Why I don’t Like Using Emoticons

I was having a conversation with someone the other day and I was sharing my dislike for using emoticons with young children. Firstly, I want to say this is a personal preference that I have as an early year’s teacher. Now don’t get me wrong, I love to use emoticons in text messages or an informal way as I communicate with friends and family. However, when working with children I steer clear of using emoticons. Even though it might feel cool, hip and relevant to children in modern times.

The main reason for this is that as children are learning to explore and understand their emotions, emoticons can cause confusion to them relating emotions to themselves. This is because when we use emoticons to display emotions such as sad, angry, happy, confused, shocked or surprised; it doesn’t necessarily relate to what emotions look like in us. It is much more relatable for young children to see those emotions in a photograph or mirror that can help them relate that make to their own feelings and emotions. Making it more powerful and relatable to those young minds, to portray what it might look like to feel those feelings in our body.

One of the most important things that we do in the early years is supporting children in learning to identify and understand those big and small emotions that we all experience. Part of doing this is relaying that it is natural and human for us to experience a vast range of emotions and to see these in other people. For example, how often do we catch ourselves saying things such as “I can see your feeling angry right now. That your firsts are clenched and your face is screwed up. What could we do to help you?”  Understanding how our bodies react to emotions and facial expressions is vital so that we develop empathy, but also an understanding of other people’s emotions once we have learnt to understand our own.

We know that only 7% of communication and language is verbal, the rest of how we communicate is non-verbal, our body language, our facial expressions and our tone of voice. Therefore, we need to support children in being good communicators and a big part of this is understanding body language and facial expressions, talking about it with our children and exploring them in a realistic way. So this is my main reasons for not  using emoticons for children.