Between about 1 and 3 years, children change how they give life to their feelings. The facial expressions they used so actively as infants, while still there, are joined by early words. These words are very often primitive, raw and intense: Hate, no like, me, want, go away, shut up.

Once a child begins to talk, the task of helping a child learn to use words to appropriately express feelings—the whole gamut from joy to rage—can bring many and immediate rewards. Anny Katan was a well-known child psychoanalyst who knew the Freud family and migrated to Cleveland after the war. There she founded a therapeutic preschool in 1950, now called the Hanna Perkins School, and she developed a technique of treating troubled preschoolers by way of the parents.

Anny Katan commented eloquently on the benefits of encouraging word use and talking in a child: Verbalization, she said, increases the possibility of distinguishing between fantasies and reality. Verbalization leads to the integrating process, which in turn results in reality testing. If the child would verbalize his feelings, he can learn to delay action (such as a tantrum). The common advice from some parents — "Use your words, not your hands" — sums up the strategy of encouraging word use.

Let's look at an example. Ben, 10 months old, and his mother are in the kitchen. Ben is in his highchair having a snack and playing with a little toy car. The car falls off and onto the floor. Ben begins to get distressed (mouth turned down, eyebrows arched). Mom can't get to the car right away and says: "Hold on, Ben, I'll get your car in a sec." Ben relaxes a bit; he knows he has been understood and he looks forward to seeing the results. He's really interested in the car, and when his mom takes a few seconds too long ( in his view of things) to retrieve the car for him, his distress returns full blast. Then his distress morphs into anger. His face turns red and he lets out a cry of despair. Mother hears this, puts down the pan she's working on, and says: "Okay, okay, I get it... here, Ben, here's the car," as she picks it up and hands it to him. Ben takes the car, smiles, and goes "vroom, vroom" as he runs it across his highchair table.

Now... take a similar scenario a year later. Ben, 22 months old, is in the highchair, playing with a car. It falls on the floor. "Car, car, car down," he says. Mom hears these words as a bit demanding but maintains her cool: "Just a second, honey, I've got my hands full." Ben brightens at her voice, but then, when time lapses as in the first example above, he gets more distressed: "Car, car!" he raises his voice. Mom, unconsciously reacting to the verbal response as she might to anyone who was talking at her, says, "Hold on, I'll be there, just wait a minute." But to Ben, yelling "car, car" is just like letting out a cry of distress. He gets even more frustrated and angry. He expresses his frustration by trotting out the limited vocabulary he has at his disposal: "No, no! I no like you... I hate you!"

This can be devastating to a parent. The sweet, needy, tender infant has turned into a nasty monster! These words may seem to be much more like a personal attack. So, in this example, Ben's Mom feels put upon and assaulted. She doesn't like what she is hearing in words. She doesn't like the word "hate." She snaps at him: "Ben, stop it! We don't talk like that in this house." And the battle is joined. You can fill in the blanks: Ben throws his food on the floor. Mom gets angry. Ben yells and says more. A timeout is declared.

What has happened? As the example of Ben and his mother illustrates, language brings with a complex set of reaction on the part of parent and child. On the plus side, language ushers in many positive results: Words give a child a way to enhance communication and to increase his or her capacity for understanding and regulating feeling. When a word is put to a feeling, a person gains power over that feeling; there is an ever-increasing ability to examine and mold it; to share or modify it; to enjoy it or to let it go. However, there is also opportunity for distortion and miscommunication which can lead to conflict. As Daniel Stern, the well-known infant researcher, noted, language can become a double-edged sword.

With the non-verbal Ben, mother was able to recognize the distress and anger, and she fixed what had triggered those feelings by picking up the car. Ben's expression of his distress and anger did not throw her off. However, when Ben became verbal, using words such as " no like" and "hate," his mother lost her bearings. She had trouble understanding that Ben was expressing exactly the same feelings as before: distress and anger. Language itself threw a monkey wrench into their communication. Translation was necessary — translating from the words back to the feelings.