The beauty of Social Emotional Learning is that it begins the journey with the self. Helping children understand and build skills to write their own story is a power that stays with them and can not be taken away from them. As the old saying goes, “You can take away what a person has but never who they are.”
Social Emotional Learning (SEL) includes 5 inter-related competencies - Self-Awareness, Self Management, Social Awareness, Relationship Skills and Responsible Decision Making. CASEL’s well designed 5 domain framework helps children build a gamut of social emotional skills one step at a time. CASEL is The Collaborative For Academic Social And Emotional Learning. They have been instrumental in laying the foundation for research, studies and field work in this area.
Understanding each of these domains and the wealth of skills they help children build is the first step to understanding Social Emotional Learning.
In this 5 Part series, we take you through each of these domains. Let’s start with Self Awareness.
“ Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom . . . ”
Self Awareness
In a broad sense, to be self-aware is to know ourselves and be in touch with ourselves.. This includes our feelings and thoughts, our values, our interests, likes and dislikes, attitudes and beliefs, and our strengths and weaknesses. Understanding how these aspects influence behaviours across contexts is also a part of Self-Awareness. Together, all these qualities form an identity. The ability to define our identity is an important aspect of emotional intelligence skills.
How will being self-aware help your child?
1. Emotional Wellness and Literacy: Let us suppose a child gets frustrated about their inability to finish a puzzle, and feels hot and sweaty. Not being able to identify the feeling and the reason why they are feeling it would not help them deal with the problem or turn it into a positive outcome. Self awareness helps them understand their emotions, their thoughts, how they feel about a certain situation and why they feel that way. It helps them name their emotions, understand the associated thoughts that go with it and identify their triggers. Being able to identify their triggers will help them build healthy coping mechanisms to deal with difficult emotions.
2. Increased Self-Esteem: Children with Self-Awareness are also able to acknowledge & understand their own preferences & interests better. For instance, understanding which concepts in maths they find difficult and which ones they enjoy. An improved self-perception leads to raised self-esteem and confidence.
3. Have a Growth Mindset: Children often get frustrated when they aren’t able to accomplish tasks like solving a puzzle or finishing an artwork. However, understanding their limitations (such as the fact that it takes time to solve puzzles or complete an intricate artwork) helps them grow and develop without developing a sense of inadequacy. This happens because awareness of limitations & knowing their potential will help them set attainable and realistic goals in accordance with their strengths. An improved self-perception leads to raised self-esteem and confidence. A child’s ability to recognise areas of weakness allows them to seek help and get better at it versus feeling flustered and upset.
4.Allows Expression & Communication: When children learn to acknowledge their feelings, they are able to communicate them clearly. Being aware of their interests will also let them express themselves while also allowing them to bond with peers with similar interests. Social Emotional Learning allows them to give a reason to their behaviour and articulate it.
5. Form Deeper Bonds: For Self-Aware children, being in tune with their feelings lets them empathise with others around them and accept differences. When they don’t get stuck on differences such as behaviour, ethnicities & personalities, they are able to form true & deep bonds with the people around them.
How do you encourage self-awareness in your child?
Validate Their Feelings: As parents we often suppress our children’s self-awareness and intuition by making light of their feelings in attempts to pacify them. However, validation - or letting them know that their feelings are real and fair - is very important in nurturing Self-Awareness in a child. Children who often find their feelings invalidated may tend to suppress emotions and develop a reduced recognition of their feelings. They often find their stresses & triggers heightened or misdirected as they grow older and may not be able to build appropriate coping skills.
Don't Taboo Weakness: We tend to taboo negative emotions such as sadness, frustration, anger & stress and term them as weak emotions. As parents we may ask children to learn to be “tough” by not letting these emotions in. Children need to feel all their emotions to truly develop self-awareness. So instead of labelling emotions as weak & strong, creating a space at home where all emotions are welcome and accepted would be helpful.
Engage In Physical Activities: Physical Activities such as sports, dance & yoga have a lot of benefits in nurturing Self-Awareness. Awareness is also felt through sensations in the body, unlike information stored in the brain. Engaging in physical activities helps in activation of senses and activities like sports & dance create multiple opportunities for a person to explore different emotions within themselves.
Encourage Journaling: Journaling or the practice of writing down your thoughts and feelings is an effective tool in helping children navigate through difficult situations while practicing self-awareness. In journaling, the mind slows down: A person is using their brain to think slowly and thoroughly as opposed to how a person tends to think fast and in a hurry when they are angry. Hence it creates a space where a child can express themselves freely while identifying nuanced emotions. This allows the child to develop a better awareness of their sense of self and their emotions.
Awareness, unlike knowledge, cannot be nurtured only through sharing of information. Self Awareness in children is nurtured through consistent reflection, conversations and experiences.
At SpringUP, we help children build foundational skills in Social Emotional Learning(SEL) skills through our experiential learning programs. We use various mediums like conversations, narrations, art, music & movement in our curriculum.
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