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January 22, 2020

Advices

CHILDREN AND THEIR EMOTIONAL LITERACY- Katerina Galeska Specialist in Psychology

“Lazy kid”, “naughty kid”, “bad kid”, “restless kid”, “troubled kid”, “untrained kid”, “forgetful kid”, “crying kid”, “crying”, “coward”, “scoundrel” , “A nervous kid”. Constantly complains of a headache, stomach ache, choking, hang up, children avoid it. These are daily complaints from parents and even teachers.

Labels, labels, critics. Behind these epithets are “forbidden” feelings; for example, fear and sadness in boys and anger in girls. It’s a parental attitude to become a “strong person”. What do these epithets lead to? What are the consequences?

They make the child insecure, unhappy, lonely, withdrawn or aggressive. They diminish his self-esteem and create a bad image of himself. The suppression of forbidden emotions is a vicious cycle – when an “explosion” of emotions occurs, the cycle of suppression of emotions is repeated until the next affective outburst. In this way, emotional injuries accumulate throughout life and when sufficiently collected they justify the expression of suppressed emotions in an uncontrolled and destructive way.

That is why many questions arise in the head of children: “Has anyone wondered why I am like this?”; “Why am I lonely, withdrawn, not understood?”; “Why don’t my friends want to play with me?”; “Can You Feel How I Feel?”; “Is something wrong with me or my surroundings?”; “I don’t understand you enough, and do you understand me?”; “Could you help me?”

Is there a solution?

Yes. From an early age, children need to be taught emotional literacy. Emotional intelligence is a capacity for empathy, a sense of self, others and the environment. It is the ability to “read” their own and others’ emotional states and to describe feelings in words. This ability is not the same in everyone. For example, in young children who do not have a sufficient stock of words, they express their displeasure, jealousy, and other feelings through their behavior. So, as they grow older, so does their vocabulary and they can describe their experiences and feelings.

In order for children to be emotionally literate, parents first need to be emotionally literate. Although each person experiences emotions, people differ in their ability to recognize and associate them with certain events or with the flow of thought. At one end of the spectrum are those who are unable to put into words what they are feeling, and at the other end are those who very well recognize both their own and others’ feelings, even when they are only discreetly expressed. Regarding how and to what extent one “reads” one’s own and others’ emotional states we can speak of emotional literacy and illiteracy.

Emotionally illiterate are those who are neither capable of experiencing or naming differentiated feelings. The most severe form of emotional illiteracy is in those people who experience emotions as bodily sensations in different parts of the body but do not recognize them as emotions. They are sometimes unsure whether what they feel in the body is an initial sign of an organic disease or just a reaction to a life situation. So they tend to interpret those sensations as the initial signs of a disease that directs them to deal with the body, not the situation that actually caused them. The same thing happens when it comes to their children. They have strong diffuse emotional states that they experience throughout the body, which they describe as severe discomfort or pleasure. Such poorly defined emotions strongly energize the whole body, so there is a tendency for such individuals to have psychosomatic illnesses.

When one is able to name the feeling they are experiencing by, for example, saying “I am angry” or “I am scared”, then it shows initial emotional literacy. When a child has a greater stock of emotion words, he or she will more easily distinguish individual feelings as notions and be able to more accurately identify and describe what they are feeling. For this reason, it is important for the parents of the children to name the emotional states they are experiencing by telling them: “you are angry now”; “You are scared now” etc. On this basis, they will be able later to describe in words what they are feeling.

Another level of emotional literacy is when a child is able to relate his or her emotional state to a particular event or thought flow. Then he is able to think about the situation by questioning either the situation itself or its emotional response.

When a child is able to understand his or her own feelings and relate them to life situations or thought processes, he or she becomes able to guess how others feel in similar situations. This is how empathy arises – empathy for other people’s emotional reactions.