How to Raise Children with Strong Social Emotional Skills

     Neuroscientists are learning more and more about how children’s brains develop.  We now know that the neural pathways between our “emotional brain” and our “creative problem-solving brain” doesn’t fully develop until a person’s mid to late 20’s.  This means children continue to react intensely and make poor responses to life’s challenges without the ability to think it through… for a long time.  The “thinking” part of their brains aren’t always talking to the “feeling” part of their brains and working together to make great choices.  Our role is be their prefrontal cortex, or Wizard brain, as we coach them to practice the skills that will help them become competent in social situations. 

     Jennifer Miller, from Confident Kids-Confident Parents, helps parents hone in on some ways to coach our children toward social emotional competency at various ages and stages of development.  At every stage we need to be helping children learn these five key social emotional competencies:  Self Awareness, Self-Regulation, Social Awareness, Relationship Skills, and Responsible Decision-Making.  But here are some particularly relevant areas to work on—based on your child’s age:

3 -5 year olds:  Work on Helping your Child Develop a Feelings Vocabulary. 

“Name it to tame it” is a key parenting strategy to use with children.  Instead of just talking about the behavior, help your child use feeling words to describe what is going on inside of them.  You might start with mad, sad, glad, scared and then add in more descriptive vocabulary – annoyed, tender, excited, worried.  Practice naming the feelings when they occur.  “Abby, it looks like you are frustrated that Simon took your toy.  Is that right?”   Always check to see if your feelings label is correct.  This will help your child self-regulate when they feel understood emotionally.  Talk about what body sensations your child might have when they are feeling a strong emotion.  Help build their self-awareness of how emotions are felt in their body.  Model how you connect body sensations to emotions --“I noticed my shoulders are really tight.   I must be feeling a lot of stress tonight.”   Parents of toddlers will need to do a lot of soothing and reassuring (the job of the Wizard Brain) until the child learns how to calm themself.

 5 -8 year olds:  Practice Coping Strategies.

Assuming children are continuing to learn how to accurately name what they are feeling, parents of 5 -8 year olds can serve as their children’s thinking brain by coaching children about how to cope with their strong emotions.  Children feel all the pressures that go along with expectations for performance in elementary school.  Help them cope with those stressors by thinking through options for calming down.  “What can we do when we’re feeling anxious and tired at the end of the school day?”  Make a list with some of your suggestions:  hugging a teddy bear, cuddling with a blanket, reading a story, listening to music, along with their suggestions.  Use the list to practice after school, along with a high protein snack.  “What should we practice today to help us relax after school?”   This teaches foundational tools your child can use in numerous situations.  Each classroom at NES has an area (Refocus Center) where children can take 5 minutes to soothe themselves throughout the day.  Consider specifying a special spot at home for this same kind of nurturing activity.  Practice relaxation techniques together.

7 – 9 year olds:  Collaborate on Household Chores.

This age group is undergoing a whole new level of social awareness as they become sensitive to fairness, can examine larger social issues, and enjoy collaborating in groups.  Build on these emerging themes by talking about household responsibilities as a family.  List out the many possible ways of contributing and engage the child in identifying what she can do with competence.  Be sure and model or work closely together on new tasks the first time so the child understands how to do it.   Then allow the child to take responsibility for a task and complete it herself.  Don’t go behind and fix it if you feel it’s not up to your standards.  Allow her the satisfaction of completing a task.  Designate a family work time so everyone can work as a team to care for the home.  Put on some kid-friendly, high energy music and get the jobs accomplished.  You are helping your child develop a stronger sense of empathy for the family by cooperating in a group project to care for your home.

9 -11 year olds:   Exercise Relationship Skills through Problem-Solving Dialogues.

This age is heavily influenced by their peers and may come to you for help with friendship issues.  The tween years are a perfect time to use coaching skills.  With coaching, trust that the child can find a good solution by utilizing some thoughtful consideration for others.  Instead of responding to a child’s friendship complaints by intervening, prompt the child’s thinking.  Begin by reflecting back the child’s feelings.  Challenge the child’s thinking and ask how they might change their approach to prompt creative solutions.  When your child is successful with his own solutions, he learns he can competently handle social situations. 

12 – 14 year olds:  Practice Responsible Decision-making Skills.

Teens are undergoing a major brain reconstruction during these years.  They are moving from learning from play toward logical, rational thinking.  This is a process that requires a great deal of practice, learning, and mistakes.  When infants make mistakes, we keep encouraging them.  When teens make mistakes, we may want to immediately punish them.  Instead, think of how you and your teenager can reflect on a social situation that had negative outcomes?   Help teens make the connection between their chosen action and the consequences of it.  Utilize conversations that help teens compare what positive and negative, short term and long term consequences might occur from a variety of selected choices.  Try to make your response one of a “teachable moment” instead of a frustrated reaction to the mistake.  Each of these conversations about choices and consequences helps build the neural pathways that strengthen the teen’s ability to think through social situations in the future. 

     The more we understand the stages of social emotional development, the better we are at gauging our parenting to fit our child’s learning.