Emotional competence

Children who are emotionally competent feel better about themselves, are more successful, experience more personal satisfaction and get along better with others. Sounds good, doesn’t it?! As educators, we can do more to increase emotional competence in children.

What is emotional competence?

Emotional competence is a child’s ability to deal with his or her emotions. The competence determines the extent to which someone deals constructively with their own and other people’s emotions. In order to regulate emotions, it is important, among other things, that children can recognize and name emotions. A lack of emotional skills can be accompanied by negative behavior, psychosomatic complaints and reduced well-being.

Naming the emotions

Learning to name emotions helps you to regulate your emotions. To be able to name emotions, an extensive emotional vocabulary is a basic requirement. And that’s where things often go wrong: we see that children and young people are not sufficiently skilled in emotional literacy. Young people can often tell that they are not feeling well, but it is difficult to name what they are experiencing. However, this is very important: we can only process emotions properly when we can give them language! And consequently, as educators, it is important that we teach our children from an early age to describe emotions in detail.

Emotion tools

Activity book embrace emotions

The activity book ‘Embrace Emotions’ is a concrete tool to get started with children in primary school (from about 6 years old). The activity book expands the emotional vocabulary, promotes emotion regulation and provides a number of healthy coping mechanisms that children can try out.

Read more about the activity book (Embrace emotions – A LOT OF MOM) here. The book focuses on the ‘soft skill’: emotional competence. The book is dedicated to all children and young people so that they can grow up in a more emotionally intelligent world.

Posters about emotions

In addition to the activity book, a set of three posters are also available: an emotion poster, a poster with ideas what you can do when you feel like it and an emotion signpost that also pays attention to where we feel emotions in our body. Handy for home and school. The posters belong to the activity book, but can also be used separately. This way you literally give emotions a place in your home!

About Lieselot Matton

Child psychologist and parent coach, specialized in teaching ‘soft skills’ to children. Mom of three.

I worked for more than 10 years in a group practice with children, young people and their parents. At the end of 2019, a_lot_ofmom was created: a platform that offers tips, coaching and tools to parents and educators. With a_lot_ofmom I focus on teaching soft skills in children, skills (such as gratitude, emotional competence, resilience, relaxation and self-insight) that are becoming increasingly important in a busy society. Furthermore, people can come to me for parent coaching. Recently, I launched some emotion tools to promote children’s emotional competence . The idea arose from the finding that children, young people and adults often have difficulty naming and allowing emotions and therefore find them difficult to process. The tools help children to expand their emotional vocabulary and to allow and process emotions.

More information can be found at www.alotof.mom

Tips and inspiration can be found via Lot .

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