A Good Beginning, a recent report from the Child Mental Health
Foundation and Agencies Network, emphasizes that social and emotional
readiness is critical to successful kindergarten transition, early school
success, and even later accomplishments in the workplace. However, according
to the report, many children enter school without the social and emotional
readiness to succeed.
      Research has shown that many children, particularly boys, go into the
adolescent years with a restricted language for expressing emotions. This
"emotional illiteracy," as psychologist James Garbarino describes it, keeps
some boys locked up; they are unable to articulate their experiences and may
be ashamed that they can't.
      But the beginnings of emotional illiteracy start much earlier, and
often affect girls as well as boys. While girls are frequently encouraged to
express their emotions more openly than boys, the absence of support from
adults can put many children of both sexes at risk for behavioral,
emotional, academic and social problems.
      By helping your children express their thoughts, feelings, and
opinions verbally and in writing, you can give them a better start toward
emotional literacy, and a foundation to succeed in school.
      In their preschool years, you can help your children express their
thoughts and feelings by writing their words for them. In stories, poems, or
letters, their language can become a way to support their ability to deal
with a peer, with conflict, with sad or scary feelings. The words can help
your children sort out their feelings, and come to terms with their own
behavior. 
      As your children grow older, you can help them develop language they
can use to deal with their emotions and behavior. One of the best activities
is reading stories aloud, particularly stories that offer rich opportunities
to discuss emotions. And by helping your children relate the emotions in a
story to their lives and experiences, you help nurture their understanding
of concepts of emotion, as well as their vocabulary.
      By discussing the books you are reading, your children can learn to
make predictions and inferences, imagine a setting, identify with
characters, use the context to understand new words, ask questions, and
become aware of the skills they are using to make sense of text - all the
earmarks of active engagement in the reading process. Young children learn
what language is through what language does.
      By helping your young children express their thoughts and feelings
verbally and in writing or drawing, and by reading and discussing stories
that offer rich opportunities to discuss emotions, and to understand how
others think and feel, you can make sure their emotional development and
literacy go hand in hand.
      Excerpted from "Learning to Read the Heart: Nurturing Emotional
Literacy" by Rebecca Novick - an article in the NAEYC journal, Young
Children. 
Early Years Are Learning Years is a regular series from NAEYC providing
tips to help parents and early childhood educators give young children a
great start on learning.

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