Child Growth and Cognitive Development
Emotional Development
Introduction
- Emotional development is defined as the emergence of experience, the ability to express, comprehend, and regulate emotions from birth throughout childhood.
- Emotional development occurs conjointly with neural, cognitive, and behavioral development.
- The processes occur in relation to the social and cultural context exposed to the children.
- This means that emotional development is closely associated with the environment the children live, including families and the larger community.
- The environment in which children grow will significantly influence the ability of the children to understand their emotions.
- The environment will also affect the children’s ability to listen to others and express their emotions effectively.
- This means that the children will be emotionally literate, which is the ability to handle emotions that improve self and the quality of life of people around them.
- Emotional literacy triggers the ability to create healthy relationships, cooperation, and togetherness or feeling of community.
- According to Murray & Palaiologou (2018), children acquiring a balance in social, cognitive, and emotional skills have a lifetime outcome since they correlate positively with academic achievement.
- Strong and positive relationships with children play a significant role in developing trust, empathy, compassion, and realization of when they are right and wrong.
- Since the children are born, they learn who they are by how they are treated.
- When children are loved, they develop a sense of comfort, safety, and confidence.
- The loving relationships help the children learn how to form friendships, communicate emotions, and deal with challenges.
- Expression of emotions assists in the infants’ transition from complete dependency to autonomy.
- It gives the children chances to express their interests, an aspect that enables them to explore and promote cognitive development.
- Expressions like smiles and other indicators of joy will significantly ease their social interaction and promote healthy relationships with the caregivers or those around them.
- When children express emotions like sadness, they develop a foundation of acquiring values like empathy and helping behavior.
- Additionally, when they express anger, it is an indication they are protesting something or are not comfortable.
- The infants have a unique tendency to express these emotions and others, a process called temperament.
Stages of emotional development
- There are three major emotional stages in childhood development and include noticing emotions (Birth to one), expressing emotions (two to three), and managing emotions (three to five) (Malik & Marwaha, 2020).
- Huitt and Dawson (2011) argue that infants begin having nonintentional smiles as early as they are born, which is the first stage of emotional development.
- They also argue that social smiling and expression of interest appear when the infants reach six weeks.
- There are many theories revolving around this stage, where some people believe that people are born with only three emotions, including happiness, anger, and fear (Lewis & Granic, 2010).
- Other people believe that newborns can have a much wider range of feelings from birth.
- At this stage, children communicate through crying and cooing, demonstrating that they are capable of identifying bad and good things.
- Emotional development at the noticing emotions stage can be fostered through creating a safe and consistent environment.
- Such environments will enable the children to feel confident, increasing their capability to express themselves.
- Growth in this stage is also fostered through encouraging self-soothing, which is effective in regulating emotions.
- It is important to show your emotions as caregivers, whereby matching facial expressions and vocalizing feelings helps the child identify emotions.
- The second stage – expressing emotions- occurs when infants reach two to four months; they randomly smile at familiar faces and other infants.
- The children use new ways of expressing their emotions, making communication with caregivers more complex.
- At this age, the caregivers can share and exchange positive emotions with the infant effectively.
- Also, it is at the age of three months when the infants begin expressing negative emotions.
- The infants perceive and respond differently to the different emotional expressions like sadness and anger.
- Emotional development and growth can be fostered by staying calm when they are not.
- This means that when they express anger or frustration, it is important to respond with clarity, kindness, empathy, and firmness.
- Growth can be fostered by giving them language to express themselves, which will act as emotional vocabulary.
- It is important to provide positive reinforcement where the caregiver you celebrate little ways that make progress with the child.
- It will also point out some of the wrong things so they can rectify as a way of encouraging growth and instilling a sense of self-confidence.
- As the infants grow to five months, they gain rudimentary cognitive and memory capacities, which is the third stage-managing emotions.
- This helps them stop expressing emotions randomly but rather base them in a particular context.
- Emotions become more dynamic as the infant begins to take more direct emotional exchanges with those close to them and caregivers.
- They start sharing, listening, and playing with other children, and since their parents are not always available, they develop coping skills.
- Emotional development and growth in this stage are fostered through giving strategies where caregivers can use tangible ways to express intangible emotions.
- The caregivers can support the children by managing their emotions through formulating modeling strategies and practice them together.
- You can the children grow emotionally by having realistic expectations to prevent them from being shameful or develop anxiety when they do not achieve, which may hurt their future.
- The creation of emotional bonds between infants and caregivers is of great significance since it enables the infant to seek support and signals danger.
- The emotional development aspect tends to play a significant role in child functioning and well-being.
- Emotional competencies will increasingly determine the child’s future success in school and other settings as well as in the adulthood phase.
- Emotional and social skills tend to develop conjointly and enable the infants to gain a greater level of confidence and capability to build relationships and solve problems.
- According to Murray & Palaiologou (2018), social skills and competency in building relationships among children and processing skills are essential at school entry levels.
- The skills enable the children to manage their behavior, make social connections, and tolerate frustrations when with peers.
- Emotional competency is one predictor of academic achievement when the children reach school-going age (Denham et al., 2002).
- Metwally et al. (2016) argue that maladjustment in the emotional domain may reduce the children’s capability to adapt to different environments, including school and family.
- In a broader sense, it means that they will not have secure attachments with people close to them, including caregivers and teachers, leading to challenges in communication and creating relations.
- This is one of the causes of emotional and social problems, including anxiety and depression among children, which adversely affects their academics.
- According to Maguire et al. (2015), there are gender differences when expressing emotions, emotional understanding, and inhibitory control, where girls show higher levels of emotional expression and understanding.
- The girls also show prosocial and internalizing behavior and externalizing behavior compared to the boys (Maguire et al., 2015).