From the Head of Primary 05.12.2020
This week staff have been very busy writing the End of Term 1 reports which will be sent home via email next Friday. I have really enjoyed reading each and every one of them and reflecting on how much progress the children have made this term. Academic progress is of course very important but equally as important is our children’s personal and social development. Their resilience, determination and perseverance has certainly paid off this term and their ever growing emotional intelligence should be applauded. When I first qualified as a teacher quite some years ago, emotional intelligence was not focused upon in my training. We were taught how to help the most vulnerable children and there were policies and procedures in school to support us with this. More recently however there has been a global focus on emotional intelligence and mental health and wellbeing which can only be a good thing for us all. As an educator and Nanny to three young grandchildren I enjoy reading about children’s early emotional development and recently came across this article from the Gottman Institute which I hope like me you will find interesting.
When emotions run high, people do and say things they normally would not. When you’re a young child, this is what you do all the time.
Emotional self-regulation, a large component of emotional intelligence, is the ability to manage one’s experience and expression of emotions. With practice, children improve their capacity for emotional self-regulation. By age four, most children start to use strategies to eliminate disturbing external stimuli. In other words, they cover their eyes when they’re scared and plug their ears when they hear a loud noise.
It’s not until age 10 that children consistently use more complex strategies for emotional self-regulation. These strategies can be broken down into two simplistic categories: those that attempt to solve the problem and those that attempt to tolerate the emotion.
When a child can make a change to address a problem, they engage in problem-focused coping by identifying the trouble and making a plan for dealing with it. When they deem the problem unsolvable, they engage in emotion-focused coping by working to tolerate and control distress.
All of these strategies are a part of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence encompasses awareness, understanding, and the ability to express and manage one’s emotions.
While the world has been focused on academic achievement in childhood, emotional self-regulation has been largely ignored. This is a poor strategy, given that research suggests emotional intelligence is twice as strong a predictor as IQ of later success.
Self-control, one piece of emotional intelligence, is particularly important in predicting achievement in children. Children who are able to inhibit impulses (often driven by emotions) and avoid distractions are able to engage in more prosocial behaviors and accomplish their goals.
A particularly powerful study tested school-aged children on self-control and conducted follow-up studies on those children in their 30s. The study demonstrated that self-control predicted success better than IQ, socioeconomic status, and family environment.
Have a lovely weekend,
Mrs Joanne Smith
Head of Primary
