My name is Emma, and for almost three years I believed something was fundamentally wrong with my daughter, Isla. She was seven, bright, funny, curious - and completely overwhelmed by her own emotions. A spilled drink could set off a 40-minute screaming spiral. A birthday party invitation being the wrong colour. Getting the wrong flavour crisp.
I read every parenting book I could find. I attended a 6-week parenting course through the school. I tried sticker charts, consequences, reward systems, the naughty step. I cried in the school car park more times than I can count. I started to wonder if I was the problem - if somehow my parenting had caused this, if she was going to struggle her entire life.
A friend in my mums' WhatsApp group shared The Feelings Toolkit. I almost didn't buy it - I'd spent so much money on things that hadn't worked. But £24 felt low-risk enough to try.
The first night, I read the Parent Guide while Isla was asleep. Page 12 stopped me in my tracks. It talked about how children who seem "dramatic" or "oversensitive" often have the richest emotional inner lives - they feel everything more intensely. The problem isn't the feeling. The problem is that no one has ever given them the vocabulary to understand it.
The next evening we sat together with the emotion cards spread out on the floor. I asked Isla to find the card that showed how she'd felt at school that day. She picked up "frustrated" and "left out" - and for the first time, rather than exploding or shutting down, she talked. Ten minutes. About a girl in her class. About feeling invisible. About not knowing what to do with that feeling.
I sat there completely still, trying not to cry.
By week two, she was using the language on her own. She started saying things like "I'm feeling overwhelmed, can I have 5 minutes?" instead of running out of the room in tears. She'd go to her calm corner - which we set up together from the toolkit guide - and come back ready to talk. Her teacher pulled me aside after school on day 16 to say Isla had comforted a crying classmate using words she'd never heard from a 7-year-old before: "It's okay to feel upset. Do you want to tell me what happened?"
It's been four months now. We still have hard days. Isla still feels things intensely - that hasn't changed, and honestly I wouldn't want it to. But she has tools now. She has language. She has a parent who knows how to sit with her in the hard moments instead of trying to fix them or shut them down.
I went from dreading evenings to genuinely looking forward to our 10 minutes together. That's not something I ever thought I'd say.
