Importance of CHILD’S EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

 

A child’s brain is like a sponge — it absorbs everything. They are like an empty book when they are born, ready to take in information and etch it into their minds as they observe their surroundings and interact with the world. It is imperative that we monitor the environment around our children to ensure they learn the right values and ways of navigating life. Whether physically, emotionally, or mentally, a child’s development is a parent’s responsibility. You can choose to build a strong foundation of core values and social and emotional development in early childhood or spend your time correcting mistakes through reprimands, risking the development of an emotionally uncertain or confused child. Physically, there are specific activities and exercises you can teach or encourage to support development. Mental and emotional development, on the other hand, is more subjective and largely influenced by parenting and the environment in which the child is raised. There are multiple stages of emotional development and the right environment can shape a child’s social emotional skills and mental well-being, enabling them to grow into individuals who can understand, manage and navigate situations with higher intellect.

A parent shared concerns about their six-year-old son, who has been struggling with anger issues and often lashes out in response to everything they say. They tried various methods to manage his behavior but were not successful, so they asked for my Redirecting.. answer to them was simple: Children are like unmolded clay — they can be shaped into any form when guided with the right influence and care. Parenting and the environment in which they grow up serve as the influences that mold them into the individuals they will become in the future. Having the right kind of environment for their social and emotional development is essential. Emotions are complex even for adults and children are often unfamiliar with them. They cannot act on what they are unaware of or have not been taught. Therefore, they should be guided on how to understand and process their emotions — both positive and negative.This is why it is necessary to keep a check on the environment in which a child is growing.

Many times, parents themselves are not the best examples of how emotions should be processed. Expressing your emotions in a healthy way in front of your child can be imperative for their social emotional development and can validate their feelings and show them that it’s okay to feel a certain way. More importantly, it teaches them that the right way to deal with emotions is to process them, not suppress them.Everything children learn in the early stages of life comes from observing and absorbing the world around them — this includes how to handle emotions. If they grow up in an environment where it is safe to express feelings, be heard and not be judged or dismissed, they will learn that this is the healthy way to express emotions.This can be achieved when parents themselves set an example of how to deal with emotions.

Children often don’t need to be explicitly taught how to express or process positive emotions like joy, satisfaction, care or love. These emotions are naturally modeled to them through daily interactions and they quickly learn to express them. However, when it comes to more difficult emotions — such as frustration, anger, stress or sadness — parents often try to shield their children from them. As a result, children may grow up clueless about how to manage these emotions when they inevitably experience them.

Parents need to show children that feeling these emotions is also a normal part of life. This doesn’t mean exposing them to every intense moment, but rather not hiding these feelings entirely. By demonstrating how to acknowledge and process difficult emotions in a healthy way, parents can teach their children that there is a constructive and appropriate way to respond, contributing to their emotional and social development.

Before we blame our children for their behavior, we should reflect on our own behavior in front of them. Our responses to certain situations may stem from the environment we grew up in, where we might not have been taught how to express or validate our emotions. This highlights the presence of generational trauma and unhealthy family patterns that may be continuing within us subconsciously due to our lack of emotional development in childhood. Now is our chance to break these cycles and prevent them from being passed on to the next generation. Identifying and correcting our own behavioral patterns is the first step toward creating a healthy environment for our children to grow up in.

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