Why You Should Teach Social Emotional Skills to Your Children

After a few years of teaching social emotional learning skills to our students, I realized how lacking I was in teaching this to my own children at home. Yet this is one of the most important skills I should have been teaching them!

Social skills are at the core of almost everything we do in life. However, as a parent, it is so easy to be reactionary to our children’s emotions, that we often fail to be proactive in teaching them emotional skills. Social emotional learning can begin as early as infancy.

See our parent resource handbook here with activities to help your child build emotional regulation skills with activities that span the growing years of preschool through middle school.

Building social and emotional skills at all ages sets a strong foundation for your child to succeed in all areas of their lives. It builds better self-confidence, stronger relationships, decreased emotional distress, more positive behaviors and increased resilience.

Basically, teaching your child to manage emotions, cope with difficulties, and build healthy relationships supports their mental health and well-being.  

Think of all the day to day situations your child encounters at home, school, with friends and in the community where social skills come in to play.

By teaching them how to deal with the emotions involved, they can better navigate their day and feel positive self-esteem. An example list of social emotional skills includes learning to handle the following:

• Feeling frustrated with homework

• Coping with anger or disappointment when things don’t go as expected

• Handling surprises and changes in plans

• Owning up to mistakes or disobeying rules

• Feeling left out from a friend group

• Dealing with teasing or bullying

• Feeling embarrassed in the classroom

• Coping with jealousy at home and with friends

• Dealing with anger over broken possessions

What social emotional skills should parents teach? 

There are three main areas of social emotional skills – emotional awareness, self-regulation and empathy.

Emotional awareness is the ability to identify emotions in oneself. Children understand when they are not happy, but they may not exactly understand the emotion they are feeling. It is very hard for them, in the moment, to accurately describe why they are unhappy. Are they feeling embarrassed, ignored, shy, disappointed, or guilty?

They may not have a name for their emotion. Understanding emotions by naming them, and recognizing the trigger situation, helps them move to the next stage which is learning to manage their emotions.

Self-regulating emotions and behavior is the ultimate goal of teaching emotional skills. After identifying the emotion they feel, and the event that caused them to feel that way, children need to learn strategies for managing the emotion to fit the situation.

If they have had a long busy day, and are irritable at dinner, recognizing this and going to their room to rest is appropriate and desired. If they have had a sleepless night, and are irritable at school, they don’t have that option. Instead, they need to find ways to work through the emotion and move on with their day, or to get help with it.

As a parent, it is really hard to deal with emotions in the midst of its occurrence. Most children are not willing to sit down and talk about ways they can deal with the emotion when they are feeling out of sorts. Teaching self-regulation strategies ahead of time, such as ways to calm down when they are upset, or impulse control and delayed gratification, are necessary proactive steps parents need to take.

Empathy for other’s emotions is the third area of social emotional skills a child needs to learn. Looking back, I feel this was an area that was a little easier to teach – sharing with others, helping others, and being a kind friend seemed to happen naturally in their lives. Looking at a situation from another person’s perspective, through conversation with a child, is also less threatening than telling a child to stop behaving the way they have been. 

How do social emotional skills help with mental health? 

The last year I taught middle school was fraught with student mental health issues. I had never experienced that many, or that serious of situations, than I did that year. From self-harm, to suicide attempts, admission to mental hospitals for depression, and anxiety attacks that had students bolting from the classroom, we saw many students struggling. Building social emotional skills can help improve a child’s emotional well-being in a few ways.

While many social skills for kids are not called stress management techniques, you really are teaching stress management because any “negative” emotion causes stress on the body. Whether it is outright anxiety, or feeling shy, ignored, irritable, or dubious, all cause stress.

By teaching your child how to handle these emotional situations, you are arming them with stress-management techniques. You are also helping them build resilience to keep going despite the emotional situation.

I have seen so many students struggle with a task at school and get completely wound up about it. They had no resilience to struggle and keep going through the situation; their frustration took over and they couldn’t find a way out.

Building the skills to find a way out of their emotion also helps them build self-confidence and self-esteem. When they know they can handle something, or they see the result of handling something and moving on, they can be proud of themselves and believe in their abilities.

We have all seen how proud they are to say “I did it!” Having a positive self-image is crucial as they will only encounter more difficult emotional situations as they grow. They move from catching a ball, to tying their shoe, to finishing an art project to acing a test. This all contributes to their self-esteem and they can look forward to being confident in themselves.

Adequately dealing with their emotions and emotional situations reduces anxiety and depression. However, it takes coping skills to get there so that they can deal with challenges and not let the challenge get the better of them.

Having the self-awareness to also seek support when needed is a big part of self-regulation. Having support can be another person to talk to, it can mean asking for help in a situation, or it can also mean having a tool box of supportive tools they can try when feeling anxious or depressed. 

What are strategies parents can do at home to nurture social emotional skills?  

Reading and Discussing Books

Looking back, other than reading books to them, I feel I did not have any resources to teach our children social emotional skills. Even those books were unplanned, just randomly selected books, not picked to teach coping skills.

Prior to selecting resources and creating a plan to teach social skills to your children, creating a nurturing environment with open communication is the first step. Being able to accept and talk about emotions with your child should start when they are not in the middle of an emotional crisis.

Validating that feelings exist, and that you want to talk with your children about them helps them feel comfortable having those discussions. Working together to find ways to cope with the emotion and problem-solve emotional situations takes time together without other distractions.

Giving them choices in handling a situation helps find a way that works for them. For example, just because laughing at a situation works for you, doesn’t mean it will work for them. Working together to create strategies and use keywords as reminders will take time and practice.

Proactively teaching skills is easier when you have tools that take the pressure off the situation. Talking about a situation in third person, as if someone else has the problem, makes for a non-threatening situation and more open communication.

There are many, many children’s books appropriate for any age through young adult that deal with emotional situations. When reading the book, stop to discuss the situation, how the character handled it and how they could have handled it better. Then ask the child what they would do in that situation, different ways they could handle it and what way would feel the most comfortable for them.

Also talk about what happens when the situation isn’t managed, both in terms of how the child would feel and also how others would feel. 

Conversation Story Cards

Story cards, or conversation cards, are another non-threatening way to discuss emotional situations. By drawing a card, discussing the situation and emotion, and possible solutions, the attention is all on the character or situation on the card, not on the child themselves.

Story cards lend themselves to the child creating stories about the situation, creating possible solutions and creating alternative situations that could result. Storytelling is a great learning activity as it cements itself more prominently in the brain, especially when the child is the one who makes up the story.

Then when a situation happens, you can refer back to their story and they can recall the skills needed to handle the situation easier than if you just had a short discussion. You can also try role-playing if your child is comfortable with it.

After reading books or using story cards, have the child create action step reminders that are age appropriate. Using pictures and words, they can create a box of cards to pull from that remind them of some choices to help them calm down.

Older children can write if/then statements – if this happens, then I can …. Many students in my classes had fidget toys to help calm anxiety. While these can really work well, you need to have open communication with the teacher on how these can be used appropriately, without distracting others in the classroom. 

Share Your Experiences

Letting your child know that you, as an adult, struggle with emotions helps them feel more comfortable talking about them as well. Reflecting with them on daily emotions and experiences, and how you handled them, gives them an opportunity to chime in on their own feelings and experiences.

Setting goals for emotional growth solidifies the importance you place on learning to handle situations appropriately. Younger child can benefit from star charts, and small rewards that are tied to appropriately handling specific situations, such as handling jealousy when a parent is paying attention to another sibling or a spouse.

Older children’s behavior in school can be rewarded as well. Teachers are more than happy to keep the parent in the loop on positive improvements in the classroom.

Children will experience many emotions during their childhood. Validating their emotions and helping them learn appropriate skills creates a lifelong impact, empowering them for future success and well-being.

The process of teaching them to identify the emotion and the trigger, and helping them develop self-regulation skills will aid them in viewing what they feel as normal and manageable. They will be able to build healthy relationships through enhanced communication skills to express their thoughts and feelings.

They will have improved academic success through heightened learning readiness and problem solving skills, which translates into successful careers and lives.

This won’t happen overnight, and as they grow, they will encounter new emotions and situations that need additional skills. However, laying the groundwork as early as possible, and as often as possible will net growth and a sense of general well-being.