WHAT IS SOCIAL, MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL HEALTH?
For many years schools have used IQ tests to try and predict which students will do well in both higher education and the workplace. It is now believed that these tests are inadequate and that future success is indicated much more accurately by the measurement of a childās social, mental and emotional health. Research has led experts to believe that success is influenced 20 per cent by IQ and 80 per cent by the various factors that make up a personās character and personality. These are sometimes called āEmotional Intelligenceā or āsocial, emotional and behavioural skillsā (SEBS) and they form the cornerstone of almost every aspect of our lives.
Personal, social and emotional development involves helping children to:
develop a positive sense of themselves, and others; to form positive relationships and develop respect for others; to develop social skills and learn how to manage their feelings; to understand appropriate behaviour in groups; and to have confidence in their own abilities.
(Statutory Framework for the Early Years and Foundation Stage, 2012)
Social, emotional and behavioural skills are learned, first at home, and then in the wider community of which the school plays an important part. Every child develops at their own pace but high-quality pre-school education can make a considerable difference to childrenās cognitive, emotional and behavioural development because the foundation for social and emotional success is built in early childhood. If their experience in the nursery is truly nurturing, children can proceed to school feeling competent and ready for the challenges of the ābig schoolā classroom and beyond. The nursery, with its relaxed, caring and secure environment, offers exciting opportunities for friendship and structured, age-appropriate learning about themselves and others, and children gain all the self-esteem and confidence they need to make sound academic progress and achieve their potential in every aspect of their lives. As Development Matters (2012) states: āChildren develop in the context of relationships and the environment around them.ā
Social, emotional and behavioural skills are not something that we can teach in a lesson and then forget about. They are personality traits, ways of interacting and a sense of self-worth that grow with us and are nurtured through the ongoing interactions that children have every day with their peers and the adults who surround them. This essential collection of skills and competencies is usually divided into five main strands:
1 Self-awareness
2 Empathy
3 Managing oneās emotions
4 Social skills
5 Motivation.
These skills are very closely related to one another but every child is different and will acquire them at different rates and with different degrees of success. āIt (Development) depends on each unique child having opportunities to interact in positive relationships and enabling environmentsā (Development Matters, 2012). The earlier they are grasped the better because emotions set the tone of all of our experiences and are what give life its vitality and purpose.
We will now look at each aspect of Emotional Intelligence in a little more depth and see how it relates to your nursery group.
WHAT IS SELF-AWARENESS?
Knowing the relationship between thoughts, feelings and reactions.
Knowing why we feel that way.
To be able to communicate how we are feeling.
Every emotion that we feel is a chain of events that begins with a thought, memory or something that is going on in the world around us. Once the emotion has been activated, a wide range of hormones kick into gear and cause physical changes in our body and we feel our mood change as our heart rate increases and we get hotter or colder or get butterflies in our stomach. These internal changes alter the way we behave and make us cry or laugh or shake with fear.
Somewhere along the way, we become aware that we are experiencing a particular emotion and give it a name, so that when we feel like smiling we say that we are happy, or when we scowl, clench our fists and feel a strong desire to shout we label that feeling anger. By the time we are adult, we are able to recognise and name what we are feeling quite precisely. Over time we will have learned a vast array of āexpressiveā words that help us finely tune our emotions and we are able to feel very complex mixtures of feelings and give them accurate names. Just think about how you felt as you walked into the interview room when you got your job ā there was probably a sense of alert expectation, and a large dollop of hope and confidence, but mixed in there was a sense of nervousness that you might be asked a difficult question. You had a name that covered the whole spectrum of feelings and sensations you were experiencing: you probably called it āinterview nervesā but we all know what you meant.
We are not born with this ability but learn it as we grow. It takes a long time before we reach this mature insight into our own inner lives and the children in your nursery are just beginning their journey towards full emotional self-awareness.
Developing self-awareness in young children
By the time they reach nursery school, most children are likely to be able to identify some of their feelings and tell you about them. In fact, they can be quite assertive about how they feel about the tasks that you wish them to do during each day!
The Early Learning Goals for managing feelings and behaviour (EYFS 2012) include: āChildren talk about how they and others show feelingsā; and Development Matters (2012) explains that adults can āhelp children understand the feelings of others by labelling emotions...
