Why ‘Use Your Words’ Can Be Good for Kids’ Health
In a desperate parental moment after dinner, I said to my six-year-old child, who was in mid-fusion, to “use your words!” He had just started to shout and hit his eight -year -old sister because she did not share a plush animal that he thought he was his. The two children frozen for a moment, giving me just enough break to slow down my own emotions that increase quickly.
With hindsight, I realize that I never explained to my children why words can help. But putting feelings in words is the way we start to name what is going on in us, and this denomination can start to change the experience itself. Sometimes, as research shows, the words we choose to describe our lives can shape our mental health for the months and years to come.
As a psychologist who spent the best part of two decades studying stress and resilience in my health and human performance laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, I explored how the verbalization of our feelings can transform experience. They can help manage heated moments, but also support the healing of the most difficult moments in life. Research published in the past 40 years on expressive disclosure – literally, using your words, especially on stressful life events, shows that this can cause significant improvements to health. After writing on a difficult situation, people report less visits to the doctor, reduced pain, stronger immune function and better results for conditions such as asthma and arthritis.
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There are empirical rules that we have learned from these studies with adults. Firstly, writing on a difficult life event three or four times in succession (such as consecutive days) tends to be more effective than spreading sessions. Second, for each writing session, the Sweet Spot seems to last at least 15 minutes; Shorter sessions can even turn against him, aggravating health. Third, for those who do not like to write, to speak through your feelings works as well. In fact, when a study directly compared the conversation and writing, the conversation came in advance because we can express more in 15 minutes of speech than in writing.
One of the reasons why speech therapy can be so powerful is that it helps people put words into their experiences in a safe and structured way. In a study, psychologist Jonathan Adler followed a group of adults who wrote stories about themselves over a period of 12 psychotherapy sessions. He noted that as participants in therapy was starting to describe themselves with a greater sense of the agency – considering themselves active authors of their own lives – their mental health has improved. He noticed that the change in stories came first, followed by improvements in well-being. For parents, it is a reminder that helping children tell their own stories with a feeling of choice and paternity, whether on a conflict of playground or a family movement, can plant resilience seeds.
One of the surprising discoveries for me is that the translation of our feelings into words can transform the feelings themselves. For example, neuroscience studies show that the act of naming its emotional experience (“angry”) activates emotional regulation circuits in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. In the scientific literature, this process is called “affected labeling” and it has powerful clinical advantages. In a study, participants with a spider phobia who labeled their feelings during exhibition therapy – while sitting alongside a tarantula – had reduced a response to physiological stress to spiders a week later compared to the participants who used other strategies, such as distraction.
While taking a warm emotion and putting it in words has the potential to blunt its immediate strength, expressive disclosure can also reshape our emotional memories. When we tell difficult experiences, whether in writing or speech, we don’t just remember a memory. We remove it from long -term memory, reshaped it with our words, then put it back in long -term storage as a new modified memory. This process, known as memory recuperation, gives us a time window to modify the structure of this memory. By describing painful or overwhelming events, we do not only relive them. We reorganize them. We add meaning, emotional context and resolution. In doing so, we can reduce the distress that these memories trigger and make them easier to live.
When I was a graduate student, I saw how powerful the words could be. I spent a year reading and coding expressive trials of women who had survived breast cancer. What surprised me was how often they talked about their sense of objective, their close relationships and their personal values. These women examined their emotional life, recognized their memories and experiences and reaffirmed what was most concerned.
Similar expressive writing programs are explored with children and come from the work of psychologist John Gottman, who presented a parental approach called Emotion Coaching two decades ago. A recent research review shows that these new expressive writing programs have weak but significant effects on improving emotional well-being results in children from 10 to 18 years old. There is even an indication that these programs can improve academic results in children with significant emotional problems. Even for young children, narration and drawing can help give meaning to great emotions, especially when they are guided by a teacher or a parent.
Of course, not all children are ready or capable of using their words in the same way. Children with early speech delays or children who are neurodivergent can find a particularly difficult verbal expression in emotionally loaded moments. For these children, emotional coaching can include images, physical prompts or coregulation by a calm presence. My laboratory has developed a new mindfulness meditation training application that can help parents develop these calm presence skills, with some of our initial clinical trial research showing that learning these calm presence skills reduces stress biology and improves social connectivity. These skills are gradually developing. The key is the flexibility, patience and meeting of your child where it is.
“Using your words” is a tool, and like any tool, you need practice to use well. If you have tried to say it in the middle of an anger crisis, you know that it does not work very well. Great emotions have often closed the ability of a child to think clearly, not to mention speaking. In our family, we have learned that the most important work often occurs outside these intense moments. My wife and I are trying to speak with our children when they are calm, helping them to think about the strong emotions they could have had earlier in the day and how they want to answer the next time they feel angry or overwhelmed. These conversations strengthen emotional vocabulary and give our children a feeling of choice on how to act.
What can parents do with others? Try a record at bedtime or breakfast with your child: “What was the most difficult part of your day (yesterday)?” Explore gently with them: “What do you feel when it happened?” Parents can also model the language of emotions by saying something like: “I feel frustrated at the moment, so I’m going to breathe.” These small moments can build the emotional vocabulary of a child and can help promote a new family approach to how we relate to our emotional life. These techniques can work particularly well when they are integrated into a daily rhythm, so that the practice of named feelings becomes a natural part of family life.
And sometimes we see him paying. Our eight -year -old daughter now announces: “I’m so angry!” When it is frustrated – born the feeling instead of acting on it. My six -year -old child is trying new ways to ask his sister to share her toys, and sometimes it even works. When their words help them get what they want or help solve a problem, it creates their own reward loop. Over time, these small language moments are not only to resolve conflicts; They help our children start to consider themselves as actors capable in their own stories, which, as research shows, is a foundation for sustainable well-being.
