Teach Your Tot to Express Emotions

M&B spoke about emotional development to Swati Popat, author of the parenting bestseller and president of Podar Education Network. Read on to discover how a little awareness can go a longway in making your baby more loving and expressive

- Swati Popat

Babies have always learnt about emotions through human interaction, but recent research says that emotions can also be instinctive. A theory called the Bronfenbrenner’s Theory adds that the environmental experiences of babies, as they grow, determines their social and emotional development. Even before the first social smile appears around the age of two or three months, babies can feel curiosity, happiness or distress that they convey through facial expressions and body language.

Swati Popat, M&B’s early childhood expert, says that children start emoting from the time of birth. She explains that when a newborn is held in the crook of his mother’s arm, he can look into her face and respond to the sight. Explaining the ways in which a baby expresses his feelings, Swati borrows from Italian early education specialist Loris Malaguzzy’s poem ‘The Hundred Languages of Children’ that says that every child expresses himself through a hundred languages but the adult world steals away 99 of them.

Instinct and imitation