Teach Your Children Well 189words, there’s only one thing to do: Teach him a basic vo-
cabulary of feeling words, starting with happy, sad, and, of
course, frustrated. Why only three words? Because—
regardless of a person’s age—if you’re overambitious in
teaching new skills you won’t teach any skills at all. And
because those three feelings cover about 80 percent of hu-
man emotions anyway. Once a child becomes comfortable
with and begins using this rudimentary vocabulary, more
sophisticated feeling words—despondent, dysphoric, dis-
enfranchised, discombobulated—can be added to a child’s
repertoire.
For some kids, even starting with the word frustrated
is too advanced. Some actually can’t say the word, in
which case “angry” or “mad” will suffice. For some, saying
any words is too frustrating, in which case it’s often use-
ful to have the child point to a picture of a frustrated
face or rank their level of frustration with numbers, a 0
to 5 ranking system, in which 0 denotes “not frustrated at
all” and 5 denotes “really, really frustrated”; or colors, for
example, green denotes “not frustrated at all,” yellow sig-
nifies “starting to get frustrated,” and red denotes “really,
really, frustrated.” Of course, it’s important for the adults
to use the same terminology as the child and to give the
child opportunities for using the language at times other
than when he’s most frustrated.
For example, Helen—a child you read about in Chap-
ter 4—learned and practiced her rudimentary vocabu-