Emotional Empowerment also includes children being able to use their developing emotional skills to help strengthen close personal relationships.
Noticing and understanding emotions in people around you is crucial for forming and maintaining close personal relationships. It’s also one of the core components of empathy or recognizing how others are feeling. By recognizing this, we can adjust our behavior to form closer connections with others. This skill requires us to be able to recognize both verbal and nonverbal signs of emotion in others.
Children learn these skills in several ways: the most important being modeling of those around them. Most of the time, empathy goes unsaid, but it can be beneficial for children to hear the adults around them talk through their thinking. When reading books, watching movies or shows, or when people around you are experiencing strong emotions, talk out loud about how you are noticing their experience. Even better, talk about how this affects your behavior toward them or what you might say.
Enact Empowerment!
These activities will help you teach children how to understand the emotions of others and use these skills to strengthen their personal relationships.
Read and discuss books
Choose books that are age-appropriate and discuss the main characters and their emotions in the story. This is a list to get you started!
