My son asked me on our way to school which emotions were the bad ones. I told him that emotions aren't good or bad, they're just information that helps us figure stuff out. It's our job as parents to help kids decipher how they are feeling and what their emotions are trying to tell us. Too many times we try to comfort children through things like fear, sadness and other unhappy emotions with the goal of just helping them feel better. But instead of focusing our attention on helping those emotions subside, we should really be trying to help kids better understand what these emotions mean.

I'm not saying don't offer kids a hug and comforting words on a bad day; I'm saying take it one step further.

I asked my son what he meant by "bad emotions". It turns out he was feeling worried. I asked more questions. What does that feel like for you? He frowned his face and grabbed his stomach. Ah, the old knot in the stomach. I could relate. Is there something that worried feeling is trying to tell you? Do you have a test to take today?

No test.

However, the day before a classmate had gotten sick in the teacher's trash can in front of the whole class. Apparently, it had really freaked my son out.

Yeah, nobody wanted to see that, I assured him. I can understand it was pretty unsettling for everyone involved. My son was worried it might happen again, maybe even to him.

"I know how a stomach virus spreads," he stressed.

Did I comfort my son? Sure. I told him how he was feeling was normal and that we all worry sometimes. But I didn't tell him to shake it off or to try not to worry so much. Instead, I asked him what his worry was trying to tell him.

He decided it was trying to tell him that he didn't like what had happened and that he didn't want it to happen again. I told him that was good information and assured him he wasn't alone in feeling it.

Then he told me, "Mom, I don't feel happy all the time."

"Nobody does," I told him. Every human feels a wide range of emotions on any given day. We confuse kids when we encourage happiness as our constant emotional goal or expectation. Our constant desire for everyone to be happy all the time makes for an unattainable pursuit.

Our emotions, all of them, are one of our body's ways of communicating with us. It's the visceral reaction to what's happening and what has happened. Thoughts are the vocabulary of the brain, but emotions are the body's vocabulary. The more we are aware of them and seek to understand them, the more we are aware of ourselves and the better humans we become. Kids don't need to label certain emotions as bad. They need help becoming more aware of the wide range of their feelings at any given time.