We've built an increasingly granular emotional vocabulary for children. These days, there are feelings charts in classrooms, books about managing big emotions, and entire pedagogies built around validating what kids are going through. Parents have learned to be hypersensitive about when their six-year-old is feeling overstimulated or needs a sensory break. And then, after averting an outburst, those same parents will go into the kitchen and stress-eat an entire box of Oreos. The disconnect is striking once you notice it.
The Vocabulary Exists, We Just Don't Use It
Ask adults to describe how they're feeling, and you'll get maybe five words: tired, stressed, fine, good, bad. Meanwhile, their kids are working with emotion wheels that have thirty options, learning words like "overwhelmed," "disappointed," "anxious," and "irritated" before they hit third grade.
A 2024 global study across 149 countries found emotional stress worsening continuously from 2008-2021, affecting over half the population in 20 nations by 2020, with young adults showing the sharpest rises. Adults these days are dealing with worse emotional regulation and higher rates of anxiety and depression than ever before. We've got the tools to teach our kids nuanced emotional language, and somehow forgot to use them ourselves.
The irony is that we're modeling emotional illiteracy while trying to raise emotionally intelligent children. They watch us say we're fine when we're clearly not. They see us power through exhaustion, irritability, disappointment—all filed under the same generic label of "tired."
Permission to Feel Applies to Everyone Except Us
Ashwini Chaudhary(Monty) on Unsplash
Children get permission to have meltdowns. They're allowed to be unreasonable, to need breaks, or to be overwhelmed. There's this unspoken rule that once you're grown, your feelings become inconvenient. You can't exactly lie on the kitchen floor because you're overwhelmed by the to-do list, even though that's precisely what you'd let your child do before gently talking them through it.
Adults are expected to cope silently, without disrupting the schedule. The American Psychological Association's 2022 Stress in America survey found that 76% of adults reported experiencing health impacts from stress, yet most described barriers to addressing it, including lack of time and feeling like they should handle it alone.
We've Outsourced Adult Emotional Support
Over the last couple of decades, therapy became the designated space for adult feelings. There's nothing wrong with this, except it means we've largely stopped processing emotions in our actual daily lives. You don't talk to your friend about feeling inadequate or anxious about aging or resentful about work. You save it for your Thursday appointment.
Meanwhile, as we model the opposite, we're teaching children that feelings are meant to be talked about in the moment with trusted people as part of regular life. The disconnect means kids learn emotional language while observing few adults who actually apply it in their own lives. They might grow up thinking there's an expiration date on having feelings that need tending.
The Performance of Being Fine
Watch adults interact, and you'll see this constant performance of capability. We're handling it. Everything's under control. The house might be chaos, work might be a disaster, our relationships might be strained, but we're still out here gritting our teeth, saying, "Everything's great."
Children haven't been programmed to perform normalcy. They cry when they're sad, yell when they're angry, and bounce when they're excited. Somewhere in adolescence, we teach them to tamp down their emotions and keep it together. Then we wonder why mental health issues spike in young adulthood. We've trained them that real feelings are private and inappropriate to air in public.
The Modeling Gap Creates a Problem
Kids don't learn emotional regulation from being told about it. They learn it from watching adults actually regulate their emotions, which requires first acknowledging those emotions exist. When we skip straight to coping mechanisms without naming what we're coping with, we're teaching them that feelings are problems to be solved quickly and quietly rather than experiences to be understood. We're raising a generation with an exceptional emotional vocabulary and pairing it with adults who refuse to model it. That gap matters more than we want to admit.
