What is Social-Emotional Development?
Social and emotional development is a child’s ability to build relationships and get along with other children and adults, resolve conflict, communicate with others effectively, manage their own behaviour and feelings and empathise with others.
Why are the development of Social-Emotional skills so important?
- Positive social-emotional skills are important throughout life.
- Having well developed social-emotional skills such as cooperation and self-control builds confidence in your child.
- These skills empower children to develop healthy relationships.
Good Social-Emotional Skills to have before Prep
- Self-regulation – recognising and managing your own emotions
- Concentration – focusing for periods of time
- Resilience – to recovering from difficulty
- Adaptability – dealing with unexpected changes
- Empathy – recognising and relating to how others are feeling
- Relationship building – making friends and relating to other children and adults
- Confidence – how they approach tasks
- Problem solving – working things out for themselves
How to encourage Social-Emotional development at home.
This is a list of practical things to do with your child. Some of them are possibly things you do or know already but our goal is that this inspires you to make these part of your everyday interactions with your child.
Things to do with your children
- Do lots of talking about making friends, how others feel, dealing with the unexpected and managing emotions.
- Model – talk through your own emotions, decisions and problems. Model how you manage these to your child.
- Encourage your child to talk through their own feelings and emotions.
- Be affectionate and model how to treat other people.
- Read books that encourage social-emotional learning and discuss them.
- Let them fail then talk through how to deal with it.
- Respect their viewpoints and ideas.
- Let them work out solutions to problems rather than always giving them the answers.
- Organise play dates with younger or older children.
- Play games with rules and allow your child to win and loose.
Helpful websites:
https://www.kidsmatter.edu.au/mental-health-matters/social-and-emotional-learning/suggestions-for-families
https://www.noodle.com/articles/6-ways-to-support-preschoolers-socialemotional-learning-at-home-and-in-school