Babies and toddlers have emotions!

Despite infants not being able to communicate through language about the nuance of how they are feeling, emotion actually develops very early on and continues to grow in complexity throughout early childhood.  Within the first two months of life, infants can feel interest, joy, and distress.  By 4 months old, there are physiological differences in how infants feel fear, anger, and sadness.  The frequency at which a baby feels angry increases from 4 months old to 19 months³.  But a baby does not feel jealous; that emotion doesn’t develop until much later on⁴.  Check out the Developmental Milestones guide for more information.

So what do we do with these emotions?

Our emotions have an important function.  The goal is not to only feel positive emotions or never feel negative ones.  .  If we strive for that, we are striving for an impossible goal.  (And if someone were to achieve it. I’d be quite concerned!).  The goal is to accept and normalize that we all feel the full range of emotions, and focus on responding to our emotions in a helpful way.  You want your toddler to know that nothing is wrong with them for feeling all sorts of things.  It really is okay.

Beyond just acceptance of the emotion, we can use the emotion as a clue to help us better understand a situation.  When a toddler experiences an emotion, we want that to spark a sense of wonder and curiosity in the parent.  Why might my toddler be feeling that way? What is going on in their world? What are they perceiving to be happening?  What are they reacting to?  The answers to these questions, or really your best guess at the answers to these questions, can help you better understand your toddler’s needs.  As the Creating Strong Bonds guide explains, paying attention to our children’s needs and responding to them is essential in developing and maintaining a healthy relationship with our children.

Co-regulation for the win!

In response to a strong emotion, a toddler turns to their parents for support.  This is what they were biologically designed to do. They are hard-wired to seek support from their parents.   Infants cannot regulate their own emotions, and completely rely on their parents to soothe them.  Toddlers weren’t designed to cope with their feelings independently, but will gain more independence with coping skills through early childhood as they practice what their parents model for them.  They begin to learn how to self-regulate through the process of co-regulating with their parents⁵.  Co-regulation is “a warm and supportive interaction that provides the support, coaching, and modeling children need to “understand, express, and modulate their thoughts, feelings, and behavior”⁶,⁷. Each time you help them make sense of their emotional experience, you are taking another step toward your child being able to self-regulate more independently.  But you remain an essential part of your toddler’s ability to cope all throughout toddlerhood and early childhood.

Toddlers may or may not really understand why they are feeling a certain emotion, and we may or may not fully understand why they are feeling a certain emotion.  Their emotion is just as valid, even if we don’t understand it.  It can feel easy to discount their emotional experience when we don’t see the reason behind it, but try not to fall into that trap!  Your child is experiencing a real feeling and trying to ask for help with the limited tools they have.

Remember, focus on providing support for their emotional experience regardless of the reason for it⁸. Remember that validating their emotional experience is NOT the same thing as saying their action or behavior is okay. You can say “you are so frustrated that your friend had to leave, that makes sense, but it’s not ok to throw your water cup.” The Intuitive Parenting and Intuitive Discipline  guides dive into more detail on validating your toddler’s feeling without reinforcing an unhelpful behavior. 

Parents are also going through their own emotional experience.  We want to recognize and cope with our own emotions, so we can then help our toddlers recognize and cope with their emotions.  Check out the Coping in Chaos guide for more information on managing your own emotional experience in the midst of parenting. 

Labeling your toddler’s feelings

Using words to describe what your toddler may be feeling helps them make sense of what is happening to them.  It not only helps organize their experience for them, but it also helps move them from the emotion-center of their brain to the part of their brain that helps them process what is happening more logically (Note that we don’t expect toddlers to be logical like adults though! That part of their brain is not fully developed, and will not be for a while).