Developing Children's Social and Emotional Skills: A Guide for Parents

A child's social-emotional development is as important as their cognitive and physical development. In fact, it is important to know that children are not born with social-emotional skills. Hence, the role of parents, caregivers and teachers of children play an important role in teaching these skills to children and fostering their abilities.

A child's social-emotional development provides them with a sense of who they are in the world, how they learn and helps them to establish quality relationships with others. This is what drives an individual to communicate, connect with others and more importantly helps to resolve conflicts, gain confidence and reach their goals.

Building a strong social-emotional foundation as a child will help a child thrive and obtain happiness in life and even it has long term benefits such as socio-emotionally connected adults. They will be better equipped to handle stress and deal through difficult times in their lives as an adult.

How to support the social-emotional development in children?

In the past, parents and caregivers have stressed only on academic skills to determine success in a child. Those days are past and now we know the importance of social-emotional development. The approach to teaching social-emotional development is rather vague than physical or cognitive development.

Yet there are a lot of strategies available to support and of course we can help! Having said this, we as parents and caregivers must learn to read our child's emotional cues so that we can help them identify their emotions; model the behaviour for our children; consistently interact with our child affectionately; show consideration for their feelings, desires and needs; express interest in their daily activities; validate their viewpoints; express pride in their accomplishments with meaningful comments and provide encouragement and support the children during times of stress.

Where to go for help? Recognising an issue early is always best

Children may show different warning signs for social-emotional issues as discussed above. If you have a concern, talk to your healthcare provider. developmental and behavioural paediatricians can definitely help you!

(The author is a Consultant Developmental paediatrician, Rainbow Children's Hospital, Marathahalli)