Early emotional awareness lays the foundation for a healthy, happy little one, empowering children to create better relationships and to cultivate essential life skills.
We all have emotions, good and bad, but children are not born knowing what emotions are or how to cope with them. Developing emotional intelligence from an early age equips children with practical coping tools to deal with emotional issues, shaping how children approach everyday life pressures as they grow into adults. Young children raised this way learn how to identify and manage their emotions, as well as developing an understanding of the feelings of others.
“If you help your child develop good emotional understanding, you are giving them a gift that will set them up for life – it will help them with school, relationships, and well-being,” comments Dr John Lambie, author of My First Emotions and Reader in Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.
Based on the latest research about emotional awareness, validation and regulation, My First Emotions has been designed by experts with a user-friendly methodology for parents to use at their own pace, in the comfort of their home. It’s a multisensory toolkit packed with beautifully illustrated materials, connected tools and stimulating activities, which helps to bring emotions to life.
Dr John Lambie says: “Our recent research* shows that emotional validation by parents helps to increase emotional awareness in children. Emotional validation is when you accurately and non-judgmentally refer to another person’s emotion, such as “I can see you are sad” or “that must be really annoying”.
Emotional invalidation is when you dismiss or ignore another’s emotion, for example saying, “don’t be angry” or “you’re not scared”. We found that the more emotional validation the parent did the better the child was able to identify their own emotions. This matters because there is evidence that good emotional awareness in children leads to better mental health and better performance in school and social life.”
My First Emotions uses play, stories and music to encourage emotional awareness, focusing on five key emotions: love, happiness, sadness, anger and fear. It’s a new, innovative and high quality resource which assists parents in learning how to respond to their children’s emotions and behaviour in a positive way, encouraging parent–child interaction and bonding, and fostering a healthy emotional environment in the home.
Set to launch Spring 2017, My First Emotions is available to pre-order from www.skylarkenglish.com at a discounted pre-order price of £49 (RRP £69).
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