Rima Desai
This blog post has been contributed by our new Parent Blogger Rima Desai. Rima has a Masters Degree in Psychology from Mumbai University. She wrote numerous articles for Parents, Women and creating Self-Awareness in a leading newspaper in Tanzania when she lived there. Her work includes writing for in-flight magazines and editing internationally published books. Rima is a certified Childcare Professional and Life-Coach in USA. She has extensive experience in training teachers, students and holding camps for children (3-9 years).
There is a lot of talk that goes on about parenting and emotions. The importance of developing an emotionally robust child cannot be undermined. Your child may grow up to be a doctor, engineer, or a computer programmer, but that is not enough to safeguard her personal life, and the ability to communicate and express herself. This skill of free emotional expression is needed at every step of relationships, career, and for high self-worth. Now, you have an opportunity to be their emotion coach!
Run your eyes over these activities that will help you enhance your child’s EQ. These activities would work well for children between the ages of 3-8, depending on their emotional maturity.
Quick challenge: In two minutes pen down as many emotions (just one word each) as you can. Note that some emotion clusters like joy, happy and glad are the same type of emotion.
How many emotions did you spurt out easily? Not many of us are generous with our emotional vocabulary because we haven’t been taught to recognize, discover, and word our emotions. In reality, we experience more than 50+ emotions and often several of them in the same day. Here is a short list:
| Happy / glad / joyful / blissful / ecstatic | Sad / sorrowful / unhappy / depressed |
| Proud | Ashamed / embarrassed |
| Successful | Failure |
| Satisfied / content | Dissatisfied |
| Secure | Insecure |
| Patient | Impatient |
| Proud | Disappointed |
| Curious / Interested | Bored / disinterested |
| Thrilled / excited / enthusiastic | lonely |
| Loved | Unloved |
| Accepted | Rejected / dejected |
| Included / belong | Left-out / excluded |
Very often, we are stuck in the confined loop of ‘happy-sad’ words when using our emotional vocabulary and this directly influences our children because they learn no better. Let us learn to label more emotions that are relevant to the situation.
Activity 1
Ask your child to state all the emotions they know of. If they find it hard to begin, make a happy face and ask them to complete the statement: I feel ______
Rima, well-done! The post is not only informative, but creatively expressed. Scope for your background in psychology. Parents are likely to take your plan seriously and act on it. God bless. Ignatius.
http://www.ignatiusfernandez.com
This is great stuff. I am posting this on FB right away. Many of the exercises are good to try with adults too. Starting with listing emotions.
Thank You Ignatius Fernandez. Awaiting your other articles and tempted to buy your books! Good luck in the journey.
Nice article
Rima,great article!!This article is so informative and adoptable one .Your are doing great work!!!I m so proud of you.
Very well written. This can be useful for lot of parents and teachers. I will definitely try these activities with my son.
Thank You Sridhar for spreading the A for ‘Awareness’. I am big on spreading awareness because being aware is to walk half the path already!
Thank You Prati, Pratibha and Amita for reading and appreciating the article. I am happy to know you all felt there was something to take back and practically use it. These simple activities can go a long and strong way for the development of our kids. Keep spreading the awareness and sharing similar knowledge. Looking forward to a stronger generation of kids.
Do share these articles from Parentedge with increasing number of parents. To secure our future, we need a strong and smart generation of kids!
Good post Rima! I look forward to many more such activity-led posts – such activities make parenting more fun as well as being educational and beneficial to the children!
Thanx Kritika, I am excited to share these activities
https://mystyrimz.wordpress.com/
Rima, this is a great article. I love listing the emotions. The activities are great I will have to use them as my granddaughter grows. Thank you!
Thank You Deb for the post
yes listing emotions is a fun and challenging activity for us adults too! Check out my post for articles more relevant to her current age :
http://mystyrimz.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/does-your-relationship-with-your-child-ooze-of-trust-or-does-it-rust/