What is emotional intelligence and how to educate on emotions?

 

Emotional education is a pending chapter in most educational stages. In recent decades, awareness of the importance of mental health and the management of feelings from an early age has been realized. The pandemic has forced this slow evolution to accelerate and managing emotions to be a task that both children and adults work on.

The World Health Organization (WHO) published in March 2020 a document called "Psychosocial and mental health considerations during the Covid-19 outbreak" in which it recognized the stress that the population was suffering due to the pandemic and in the one that gives recommendations to the different social groups to improve their emotional well-being.

They advise parents that “if their children have concerns, addressing them together may lessen anxiety. Children will observe the behaviors and emotions of adults to look for cues that tell them how to manage their own emotions in difficult times.

Giving importance to this learning from an early age will not only help children to understand and identify their emotions, but also to get to know each other as people.

Types of emotions

In general terms, we can consider them as those processes that take place when changes occur in ourselves or in our environment that provoke a reaction in us.

The classification of emotions is roughly made into positive and negative and functions are attributed to all of them. For example, fear, anger, sadness have a protective, self-defense or rejection purpose, while joy and surprise give us a positive mood, happiness and good feelings. In addition to these primary emotions, we find other derivatives that are not intrinsic to the human being, but are acquired culturally. They are guilt, pride, shame, or jealousy.

We have to know how to identify them, analyze why we feel this way and what we can do to feel better. In addition, there are countless positive emotions such as gratitude, satisfaction, tranquility, trust, illusion, empathy, generosity or tolerance that we can experience with different intensity degrees, but that will always make us feel good.

Keys to education in emotions

It is important to work on emotions to learn to manage them in a healthy and beneficial way, achieving well-being with oneself and as a social being.

It is convenient to start learning and managing feelings at an early age and for this reason, from village high school we propose 5 keys to education in emotions.

1. Acknowledging our own emotions, explaining them, exemplifying them and helping the child to find their own in them will encourage her empathy and help them understand them.

2. Identifying the emotion we are feeling is not an easy task. To help the little ones externalize them and talk about what they feel, we can use tools such as drawing facial expressions, using emoticons, even dancing and singing.

3. It is very important to let the child express her emotions, be they positive or negative, and that they feel comfortable doing so. Our active listening, asking questions that you should reflect on and resolving any doubts you may have will also contribute to improving emotional management.

4. In the childhood stage it is very recurrent to use stories to explain emotions that other people feel in other situations. This encourages empathy.

5. The attitudes and learning that children absorb will be very marked by their direct environment. All of them will affect the development of their personality. Therefore, it will also be important to promote self-awareness, reflect on our abilities and empathy. Being able to understand our relationships with other people and the feelings that different situations generate in us will also be a fundamental part of emotional literacy.

The elementary school show low and parents work together to educate the professionals of the future.