Educating the mind without educating the heart is not educating at all

The emotional relationships established in childhood make up a large part of a person’s future. Thus, although rationality has traditionally marked the practice of educating, emotional and social skills are strongly linked to rational skills.

What encourages educating the heart is the idea that If we deal with emotions today, tomorrow we will reduce the incidence of problems derived from conflicting emotions. These problems can be simple and everyday or truly serious such as violence, suicide or drug use.

By educating the heart we develop the mind in terms of neuronal plasticity. This neural capacity will help us shape healthier brain circuits.

Practice makes a master

What matters most to us is working on the moments in which an emotion catches us. That is when we can learn to manage them well. Learning is greater through practice. Emotions, being intangible concepts, can be complicated to understand and learn to manage without experiencing them. This is why it is so important to take advantage of the opportunities in which the child feels emotions. In this way, we can familiarize him with them and make him see that it is normal.

For example, children who are recognized with negative emotions such as anger or annoyance learn to regulate them better and cope with them successfully. However, sadly, the usual thing is to face our children’s emotions; That is, if they get angry, we punish them or get angry with them in response. So that, Educating parents about the emotional management of their children is also an important factor to take into account.. Thus, instead of punishing your children for showing anger, it will be more appropriate to teach them to manage the emotion in the best way possible.

This adult reaction causes children to conclude that they should not share certain emotions and, as a consequence, they end up disconnecting from them. This does not cause the emotion to disappear at that moment, but rather it hinders the trust between the child and his or her caregivers.

Educate the heart, a pleasant task

Although the term emotional education is very attractive, we must be careful when carrying it out. Not everything is worth anything and nothing remains. In other words, just as we carefully teach addition and subtraction, we must get involved in instructing the heart.

For this, we must transmit a clear message to children: All feelings are right, it is the behaviors that can be wrong. It is key to emotional development to realize that everyone sometimes feels jealousy, greed, disappointment, etc. However, the important thing is that they become familiar with it and learn to express it in the appropriate way.

To achieve this we must worry about Provide them with tools to help them put it into practice. This is of utmost importance since there are many children who fear their feelings, since they feel unable to separate them from their behavior.

Emotion and behavior

It is very important that the child understands that If you have ever been punished for expressing anger, it was not for the emotion itself but for your behavior. To do this, we can tell them stories in which a child has felt that emotion and their way of solving it. Inviting them to tell us about their experiences, to draw a drawing or to write about it is a good idea to help them express their discomfort.

From this, the child has to learn to calm down before thinking and acting. Feeling negative emotions is normal, but you have to recognize that the activation you feel stems from it. Little by little, the child will learn that no matter how much anger he feels, it does not mean that he will carry out negative behavior. You will be taught that emotions can be regulated internally without having negative external consequences..

It is not about telling children to calm down, but rather inviting them to understand that certain emotional states are unpleasant for everyone. Thus, to control the behavior that derives from your emotion They have to understand that they must treat their environment as they want their environment to treat them.

Main reference source: Destructive emotions by Daniel Goleman

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