Family Guide to Social-Emotional Learning
Social-emotional learning (SEL) is an essential part of a child’s development into an emotionally healthy adult. It encompasses the skills, attitudes, and behaviors that help individuals manage their emotions, build positive relationships with others, and make thoughtful decisions. For parents navigating the challenges of sharing child custody after divorce, SEL is particularly important, as it can provide valuable tools to help children adjust to new family dynamics and maintain their emotional well-being. Understanding SEL can help parents guide their children toward becoming resilient, empathetic, and self-aware individuals.
What Is Social-Emotional Learning?
Social-emotional learning involves teaching children the skills they need to effectively navigate social situations and handle personal challenges. SEL helps children to identify and regulate their emotions, communicate their needs and feelings clearly, solve problems, and collaborate with others. These skills are taught in schools, but parents play a critical role in reinforcing them at home.
Components of Social-Emotional Learning
Social-emotional learning is often broken down into five main parts:
Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is the ability to identify and understand your emotions and behaviors. Children who are self-aware can identify what they’re feeling and why, which is the first step in managing their emotions effectively.
Social Awareness
Social awareness involves understanding and empathizing with others, including those from different backgrounds and cultures. Children who develop this skill are better equipped to thrive in a variety of social settings.
Relationship Skills
Strong relationship skills enable children to build and maintain healthy relationships. These skills include effective communication, teamwork, conflict resolution, and the ability to ask for and offer help. During and after a divorce, children may need extra support to maintain relationships with parents, siblings, and extended family. Parents can nurture these abilities by encouraging open dialogue and teaching children how to express their needs and listen to others.
Impulse Control
Impulse control helps children regulate their emotions and behaviors in challenging situations. This skill allows them to set goals, delay gratification, and stay focused.
Decision-Making
Responsible decision-making is the ability to make choices that accomplish a goal while taking into account the well-being of yourself and others.
How Does Social-Emotional Learning Benefit Children?
The benefits of SEL are far-reaching. Children who develop strong social-emotional skills tend to perform better academically, form healthier relationships, and experience improved mental health. SEL also helps reduce behavioral problems and makes children more resilient, helping them to adapt to challenging situations, manage the stress of transitions, and recover from setbacks more effectively. In the long term, these skills lead to greater odds of success in the workplace, more community engagement, and better overall life satisfaction.
How to Support Children’s Social-Emotional Growth
- Model Positive Behavior: Children often mimic what they see. Demonstrate healthy emotional regulation, effective communication, and empathy in your own interactions with your children, your co-parent, and others.
- Create a Safe Environment: A nurturing and supportive home allows children to express themselves without fear of judgment.
- Talk Through Their Emotions: Encourage children to tell you about their feelings, and help them to identify what these emotions are and what caused them.
- Teach Problem-Solving Skills: Help children approach challenges with a positive mindset and work toward solutions. Offer guidance, but let them take the lead in finding answers.
- Encourage Reflection: Ask open-ended questions to help your child think about their emotions, decisions, and relationships.
Activities to Try at Home
Social-emotional learning doesn’t have to have a set curriculum; in fact, many everyday activities can be opportunities for emotional growth.
- Plan Out Your Day: Creating a to-do list at the beginning of the day involves decision-making and setting reasonable expectations. At the end of the day, they can cross off everything they did and feel a sense of accomplishment. If something didn’t get done, it’s an opportunity to reflect on why and learn from it.
- Keep a Journal: Writing down their thoughts and activities gives children a way to express themselves and work through their feelings about events in their lives, from small things like disagreements on the playground at school to larger things like their parents’ divorce.
- Practice Mindfulness: Taking a few moments to clear your mind can provide an emotional reset button that helps you see the world more clearly. This can be as simple as closing your eyes and listening to the sounds outside for a while.
- Cook Together: Cooking with your child hones their ability to collaborate, and when you’re done, they can examine how they feel about the results. Perhaps they’ll be proud of what they made, or maybe they’ll be disappointed that the recipe didn’t come out like they’d hoped. Cooking together is also a great opportunity to bond with both parents, which is particularly important if they’re divorced and share custody.
- Breathe: The simple act of breathing can be a useful tool for emotional regulation. Try belly breathing, in which you place one hand on your chest and breathe deeply, feeling your chest rise and fall, or rainbow breathing, a full-body exercise in which you raise your arms out to the sides and upward as you inhale, then lower them as you exhale.
Additional Resources
- Defining Social and Emotional Learning
- Social-Emotional Learning and Why it Matters
- What Is Social and Emotional Learning?
- Building Social and Emotional Skills at Home
- How to Help Kids Understand and Manage Their Emotions
- Social and Emotional Learning Strategies for Parents
- How to Teach Social-Emotional Skills at Home
- Helping Kids Express Their Emotions
- Supportive Family Law Attorneys
- Building Self-Regulation Skills at Home
- How to Support Your Child’s Social-Emotional Health
- Tips to Help Kids Recognize Emotions
- Mindful Art Activities for Kids