Learning to identify and express emotions is an important part of early childhood development, however many children in the foster care system struggle with this concept. Because of an inability to appropriately identify or express their emotions sometimes one emotion may be masked or overpowered by another. As an example, let's focus on the emotion fear. Fear is an emotion used to alert us to potential danger. A new foster child may have many triggers you are unaware of and something in your home that is seemingly harmless, may incite a fear response in a child who has experienced trauma. This could trigger a fight, flight, or freeze response, which could then cause fear to become overpowered and masked as anger, which is an emotion of self-protection. If this became consistent, children may demonstrate anger inappropriately causing difficulty in their social-emotional development. This is why it is imperative that children learn to identify their emotions, because only then can they begin to learn to control them using self-regulation and other strategies.