Teaching kids emotional intelligence isn’t always easy, especially if you weren’t taught emotional intelligence as a child. Many parents are just trying to do the best they can to produce good humans. But the thing about children is that they have a lot of emotions and since they’re fairly new to the planet, they don’t always know the names of the emotions they’re feeling or appropriate ways to express them.
It’s up to parents to help kids navigate the emotions that come along with the human experience. A man that goes by the name of Dope Dad on TikTok is giving parents a quick glimpse into how he teaches his own kids about emotions with something called “emotion soup.”
The dad has a bowl with colorful puff balls laid out in front of him. Each ball represents a different emotion and the bowl of course, is for the soup. No worries parents, there’s no actual water or messy ingredients involved.
“If you’ve seen the Disney Pixar movie “Inside Out,” we follow those basic colors to represent the emotion. “Inside Out 2″ was just announced so we have a few new emotions being added to the mix,” the dad says before holding up each color to reveal the emotion.
He also explains that he has an emotions wheel that shows more emotions in case what his kids are feeling don’t fit into the color coded puffs. The bowl is to place the puff balls in for emotion soup which gives the dad a chance to see how his kids are feeling and why.
“The idea is that whatever emotions are in this bowl are the emotions that you’re feeling right now, or today or over the past week and these are the emotions that we need to digest or process,” he reveals.
The kids are in control of their soup, how many emotions go in the soup and what they do with the emotions they share with their dad. If the soup is too “hot,” meaning they need help managing their emotions, the dad gives them tools to help get the emotions under control.
It’s a really clever way to explain emotions to kids and can be great for parents who aren’t quite sure how to implement emotional intelligence with young kids. You can check out the video below to see how it’s done:
