A must-have for children? Social and emotional skills: Part 1/2
Teachers, school counselors, and parents are familiar with this very well: Children talk day in and day out about their positive and negative school experiences. They often share with adults how well they connected with some classmates, conflicts they had with others, or some other disappointing experiences such as teasing or bullying. As adults, we desire to help our children cultivate their positive experiences and to prevent or, at least, minimize the impact of negative ones.
What are social and emotional skills?
In a typical school day, interaction with peers takes a great portion of the day. Such interactions are essential for the development of social and emotional skills especially from early childhood onward. In fact, positive peer relationships provide children with a context where they could learn and develop their skills in self-awareness, communication, negotiation, assertiveness, perspective taking, and problem solving. We call such skills social and emotional skills.
“Social and emotional skills is an “umbrella term” involving a variety of skills that are connected and build on to each other.”
Characteristics of children with good social and emotional skills
As children move from one developmental period to another, the skills they use become more sophisticated. However, we could typically define children who are good at social and emotional skills as those who (can):
identify and label their own emotions as well as those of others,
acknowledge others’ feelings and empathize with them,
communicate their needs to others in a manner that fits best,
know their values,
seek self-knowledge and skills to improve themselves and their relationships,
desire to be connected to others and strive for positive relationships where they value others without undermining their own worth and values,
are flexible and resilient in adapting to different situations,
view themselves as worthy as others but not superior to them,
sensitive to individual differences and cherish the diversity.
From a broader perspective, children who are good at social and emotional skills are able make responsible, sensitive, and ethical decisions and they have a pretty good overview of the potential consequences of their actions. They are able to paint the broader picture of how impactful they are as an individual as well as together with other people, and how they use their resourcefulness so as contribute to the world.
The Problem with Social Emotional Learning (SEL)
Because “social and emotion skills” is an umbrella term, it is not always clear what we mean when we say things like “This training aims at improving children’s social and emotional skills.” Do we mean we desire to see a positive difference, following the training, in children’s perception of their peer relationships? Do we mean we desire to see an improvement in the way they believe they assert themselves? Or in labeling their emotions? This is tricky — unless we define the term clearly in our training and group counseling programs. Yet, perhaps, this is trickier for research that examines the effectiveness of social-and-emotional-skill trainings.
Explore SEL (by Harvard University) is a cool project to address such problems. The project offers tools to examine the nature of social-and-emotional-skill trainings. These tools are not only for comparing the terms that are being used across different programs, but also for comparing domains and frameworks in social and emotional learning. For each framework (for example, Character Development, LEGO’s Skills for Holistic Development), you can find much helpful information about:
the purpose of each framework (or program)
the target group (for example, children age 8–12)
how they define each social and emotional skill in their framework etc.
Definitely something to check out for practitioners and researchers!
Bonus: You can also access the websites of frameworks with lots of tips & scientific articles!
Enjoy exploring more about social and emotional skills!