If We Want To Educate Strong Children We Have To Know That Emotional Intelligence Is The Key

If we want to educate our children in strength, we have to be very clear that emotional intelligence is the key. Being aware of their emotions helps them control and regulate their reality, opening the way to a multitude of good experiences.

Gone are the old Disney ideals of princes and princesses with few more goals in life than to blindly indulge in dependent relationships wrapped in magical worlds full of totally evil witches and dragons.

Not everything is as they told us, nor is the world made up of black and white tones or, what is the same, of good and bad, which in essence remarked that in the absence of evil, everything is fantastic and full of happiness. This, without a doubt, is not the case, which offers an unreal image of the world with which we have to deal with every day.

We have the responsibility to say goodbye to “they were happy and they ate partridges.” We have to give way to “life is built from the strength of oneself”.

We cannot continue painting the world in pink, because they will grow up and find problems that they will not know how to solve due to the enormous discomfort and the great sense of incomprehension and injustice that it will generate.

Thus, helping them and promoting awareness of their emotional states and those of others puts the mark that marks the before and after on their path to strength.

Emotional awareness, keys to its development

The development of emotional awareness in childhood lays the foundations that will help to generate good strategies for regulating emotions. Thus, low emotional awareness leads to less adaptive regulatory strategies and, therefore, less ability to solve problems.

Let’s take a closer look at this:

• Attentional aspects are used to identify and differentiate emotions, as well as to locate what causes them and even to manage bodily sensations that are part of the emotional experience (for example, tension in the abdominal area).
• The attitudinal aspects are necessary to detect the experiences and emotional expressions that occur in oneself and in others.

Thus, depending on each evolutionary moment, we will find that emotional consciousness reaches a determining role for one or other vital tasks (formation of attachment bonds, development of social cognition, identity formation, etc.).

• Babies are able to pay attention and react to the emotions of others. If the caregiver smiles, the baby looks more often. If the caregiver is sad, the baby reduces the number of glances and tends to express sadness on the face. This type of contact favors the formation of the attachment bond.
• children must learn to differentiate and verbally communicate basic emotions such as joy, sadness, anger or fear. They still fail to identify the surprise. This favors the development of the ability to consider and understand the other.

• They must learn to analyze their own emotions and to be more aware of the bodily sensations that accompany them, which contributes to the formation of identity.

Emotional regulation is sometimes a difficult road to travel

Not only is it enough to make children understand and be aware of their emotions, but we must encourage them to regulate and control their reactions individually and in conjunction with others.

The main mistake made is to teach children that unpleasant emotions (sadness or anger) should be ignored (“ignore them”) or changed (“do not be angry about this nonsense”); moreover,  sometimes, shame is even promoted towards them (“don’t be a crybaby”).

Taking this into account, it is understood that emotional regulation consists of managing emotions correctly once they are aware of them. There are two main ways to promote the development of this capacity:

• Based on the control of emotional expression: the child is very angry but tries not to express it to solve the conflict in another way because, let’s say, he conforms to certain rules of expression that promote a greater benefit.
• Based on the antecedent: here we can promote that the child, being aware of his emotions, controls his behavior to manage the activation inherent to the emotion.

Emotional awareness is the best vehicle for change in our life. In other words, we have to be aware of what causes us frustrating and negative or positive and pleasant feelings in order to find ways to encourage, understand and control them.

If we deprive our children of a correct emotional development, then we will obtain as a consequence the inability to understand and evolve according to their feelings and emotions. Therefore, teaching children to observe, communicate and learn about their emotions is essential to promote their development and vital success. For all this, our main responsibility at this stage is to promote the development of their emotional intelligence, the key to strength.