Educating The Mind Without Educating The Heart Is Not Educating

What encourages education of the heart is the idea that if children learn to deal with their emotions, we will reduce the problems arising from conflicting emotions in the future. These problems can be simple and commonplace or extremely serious, such as violence, suicide or drug use.

Another reason to educate the heart is mental development. The neuronal plasticity inherent in childhood will help us shape brain development, thus supporting the development of healthy circuits.

Practice leads to perfection

The most important thing is to notice and work with emotions as they happen, so we learn to manage them correctly. Learning is reinforced through practice, and because emotions are abstract things, it can be difficult to understand them if we don’t have a way to experience them.

For example, children who recognize their negative emotions as anger and irritation learn to deal with them successfully. Unfortunately, we don’t know how to handle our children’s emotions ; if they get angry we punish them or we get angry too.

This adult reaction induces children not to share their emotions. The emotion does not disappear, but it weakens the trust between the child and their caregivers.

Educating the heart, a pleasant task

Emotional education is very important, but we need to be careful: not everything is worth it and nothing ends. Just as we strive to teach addition and subtraction, we should also strive to educate the heart.

For this, it is necessary to convey a clear message to children: all feelings are good; it is our behavior towards them that may be wrong.

It is critical for emotional development to realize that we all feel jealousy, greed, disillusionment, etc. It is important to become familiar with them and learn to express them correctly, without harming yourself and others.

We must provide children with tools to help them put this into practice. This is very important because some children are afraid of their own feelings as they cannot separate what they feel from how they act.

The child needs to understand that if at any time he was punished for expressing his anger, it was not for the feeling itself, but for his behavior. To help her, we can tell stories of children who felt angry and how they solved the problem, invite them to share their experiences, ask them to draw a picture and write about it.

The child must learn to calm down, think before acting, and understand that certain emotional states are uncomfortable for everyone. So, to control your behavior that stems from some emotion, you  need to treat others as you would like to be treated.