Emotional Literacy
At the end of last term the newsletter article for The Resilience Project was about emotional literacy and ways to practice this as a family. The ‘Family Habit Builder’ around the dinner table was a great way to connect as a family. I wonder how you do this in your family?
In my family, my 5y/o is a chatterbox while my 6y/o will only share when she is ready. Asking questions at the dinner table she only gives one-word responses. “What went well today?”, usually ‘everything’ or ‘nothing’ and she dislikes further probing.
Unusually, yesterday, we walked home from school. My 5y/o was full of ideas, instead of falling asleep in the car and the 6y/o was engaged, responding to her sister’s enthusiasm and questions. I learned how their day went in detail, which opened the door to discussing emotions. Hopefully, I can find ways to adapt this experience and fit this into our family routine.
This fortnight’s page from ‘TRP + for parents and carers’ goes into more detail on using Emotional Literacy to build habits of resilience. If children learn to express their emotions in daily life they are more able to identify emotions in difficult circumstances and develop their toolbox of ‘mood changes’.
As well as supporting our children to develop their resilience through emotional awareness, we are always modelling this by how we manage our own emotions. In this 2m excerpt from the Imperfects podcast, Lael Stone looks at how we can handle reactions and big emotions as adults and care for ourselves.