4 Ways To Encourage Children’s Self-knowledge
Helping our children to recognize themselves, understand their emotions, and value their attitudes is the key to achieving good emotional health throughout their lives.
Self-knowledge is the key that opens the door to emotional fullness. Once we acquire this skill, we can be sure that we will always have an emotion regulation strategy at our service.
Therefore, it is of great importance to cultivate these aspects in our children so that they grow up healthy and happy. Below we offer 4 lessons that will help us to stimulate self-knowledge in children:
1- A person is not what others think of him/her
Believing that we are what we are opined is a very common mistake in both child and adult thinking. Also, at certain ages, children tend to put labels on almost everything, including people.
In principle, these classifications may represent an important strategy for relating to the world. However, they are detrimental to the recognition of our identity, and we come to believe that, basically, we are the tall one, the fat one, the beautiful one or the smart one.
This, of course, does not define a person, but ends up determining their behavior and their thoughts if they are, for a long time, subject to labels and external expectations.
The child has to understand that just as he has a very different inner world, so do others.
If the child understands that his/her classmate is not only “ the one who plays soccer best”, but that he also thinks, feels, laughs and cries, then we will have half the way for him to understand that we are all independent.
2- We must not let our emotions rule us
The child must understand that before an emotion comes out strongly (for example, discontent), it has given us several warnings and has shown itself, in a subtle way, on several levels.
3- Purposes do not define us, our attitudes do!
It is very common for us to ask the wonderful question: what do you want to be when you grow up? So the children answer us: doctor, nurse, hairdresser, carpenter… Then, as if that wasn’t enough, we ask why they made this choice.
“Wanting to be an adult” is, after all, child’s play, but… does it define them? Of course not! This is just one example, but children must understand that we are not just what we want to be, we are constantly managing our identity.
Therefore, children need to understand that their pursuit and attitude will shape their future, not their expectations or ambitions. We must let them mentally explore their possibilities and the path they need to take, always fostering a proactive and independent attitude towards their future. This will help them not to get stuck in front of themselves.
4- It is important to reserve a private and intimate space each day
Recognizing your state of mind and thoughts will allow you to develop your socio-emotional skills properly.
However, getting our children to reach this level of emotional development requires the investment of time and effort. The first thing to do is to avoid contamination by the rush and bad habits that today’s adult society maintains.
It should facilitate and enable the child to acquire the daily habit of reflecting on what he did, how he felt, what are the things he likes and how he can achieve them.
It’s simply a matter of inviting you to start the game of thinking about your day, about your aptitudes and your dislikes. An ideal way to do this is to draw an analogy between your mind and a thinking machine, thereby understanding the importance of connecting with your inner self.
