Last update: December 14, 2015
The emotional relationships established in childhood determine much of a person's future. Traditionally, rationality is the heart of education, but emotional and social skills are closely linked to it.
The reason why it is good to educate the heart is that, if we deal with emotions today, tomorrow we will have fewer problems caused by conflicts between them. These problems can be simple and everyday or more serious, such as violence, suicide or drug use.
Through emotional education, we can develop a healthy ego, whose strengths are freedom and emotional maturity, and which experiences the feelings of self-realization and victory.
It is also good to educate the heart because the neural plasticity of childhood helps us to model brain development, thus fomenting the strengthening of healthy circuits.
Practice makes the teacher
The most important point to work on is the moment when we are seized by an emotion, because it is there when we can learn to manage it better. In other words, learning is greater through practice, because emotions are something intangible and abstract, difficult to understand without experience.
For example, children who recognize their negative emotions, such as anger or rage, learn to manage them better and cope with them successfully. Unfortunately, however, we frequently attack our children's emotions: if they get angry, we chastise them or take it out on them.
Tale reaction of adults makes children deduce that they do not have to share certain emotions and, therefore, they end up losing contact with them. The result is not the disappearance of the emotion in question as one might think, but a hardening of the relationship between parents and children.
Educating the heart: a fulfilling task
Although the term "emotional education" is very attractive, we must be careful when putting it into practice. When we accurately teach addition and subtraction, we must strive to instruct the heart as well.
The child must learn to identify the signals offered by feelings and must use them as a basis for making decisions appropriate to the emotional climate he breathes in his environment.
To do this, we need to convey a clear message to children: all feelings are welcome, it is attitudes that sometimes need to be corrected. To develop emotionally, it is essential to understand that everyone, in certain situations, feels jealousy, avarice, disappointment, etc. The most important thing is that they learn to familiarize themselves with these feelings and express them appropriately.
To succeed, we must take care to give the little ones tools to support them. This concept is very important, because there are so many children who are fearful of their feelings: their problem is that they are unable to separate them from the behavior.
In other words, it is very important for the child to understand that, if he was reprimanded after expressing anger, it was not because of the emotion itself, but because of his conduct. A good way to do this is to tell him a story about an imaginary child who felt that emotion and who solved the situation by acting in a different way. We can also invite him to communicate his feelings to us, to express them in a drawing or in a small text.
In this way, the child has the opportunity to learn to calm down before thinking and acting. It is normal for him to get angry or feel jealous, but he must understand that at the root of his attitude there is an emotion.
Children should not be told to calm down, but they should be encouraged to understand that certain emotional states are unpleasant for everyone. To control the behavior resulting from his emotions, he must learn to treat others the same way he wants to be treated by them.
All the strategies that contain games, stories and funny dynamics are adequate to favor the absorption of the principles we have talked about in this article. In this way, you will help your children develop their thinking and planning skills, so as to avoid complicated and unhappy situations.
Main source of consultation: “Destructive Emotions”, by Daniel Goleman
