How to Help Children Manage Their Emotions

As we all know, emotions are an important part of our lives both as adults and as children, and therefore they are the reason why people are happy.

Why emotional education matters

We generally hear teachers and parents commenting proudly on the good grades their children get, but just as important as this would be to feel glad when your child knows how to express their emotions correctly, knows how to share with others, listen, tolerate other people's opinions, be empathetic, etc.

We are all involved in the emotional education of children, both parents and group leaders, educators, teachers, etc.

What we can do to help them manage their emotions

We often ask ourselves: what can we do so that our children know how to manage their emotions? How do we get them to interpret correctly and transform negative emotions into positive ones?

To manage emotions effectively, we must be capable both of correctly identifying how we feel: whether we are happy, sad, worried, etc.; and of developing the ability to self-control anger, to know how to reflect before acting, to face life's difficulties, and to congratulate ourselves when things go well for us.

Fear, worry, and anxiety are all completely normal in certain respects, but what we must avoid is letting them block us and prevent us from solving our problems.

Guidelines to understand and manage emotions

Some of the guidelines we recommend and that we can all carry out together in order to understand and be able to manage emotions would be:

- It is important to be aware of our feelings and our emotions, to know how to identify them, and to be able to express them correctly.

- We should try to realize the reason why we have this worry or fear, or the reason why we are getting nervous.

- Adults (parents, teachers, tutors, leaders of extracurricular activities, etc.) are the most important models and examples for children, and that is why children learn based on observation of them.

- It is important to observe what children play at, how they make their dolls act and what they say to them.

- Through the watching of films such as Inside Out we can, in a fun way, together with family and friends, talk about and work on managing emotions in a more enjoyable manner. Through this film, the 5 basic emotions are seen: sadness, anger, joy, fear, disgust, and surprise.

- Encourage them through everyday life, teach them to express their emotions with the right words: *“I am happy because…”, “I am worried because something happened to me…”)* and thus express how they feel and how they are doing.

- It is also important to pay attention to their non-verbal or body language, their tone of voice, their gaze, etc., since these will often give us clues about how the children feel.

- Through this we will be able to help them think of solutions and solve their own problems as effectively as possible.

Using self-instructions at school

- All of these aspects can be worked on from school. It is beneficial to teach them to reflect on all actions, whether in relation to conflicts with classmates or about academic tasks. The use of self-instructions can be encouraged:

What do I have to do?

- How am I going to do it?

- Be attentive and look at all the possible answers

- Look for the most correct solution

- Congratulate ourselves or correct ourselves

Starting from early childhood

As we have observed from early childhood, emotional education can and should begin to be taught to help children have a happier childhood and life.

Knowing how to recognize our emotions and the emotions of others and knowing how to communicate them effectively is fundamental for the proper development of children, so that they know how to adapt to society and grow up happy. Together we can help them!!