Raising Emotionally and Socially Intelligent Children
One of the crucial roles of parents is to help their children develop the emotional and social skills they need to thrive. Every child struggles at some point with painful feelings or friendship problems. Whether your child needs to gain self-confidence or learn to pull in their temper, make new friends or resolve conflicts with existing friends, this guide offers practical advice to help children manage emotions and build healthy connections.
Throughout these steps, I will give you true-to-life examples, research-based tips and obtainable solutions. You will come away with a deeper understanding of your child’s emotional and social development, from toddler to early teens, and discover strategies to help your child overcome obstacles to growth.
Being an Emotion Coach
Parents can be emotion coaches, fostering children’s emotional intelligence by teaching them to understand and cope with feelings. This section offers strategies for preventing intense emotional meltdowns and provides age-related guidelines for responding to the complex emotional lives of children.
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Coping with Anxiety and Fear
It seems like a time for carefree joy, but some children can become overwhelmed with worry and fear. In this section, we explain how parents can offer a combination of deep compassion and gentle urging to help children learn to cope with anxiety, tolerate uncertainty, and move beyond their fears.
Responding to Anger
This section addresses how to respond constructively to a child’s anger. It describes the processes within a family that intensify anger problems and offers positive discipline strategies to help children develop healthy communication and problem solving skills.
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Building Authentic Self-Esteem
This tackles the issue of self-esteem. The section lays out significant developmental changes in children’s self-concepts and describes how parents can help their children build authentic self-esteem.
Developing Empathy
Here we focus on ways to help children move beyond self-interest and develop genuine empathy for others. Empathy is the foundation of close relationships and a key force behind caring behaviour. We explore how to address children’s empathy blind spots and how certain roles can affect the expression of empathy.
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Understanding Children’s Happiness
Here we consider children’s happiness. Happiness sets the stage for positive development by prompting exploration, promoting effective coping skills and encouraging healthy relationships. We consider three aspects of the well lived life pleasure, engagement and meaning—and what these look like from a child’s point of view.
The World of Children’s Friendships
We describe the nature of children’s friendships at different ages—from the exuberant but self centred friendships of preschoolers, to the secrecy of older children, to the more intimate connections of teenagers. We help parents understand certain types of negative social behaviour and offer strategies to help children make friends.
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The Power of Play in Friendships
We look at play, which is central to growth and maintenance of children’s friendships. Play is surprisingly complex and difficult to master. We explore three forms of playground play pretend play, rough and tumble play, and games with rules and how we can help children be good sports about winning and losing.
Handling Friendship Changes and Conflicts
We examine ways that children of different ages deal with making and moving away from friends. Hurt feelings are an inevitable part of relationships, and whether friendships work or not often depends on how children handle conflicts.
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Navigating Group Culture and Belonging
Here we look at ways to help children cope with aspects of group culture. From reception onward, children become increasingly aware of how other kids view them, which raises concerns about belonging, status, popularity and rejection.
Understanding and Addressing Bullying
We explore what to do if a child is bullied or is bullying someone else. Children’s efforts to achieve popularity often cross the line into bullying. We help them distinguish between bullying and ordinary meanness.
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Friendships in the Digital Age
Here we consider friendships in the digital age. The Internet and social media are rapidly changing how children play and communicate. We explore forms of digital interaction screen based gameplay, cyberbullying and “Instagram depression” and explain how they differ from face to face interaction.
