How to Encourage Emotional Growth of Kids

From the second a child comes into the world, he/she starts developing a sense and understanding of the surroundings. The child observes people and things around and even starts trusting parents. The bond you build as parents with a child makes the child feel safe and secure. As the child grows, the responsibilities of parents keep on increasing to make the child understand social life, different emotions, and how to react in the right way.

Parents have the biggest role to play in the emotional development of kids. Emotional development is related to teaching kids how to regulate and express emotions in the right way. For the emotional growth of kids, parents should be able to make them understand what different kind of emotions is and how to react to people and actions in the right way while being sensitive to others’ feelings.

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There’s no fixed formula to work on to enhance emotional growth in kids as every parent nurtures his kids differently. But we have got some tips that will prove to be helpful in the emotional growth of your kids.

1. Show Empathy

When your child feels and expresses multiple emotions, it can get overwhelming to handle him. But you have to understand that any dismissive comment would make the child feel wrong about having emotions. The better way to work here is to validate their feelings and show empathy towards what they are feeling. You have to understand that even your kids aren’t aware of what they are feeling and how to channel it. So you have to be their support system, even if you don’t understand their emotion, and tell them that it’s completely normal to feel this way.

2. Teach Your Kids Healthy Coping Skills

When kids start learning and understanding their emotions, you have to teach them how they can healthily deal with those emotions. Realizing all those emotions can be exhausting so you have to guide your kids on how to face their fears and calm themselves down whenever they face any rush of feelings.

You need to work on teaching them some skills. For example, when your child feels angry, tell him he can take a few breaths that will calm his body down and will give him the time to think the right way to react. You can teach them about bubble breaths, in which they will inhale through their nose and breathe out through their mouth. You can also introduce your kids to soothing music and lotions that smell good and other items that can engage their senses and can contribute to calming them down.

3. Help Kids Understand Consequences of Behavior

All kinds of behavior have its relative consequences. You can make your kids understand that however the kids behave and respond, it tends to have results. Their actions or words, good or bad, would have the relative consequence for which they have to be ready. For example, if a kid dumps all his crayons, the consequence would be that he would have to pick them all up and put them away.

Thinking about the consequence of a situation or any expression would help a kid understand whatever they are going to do or say is right or not. This is the way you can teach your kids to take time to realize what good comes from their actions, thus making them act in a good and healthy way in most cases.

4. Listen Actively

It may sound simple, but when children know their views and feelings are being listened to and taken care of, it adds to their growth. As a child keeps growing, he keeps on developing some strong emotions like excitement, frustration, sadness, and anger. Most often kids don’t understand how to express these emotions. That’s where parents and teachers can be of great help, talking to kids and listening to how they feel.

While listening to kids, your facial expressions and tone of voice matter a lot. You should appear like you actually care about their feelings and that you are happily there to talk to them. This helps kids feel that it’s completely normal to get stressed about handling the issues. This calms down kids and makes them ready to understand what you are trying to explain.

In the growing years of kids, emotions play a great role, and parents and teachers should understand it can get kids confused to differentiate between different feelings and understanding the right way to react. Help them out with the above-mentioned tips to support emotional growth in kids till they are at the age where they’ll be able to handle their emotions in the right way.