Power of Emotion in Child Development: A Comprehensive Guide by Dr Avinash Kamath

Let's spend some time today in understanding regarding your child's emotional intelligence. So in this increasingly competitive and logic driven world, we often focus on areas like problem solving, how children should score better, perform better in their activities and a lot of importance is given to intelligence and improving their skills in terms of academic skills and learning and all that. It goes to the extent that sometimes we wonder what role does emotions play in our lives. However, helping children understand their emotions better, and in that sense helping them develop their emotional intelligence, helps children take more responsibility for their actions, Helps them understand their problems better. Also helps them in understanding other people's problems and becoming better human beings in how they looked about their world, how they look at the world outside and how they look towards solving their problems in terms of emotional conflicts that they may have with their friends or family members. So let us take a few minutes today to look at what are some of the things that parents can do to improve their child's emotional intelligence. One of the simplest things that parents can do as the child is growing up is to provide children with feedback regarding what could be the emotions that they are feeling. Also, they may use appropriate adjectives like, oh, you're feeling a little sad today that you couldn't complete your homework, or you're feeling a little bit sad today that we couldn't go out for a movie. So helping the children understand what emotions they could be feeling at the same time, also helping them understand what's the magnitude of feeling that they could be feeling. And then having conversations about emotions helps children develop a kind of understanding regarding what is the kind of emotions that they are experiencing. This has to be done in a child's developmentally appropriate age. Like a very young child less than five years of age may understand only very simple emotions like happy, sad, or, you know, anger, right? But as they grow older, definitely more complex emotions like feeling jealous or feeling envy or feelings of disgust and you know, feeling elated and such complex emotions can start being understood by the child in more details. So as the child is growing, having conversations about emotions helps children understand what they are feeling. Many a times when this is not done, we see that children kind of come to us and tell things like they are having their heart beating fast, they are having butterflies in their stumble without being able to articulate, saying that you know, they are having a problem because of anxiety or they are feeling anxious. So they may instead end up inappropriately thinking that oh that means there is something wrong with my heart or there is something wrong with my body because they are feeling tremulous and they may want to consult doctors for problems which are more psychological in nature than physical. So understanding emotions, understanding what they are experiencing. It happens in the home context when there is a place for emotions to be discussed. So this is something that is very important for parents to do. The second thing is understanding the concept of empathy. Now empathy is a concept where in which we try and understand what the other person may be going through. It is as if we are walking in their shoes and looking the world from their viewpoint. So this is a little bit different from what we commonly understand as sympathy, where in which we are feeling sad or feeling, you know, a sense of care or concern for somebody who is going through a tough time. But you know, the feeling of empathy is where in which we respond to someone like how we would want somebody else to respond to us. When we are going to similar distress. Like say for example, when we find someone going through a very tough day, we may feel bad that, oh, he is looking too distressed. But maybe acting out of empathy may mean sitting down and having a conversation with him or checking with him whether he's had breakfast for the day or things like that. So the difference between sympathy and empathy will be about acting out of concern and understanding what the person would like to be done if we were in such similar situations. These are skills that children often understand by looking at how parents communicate or how they are dealt with at their home. So this or by seeing examples of this in school Oregon places around them many a times. In in these times when we are always in a hurry, we may choose to just simply react to the situation without really thinking, understanding and you know, responding. So how parents can often communicate empathy to their children is by simply following these three simple rules where in which one, they are initially listening to the person now. Second, they are thinking what that person may be going through and then responding rather than just simply reacting to the situation. So if parents encourage their children and they themselves also respond with listening first, thinking about it and then taking time and responding, children understand how to develop these skills about empathy and then how to respond to the environment. There can be sometimes very drastic differences in how we may respond to the situations if we are thinking from a logical point of view versus an emotional point of view. Like say for example if somebody has been going to a very stressful situation over the last one year and because of which the person's performance and you know the marks or other things may be significantly affected. A logical way of thinking is that he's not able to cope with the curriculum or he's not able to cope well so that he's his grades are dropping so he may need to repeat the year or things like that. But emotional way of dealing with the same problems may be trying and understanding what is it that he requires help with. Maybe sometimes children require help for different things than what it actually is. Like say for example a child doing well but currently is significantly going through a difficult time because there are problems at home because of a recent death at home or something like that. That child may not really need more tuitions or things like that because the marks are going down, which may be looking at the logical way of solution. But the more emotional thing may be that he requires some kind of a space where in which he can have his own time for expressing his emotions and then somebody may need to sit with him for his studies for some time to help him cope with that difficult time. So in this way, the kind of solutions that can be looked at from emotional intelligence viewpoint versus logical logically looking at solutions can be very diverse and many times it helps children to kind of understand these kind of differences and take logical decisions. So I'm hoping that these tips have been useful for you.