Children’s Emotional Development
Children’s emotional development makes them aware of the origin and management of emotions. They begin to read the emotions in the facial expressions of others and interpret them in terms of the social context (1).
Thus, the change and growth expected of them at an emotional level derives from the experiences that take place, on the one hand, in their context and, on the other, in their maturation.
Therefore, in their emotional development, certain emotional goals related to themselves and to others begin to emerge, taking into account the context.
How children manifest different types of emotions varies substantially depending on their previous repertoire. It also has a lot to do with your learning history. This leads to important achievements in understanding, emotion regulation and empathic response (3).
Below, we share three aspects of children’s emotional development that allow them to know more specifically about their emotional competence.
Emotional Understanding
Understanding is especially important in children’s emotional development. On the one hand, we have an understanding of their emotions and, on the other, an understanding of emotional ambivalence and the rules of expression.
Understanding emotions and taking an emotional perspective begin to develop at very young ages. Boys and girls, during preschool age, are linked to increasingly diverse situations, which generate different emotions (2).
An important advance in understanding emotions comes when children begin to regard the other as having their own wants and needs.
On the other hand, the emotional perspectives and the level of understanding they come to establish are linked to the culture in which they grow up, while also being linked to the parents’ reactions.
Ultimately, what children believe and expect is linked to contextual factors and their personal makeup.
Culture provides different rules for expressing emotions. Thus, children gain an understanding of emotions through modeling and vicarious learning. In this way, the cultural component definitely imposes limits and rules for emotional expression.
Understanding these emotional expression rules involves aspects such as:
- The intensity of expression;
- The persistence of expression;
- Inhibition of expression.
On the other hand, we must mention the understanding of emotional ambivalence. This is understood as the ability to understand, know and discriminate the presence of various opposite emotions.
The possibility of understanding this is a basic point for children to acquire skills when dealing with stable relationships with a high affective charge (5).
Emotional regulation as part of children’s development
Emotions are ways of contacting reality. Therefore, for them to fulfill this objective, they need to be flexible and congruent with the situation as well as the objectives.
The use of different strategies to achieve levels of emotional self-fulfillment is varied as it depends on the situation. Little by little, children learn that some strategies are effective for certain situations and that these depend on the type of goal desired.
The flexibility in its management and the development of internalization levels show the usefulness of regulation for the adjustment of adaptive behaviors and socio-emotional adjustment (6).
Empathy in children’s emotional development
Empathy is considered the ability of a person to understand the emotional situation of another and to issue responses related to that person’s feeling (2). Thus, empathy is an emotional component that is only achieved when the child reaches three previous aspects (2):
- Your own emotional understanding;
- Emotional understanding of others;
- The ability to regulate your own emotion.
These three aspects are aimed at social situations that allow, on the part of the boy or the girl, to analyze the achievement of goals, highlight affective actions and understand why they feel different emotions (7).
As such, we can consider many factors in a child’s emotional development.
However, it should be said that, for these strategies mentioned above to be developed, her family and social environment needs to be conducive for her to have a good emotional development.
