puppet or a favourite doll. Help your child release their feelings by giving one doll to your child, and taking another for yourself. Then, pretend that your doll is asking your child’s doll how they feel. You might just find your child is comfortable enough to let out what’s upsetting them.

How do I raise my child to be expressive?