Promoting Emotional Literacy in Kids

Promoting Emotional Literacy in Kids

To correctly label an emotion is to have mastery over it. Kids who are skilled at using words to express feelings are less likely to become overwhelmed in emotionally charged situations. Studies show that children as young as two, when shown facial expressions, are capable of discerning and naming the six basic emotions—happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust. Kids who have access to a variety of words for identifying these basic emotions, and are skilled at verbally elaborating upon them, experience a general sense of emotional control.

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The Ins and Outs of Psychoeducational Testing

Upon becoming licensed ten years ago, I began scampering around in search of “gigs” to supplement the meager income I was making as a part-time community-mental health therapist and college lecturer. It was my good fortune to land a two-year position with Teri Solochek, an educational consultant in the San Fernando Valley who was well known for conducting psychoeducational testing with the wayward children of the upper-strata and placing them in high-end therapeutic boarding schools around the country.  I nodded politely and disguised my ignorance when she spoke of psychoeducational testing, assuming it was a of hybridization of the more regal psychodiagnostic testing that we are all trained to do in graduate school. Indeed, my stint with Teri Solochek proved to be auspicious and I incorporated psychoeducational testing as a dimension of my own private practice.

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