Emotional Intelligence includes teaching about and providing a range of feeling words to match to emotions and learning how to use them at the appropriate time. Our English language has over 2000 words to describe our feelings. Typically though, any of us will only ever use six words (three sets of opposites, i.e., hot/cold, happy/sad) in our feeling description repertoire.

1. Affect (feelings) – I feel…,


2. Behaviour (doing) – when you…


3. Cognitions (thinking) – because…

Example: I feel confused when you try to touch my private parts because Mummy said nobody is allowed to touch me there.

Without a range of feeling words to use, children cannot clearly communicate what is happening inside them. The classic example is of a child who says they have a headache in their tummy. The child knows something feels yucky in their stomach but they don’t yet have the right word to match the feeling with.

In Game to Develop Emotional Intelligence and A Mime of Early Warning Information I provide a couple of games designed to stimulate easy teachable moments around learning new feelings words. I will feel estatic when you teach them to your children because it will provide another layer of protection for the world’s children.

Have you seen the beaut posters depicting feeling faces? Very handy as emotional prompts for learning and remembering, we have them plastered all over our walls at home. I feel proud that my children have an excellent grasp on emotional language and the kids are my evidence that teaching emotional intelligence leads to well adjusted children.

What do you do to instill emotional language and clear communication into your child’s vocabulary? I'd love to know because then I can teach your ideas to other parents I come into contact with. Why not consider entering your ideas into the book competition: WIN a Children’s Chapter Book (Bitss of Caramel Marmalade on Toast) for Yourself and Your Local Library.

Here's some other helpful articles I've written on emotional intelligence and feelings:

Emotional Intelligence and Clear Communication
Make a difference in another child's life: Actively listen to them.
Do You Get Angry with Your Child? I Do, Because Anger is a Natural Feeling.

Here's the link to a free sheet of Feeling Faces from Adoption Crossroads.

Is it okay to have consensual sex with an adult step-child? Ohio (U.S.A) man, Paul Lowe, has gone to jail for engaging in consensual sex with the 22-year-old daughter of Lowe's wife: his stepdaughter. Lowe argued that the relationship was consensual and that because she was an adult, the “incest statute […] to protect children against adults in positions of authority over them” did not apply to his case. Lowe was unsuccessful in his appeal that “barring consensual sex between an adult stepparent and stepchild was unconstitutional.” The opinion summary (including the direct quotes above) can be viewed at Law Barring Consensual Sex Between Stepfather and Adult Stepdaughter Upheld as Constitutional.


Legal opinion aside, debate around sex with adult children of a relationship (step-children, adoptive children, foster children, or natural children) raises a number of social concerns for me. What is the fabric of marriage made of: law, morals or ethics? Can this fabric be stretched to suit the lustful or conjugal needs of any family member? Was Lowe still in a cohabiting marriage with the stepdaughter’s mother? How long had the relationship been going on for? Was it really consensual or had family dynamics acted to sway the stepdaughters view of acceptable/unacceptable? What was the relationship between mother and daughter? Did the wife know of the affair between her husband and daughter or was it hidden and illicit? What is the social/religious/legal history of Ohio in relation to sex crimes?

My views on incest and child sexual abuse are very clear. Similarly, rape in marriage is a crime where I live and I fully support the abhorrence of rape in any relationship. Opportunistic prostitution (the exchange of sex for a concrete commodity – roof over your head, hot meal or shower, etc) is a recognised youth sub culture and funding is pored into services to provide young people with alternatives to opportunistic prostitution.

Despite my clear beliefs, I still find myself seeking more information to fill in the gaps behind Lowe’s case – how consensual is consensual and how did the relationship occur? Curious, I sought comment from the man I am about to marry. He also was unable to answer immediately: is it acceptable to enter into a consensual sexual relationship with an adult stepchild? He required time to think through the issues rather than knee jerk an emotive response. Neither of us can conceive of ever having sex with our adult stepchildren or entering into sexual relationships with any extended family member. In our view (albeit without all of the social answers to my above queries), it is incest.

Lowe has broken the law and is being punished. I am interested in your opinion. Do you think it is okay to have consensual sex with an adult step-child? Why/why not?

A little girl, aged 11, asked me why her mother didn’t help her and stop the abuse. I explained that her mother had no idea that father and uncle were sexually abusing her. The abuse had gone on for years. The child was angry, her behaviour was telling everyone that something was wrong and she was sent to counseling to get sorted out.

During the therapeutic process, the child disclosed the abuse. She claimed that she had told her mother by saying things like, she hated her father and never wanted to see her uncle again. She was using a child’s simple language to explain something that her vocabulary and life understanding was unable to punctuate with words. The child's mother didn't understand what the child's behaviour was saying. It wasn't until I told the mother in plain adult English and gave her the choice to tell the authorities herself before I did, that mother understood what had been happening.

Devastated and wanting retribution, the mother turned her anger toward her husband and brother. She committed acts of violence and was charged with three counts of grievous bodily harm. The mother turned to alcohol to consol herself and sought as much support as she could from other angry friends. While the anger danced around the household and the plotting thickened, the child and her enormous emotional and healing needs were forgotten. The child and her emotional needs simmered and the child developed a belief that her mother had (and was continuing to) failed to protect her.

The child saw family and friends that cared only about themselves and family that didn’t really believe the abuse because they acted like it was her fault that the family was now separated. Because of her young age, the little girl failed to recognise that her family were handling grief in their own way, that they did love and believe her but that were incapable in that moment of providing the support she so required.

The secrecy that surrounded the sexual abuse tore this family apart. It was not only the dysfunctional secrecy of the abusive acts, but the secrecy that then surrounded everyone’s coping mechanisms. Nobody talked through their primary emotions. Anger, a secondary emotion, quickly escalated to violent behaviour: behaviour that knew no words but that acted to further destroy the fragility of the family.

The 11 year old ran away from home at age 14. She lived with family of friends who would take her in and she drifted from bad situation to worse. Now 16, she has begun to visit her father again and never sees her mother. Where is the justice in this story? There is none. The perpetrator wins and the innocent remain wounded and cut off from each other. Why? Because they couldn’t talk about what had happened.

Talking to our children is important. If we can establish preventative cultures of talk then it makes it easier for our children to tell us if something happens to them. It is also easier on protective parents when and if they discover child sexual abuse. Talking about our pain, our betrayal, our shock is far healthier than acting it out and taking the law into our own hands.

Just as we invest in our children’s academic education, so too must we invest in our children’s development of emotional intelligence. Discussions about child safety, what to do if someone tries to touch you, and who to tell, are just as important as learning to read and spell.

After 15 years of working with families and children in both Australia and the U.K, across all levels of Government and in the community and private sectors, Megan Bayliss was sick and tired of waiting for business to make protective behaviors their business.

Megan embarked on a family focused business path of resource development. The original idea was to create and make available a number of specific resources that were easy to obtain, affordable and met best practice guidelines for working with children. Throughout this journey, market research continually supported that workers and parents were unable to identify specific elements of any protective behaviour programs.

With this low-level community knowledge in mind, Megan began to develop a model that would make it easy for parents, and workers, to remember how to fit protective behaviours together. Hence, a family friendly model of protective play resulted in the BITSS model of Protective Behaviors. BITSS is an easy to remember acronym for the important protective behaviour building blocks that are common to all other programs: the BITSS to remember are – Body ownership, Intuition, Touch, Say no, Support network. Since development, the model has grown to include in home protective play tutorials for parents/grandparents, easy read tutorials to support protective play, a series of children’s chapter books and workshops for people working with families and children.

How do you teach protective behaviors to your children?

What does your business do to support ending child abuse?