Taming the Dragon: Learning to Benefit from Feelings

Elizabeth Levin is a psychology professor at Laurentian University.

This volume describes a preventive program in anger management and
conflict resolution designed for children between 3 and 8 years of age.
If you are involved in daycare, preschool, or the early elementary
grades, then this book provides a curriculum guide to help children
express six feelings appropriately: happiness, sadness, fear, anger,
hunger, and loneliness. Detailed instructions are provided for making
the required supplies, informing the parents, running the weekly
lessons, and evaluating the program. By learning to recognize and
identify several feelings, the program aims to help children develop
appropriate anger management skills, which should ultimately lead to
reduced violence in the schools.

The program involves three six-week cycles, so you must be prepared to
work at the program, but the repetition of the themes should reinforce
the concepts. In the presentation of symptoms of the various emotions,
there is much overlap. For example, stomachache is described as a
possible symptom of sadness, hunger, loneliness, and anger. Similarly,
headache and appetite changes are each described as common to four of
the six emotions. Every symptom on the sadness list appears on the
loneliness list except for fatigue. This fits with theories of emotion
in that many of the physiological changes are similar, but focusing on
this similarity makes it difficult to teach kids to discriminate.

Although the text presents anger as a secondary emotion, the research
literature has long included anger as one of our most basic and primary
emotions. Further, there is little evidence that fear leads to autism
(as opposed to autistic-like withdrawal). Despite these factual errors,
if you are looking for a well-laid-out plan to help children with their
emotional development this manual deserves your attention.