Learning letters, colors, and numbers matters, but they shouldn’t be the primary focus during the early years of development. A quality child development center understands why emotional development is just as important as academic learning. Experiences like enrichment at Children’s Journey can help build those skills while your child learns academically. This makes emotional development another part of the day rather than a separate lesson. Neither needs to be sacrificed for the other; when planned thoughtfully, both can be developed simultaneously.
What is Emotional Development?
Emotional development is the process of learning to recognize, understand, express, and appropriately manage emotions. This can be a difficult process for young children. They often feel big emotions long before they have the words to explain them. They may be able to identify when someone is sad but not know what to do with the information. Emotional development helps children understand how to regulate themselves over time. It also encompasses learning how to form relationships, show compassion, control impulses, and handle things that don’t go right. These are skills that continue to develop throughout childhood and require careful guidance and practice rather than undefined expectations on how to manage every emotion.
Why Emotional Learning Is Needed
Academic learning relies on more than your child’s ability to retain information. They also need to listen, engage, ask for help, handle mistakes, and work with others. If frustration immediately causes unnecessary conflict, or a disagreement makes it impossible to return to the group, it will make learning harder, no matter how academically competent your child is. This is why emotional learning is necessary in early education. They are given opportunities to identify their emotions and learn how to manage them appropriately. Studies indicate that children with strong social and emotional skills achieve more positive academic outcomes.
Benefits of Emotional Learning
One of the greatest benefits of emotional learning is that your child begins to better understand themselves. They learn that they are allowed to have big feelings, but that doesn’t mean they can lash out. Learning what is acceptable and appropriate when managing emotions takes time. Research also connects social-emotional learning with improvements in academic performance. These are not competing skills but complementary.
Components of Emotional Learning and Development
Emotional development covers several related skills, and they don’t all present at once. Each is learned in its time and with sufficient guidance and understanding of the process and its components.
- Self-awareness is the skill of recognizing one’s own emotions and beginning to understand their causes.
- Self-management involves processing those raw emotions and controlling impulses.
- Social awareness is learned as children recognize their own feelings in others and see things from another perspective
- Relationship skills encompass communication, cooperation, listening, sharing space, and resolving conflict.
Children learn that the choices they make and how they respond have consequences. Whether good or bad, those consequences lead to the understanding that there may be more than one way to go about things, leading to better decision-making. Each builds on and leads to the next.
Creating Emotionally Intelligent Minds
Emotional development isn’t built by preventing children from getting upset. Children need opportunities to learn the skills necessary to process those emotions and respond logically. They do well when provided with appropriate opportunities to feel frustration and to experience disagreement, disappointment, excitement, and uncertainty, with the support of adults who understand the importance of emotional development. Academic knowledge will continue to grow as they progress through school, but how they process and manage their emotions can affect their approach to learning.
Schedule a tour of our early learning environment, which understands the importance of emotional and academic development.
