Most of us would agree that there is a strong link between language and emotions. We use words to help us express our emotions, but those very same words also help us to define what we’re feeling. This is true for monolinguals, but those of us who speak more than one language know that different languages often allow us to define our feelings in a different way based on the specific nuances each language has to offer.

I was reminded of this recently when I read an article about emotional intelligence on Maw Books Blog. According to guest post author Marsha Jacobson, “Increasing our children’s feeling vocabulary, accepting their feelings (positive and negative), exploring these emotions and helping them learn how to manage them are the ingredients for developing their emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence, which is strongly linked to future success and happiness, is something more and more parents are paying attention to.”

Parents in bilingual homes have the special privilege of giving their children the gift of expressing their emotions in two different languages. While bilingual children won’t feel things more deeply than other children, they will have more tools to express their feelings with a wider range of nuances. Of course just knowing the meaning of emotionally charged words is not all it takes to develop a child’s emotional intelligence. Parents also need to encourage their children to express their feelings openly and honestly, which may be difficult for parents who aren’t used to expressing their own emotions freely with words.

Marsha offers a few ideas for parents to help children explore their emotions:

• Give your children time to explore their feelings at their own pace and come to their own conclusions.
• Restate what they say, but put in some more feeling words.
• Provide some “what if” scenarios such as “What if the mommy had said…?” or “What if that was you, how would you have felt?”
• Share your own stories. Children love to hear real stories, especially things that happened to you or how you felt as a child. It’s sometimes fun to replace reading a book altogether and relate one of your childhood stories instead. (I would add that you could even make a homemade book about one of your childhood stories to read aloud to your child, and include pictures of you as a child.)
• Share your feelings. Children learn best by example. Parents are their best models and hold the greatest power for teaching. (Again, if all this soul bearing is new to you, just try to express your emotions little by little.)
• We at Bilingual Readers would add that you can also use storytime to reinforce emotional vocabulary. Some books are specially designed to showcase emotions, but you can highlight emotional vocabulary in almost any storybook by talking with your kids about how the story made them feel, how they think the characters felt after certain events in the story, etc.

Helping your kids to express what they feel is an important step in their language development as well as their emotional growth. So whether it’s I love you, te quiero or maite zaitut you tell your little one when you kiss her goodnight, you can rest easy knowing that you’re laying the foundation for emotional health that will last a lifetime.