How to Properly Nurture Children’s Emotional Development
Pity the hearts of parents everywhere; every parent wishes for their child to succeed. In the East Asian Confucian cultural circle, there is a strong emphasis on education regarding intelligence and knowledge, but we often overlook emotional education.
Before we become parents, we know how to pursue success and excellence, but no one has ever taught us how to take care of our own emotions. While we understand that emotional intelligence is as important as IQ, and arguably even more so, both familial and educational institutions have largely neglected emotional education.
When one day we become parents, we often find ourselves at a loss on how to teach our children about emotions. After long periods of suppression and neglect, we often cannot clearly understand our true emotional state or what constitutes appropriate emotional responses.
Teaching Children to Express, Understand, and Regulate Emotions Effectively
The first step in emotional education is recognizing emotions. There are six basic emotions: anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, and sadness; they are all means to achieve certain purposes.
For example, sadness is an emotion that arises when we lose something important. It can occur when a loved one passes away, or when you are moving and leaving behind old friends. Sadness prompts us to reflect on our lives, helping us to discern what is truly important and what is not. Similarly, fear serves to mobilize all your attention and physical resources in a crisis, urging you to quickly respond to a threat.
In the same way, the emotion of happiness is also a means. Happiness primarily comes from dopamine; we know that the process of generating dopamine is a form of reinforcement learning: this emotion allows you to remember how you obtained the reward so that you can replicate that behavior next time, and nothing more. Happiness itself is not the goal.
All emotions arise naturally and should dissipate naturally. When we encounter emotions, we should first accept them, similar to meditation in Buddhism, viewing emotions like tides that come and go without denial, judgment, or immediate attempts to change them. Just let it flow naturally and pass through your body.
Some parents say that to protect their child, they cannot allow their child to be troubled by any negative emotions — but this is actually incorrect. You should help your child understand that negative emotions are a part of life.
For instance, if your middle school daughter’s classmate has a birthday party over the weekend and invites many classmates but not your daughter, this can be a significant blow, especially at this age when relationships with peers are prioritized, particularly for girls. What should you do? Call the classmate’s parent and demand that your daughter be invited? Or organize another party for your child instead?
How to Avoid Being Hurt in Emotions
The best approach is actually to guide the child to accept the fact that, sometimes in life, one may feel neglected, lonely, and sad — but it’s not a big deal; it will pass soon, and you won’t feel this way forever! These moments of inner struggle are precisely opportunities for growth in wisdom.
By not allowing children to experience excessive negative emotions, you may unknowingly inflict the greatest harm on them. The real world is like this, and we must learn to accept, feel, and understand various feelings of sadness and happiness.
