5 Exercises To Create Emotional Awareness In Your Children
Understanding and controlling emotions can be essential for our integration into society, but if this fails, we will become misfits, frustrated and unhappy people.
We teach you 5 exercises to create emotional awareness in your children, read on.
What is emotional awareness?
Emotional awareness is the ability to recognize emotions, and to be able to name that emotion.
It also means understanding how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors impact ourselves. And the ability to become aware of the emotions of others, including the ability to capture the emotional climate.
Emotional awareness in children
Emotions determine behavior and learning ability.
An adequate Emotional Education promotes well-being, the health of the person, and prevents difficulties in maturational development, strengthening the formation of a stable personality.
Expressing and controlling emotions is a basic educational objective to promote the development process itself.
Most researchers agree that we can classify our emotions into the following:
Primary emotions
They seem to have a high genetic load, in the sense that they present emotional responses that, although shaped by learning and experience, are present in all people and cultures.
Secondary emotions
They are largely due to individual development, and their responses vary widely from one person to another.
Negative emotions
They involve unpleasant feelings, an assessment of the situation as harmful and the mobilization of many resources to cope with it.
Positive emotions
They are those that involve pleasant feelings, valuation of the situation as beneficial, have a very short duration and mobilize scarce resources for coping.
Neutral emotions
They are those that do not inherently produce either pleasant or unpleasant reactions, that is, they cannot be considered either positive or negative, and their purpose is to facilitate the appearance of later emotional states.
5 Exercises to create emotional awareness in your children
The family
The model offered by family members cognitively and emotionally impacts our children always.
Our children are continuously observing the behavioral repertoire in close and significant loved ones, since we are a reference for them, they always tend to imitate us. Thus, optimism or pessimism and especially the way of relating, largely depend on learning at home during childhood.
Intellectual stimulation
It is up to parents to build an environment that awakens the love of culture in its various manifestations. This stimulation must be very varied and above all supported by reading.
Nor should we forget that recreational and sports activities bear fruit in the child’s personality in the form of a healthy curiosity to explore the environment.
Make sure they talk about their feelings
Take an interest in what is happening to him and don’t forget to chat with him.
Through the conversation, try to bring out what scares or annoys him, and that if he shares it with you, you can help him.
And of course, teach him to express it with good self-control.
Give options
To develop emotional intelligence in children it is important to motivate them to make their own decisions, of course after having shown them what is right and wrong.
In this way they will become self-confident. And when they have to make a decision they will not have the feeling of frustration.
Recognize the atmospheres of the sites they visit
Educate your children to be observers of the places and people around them.
In this way they will be better suited to various environments. If the place is quiet and calm, they should not break in shouting. If they enter a place where everyone is happy and smiling, they can integrate into this atmosphere with a smile.
Everything you do today with your children is recorded in them, and will be what they will probably reproduce in their homes in the future.
