Managing your emotions is a skill that everyone should learn.
Psychologist Olga Salamakhina told how to help a child cope with emotions: techniques.
From a very early age, a child experiences a huge range of emotions: joy, delight, sadness, anger, annoyance, fright, fear and many other emotions.
Does he know how to manage his emotions? Of course not, because he does not understand what he is experiencing and why.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and understand your own emotions and the emotions of others, manage them, and use emotions to solve problems and achieve results.
By developing emotional intelligence in a child, parents help him to be aware of his emotions, understand the reasons for them, and cope with and regulate them.
For the harmonious development of emotional intelligence with a child, it is important to go through 4 steps:
- Learn to recognize emotions.
- Learn to use emotions in problem solving.
- Develop an understanding of the causes and consequences of emotions.
- Learn to regulate emotional states.
Step one: Learning to recognize your emotions.
1. Talk about the child's emotions and ask: "What are you feeling?" In this case, children's books on various emotions are a great help.
You can read books about anger, fear, resentment, sadness. For example, the book by Ekaterina Kes "The ABC of Feelings and Emotions": these are 17 stories with different feelings and emotions. After reading the book, you can discuss the story with your child and clarify whether he experienced similar emotions and when.
Regular communication with your child will help him talk about his emotions.
2. Talk about your emotions. In this way, parents show an example of understanding their feelings, developing their emotional intelligence. The child will learn to deal with their emotions through your experience.
3. Containing and reflecting emotions. This tool is key to understanding and managing your emotions. When a child, for example, is angry, you can say: I see you are angry.
The emotion of anger manifests itself exactly like this. You want to throw the toy, your fists clench, your teeth clench, and you want to scream loudly." In this way, the child begins to connect emotion with physical manifestation.
4. Watching movies and cartoons together, where you can discuss the characters’ emotions and possible reasons.
Step Two: Learn to Use Emotions in Solving Problems
Each emotion has its own task, and if parents convey this to their child, they will teach them to use emotion to solve complex problems and difficulties.
Anger helps you achieve what you want, defend your point of view, and protect your boundaries. For example, when a child gets angry in response to a violation of boundaries (toys were taken away, a phone was taken away, someone entered the room without asking), teach him to talk about it and find a compromise.
Resentment helps to negotiate and discuss everything that does not suit. If a child is offended, then you can say so and ask not to do it again or to act differently, taking into account the interests of two or more parties.
Fear helps to stay away from danger, and if a child is scared, it means that fear is protecting him from something.
Joy helps to create and fantasize.
Understanding the resource of each emotion will help the child not only solve problems, but also accept all emotions, without dividing them into bad and good.
Step three. Learn to understand the reasons for the emergence of emotions, develop awareness.
If you add the articulation of the reason to the reflection of emotions, then the child will learn to recognize the reasons for his emotions, since small children initially do not understand the reasons for their own emotions and are not always ready to answer the question: What are you feeling?
You can suggest: “Are you angry, perhaps, because your mother forbade you to watch cartoons?” And if you hit the nail on the head, the child will relax and answer your suggestion in the affirmative.
When parents help understand the cause-and-effect relationship of their child's emotions, it relieves tension from the body, improves the bond between parents and child, builds trust and teaches how to manage emotions.
Step four: Learn to manage your emotions.
The first 3 steps are the basis for regulating your emotions, and if you follow all the recommendations, you will already be able to help your child.
But there are also play and drawing techniques:
1. Technique: Draw anger. You can ask your child to draw his anger in the form of a hurricane.
2. The "Defeat the Enemy" technique. You can suggest that the child take 2 soft toys and imagine that one of them is a doctor and the other is a warrior, and the battle begins. Do not be afraid that the child will use the fight to live out anger, he will not transfer this to real life. After the fight, you can think about how disagreements can be resolved in another way.
3. Technique "I draw my fear". You can suggest that the child draw his fear in the form of an animal, and then make it ridiculous or funny.
4. Technique "Roosters". In a playful way, you can make a circle and push each other out of this circle. The child's body tension leaves, as he says goodbye to anger in the fight.
5. Technique "Cloud". Ask the child to draw a cloud that is sad. Let him draw rain, thunder and lightning. This technique helps to cope with a sad mood.
Working with emotions from an early age is the basis for a child’s successful, happy and healthy life!
