Episode 93: Fostering Future Leaders — The Vital Role of Emotional Intelligence in Children

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Welcome to another episode of K12 Education Untangled. My name is Dr. Kim Fields, former corporate manager turned educational researcher and advocate, and I'm the host of this podcast. I got into this space after dealing with some frustrating interactions with school educators and administrators, as well as experiencing the microdiscriminations that I faced as an African American mom raising my two kids who were in the public school system. I really wanted to understand how teachers were trained and what the research provided about the challenges of the public education system. Once I gained the information and the insights that I needed, I was then equipped to be able to successfully support my children in their educational progress.

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About current information and issues in education that could affect you or your children, then you're in the right place. Thanks for tuning in today. I know that staying informed about K12 education trends and topics is important to you, so keep listening. On today's episode, I'll be discussing whether emotional intelligence really matters and whether it applies to children. You may have heard about emotional intelligence and its application to adults, but does this concept and its principles apply to children? Many of you have been asking this question, and you've also been asking whether emotional intelligence can be taught to children. I provide some practical ways to develop emotional intelligence in your children as part of my discussion on this topic. Let's get started. When I speak of emotional intelligence, I'm talking about giving full attention to one's feelings and the feelings of others, sympathy and compassion. It includes self awareness, controlling feelings, encouraging oneself, and establishing social relationships. Emotions have a profound effect on every decision and action taken. Emotional intelligence is the social and emotional skill that has been widely researched and targeted in educational interventions. Children need to develop skills for adapting to not only the conditions that they'll encounter in the future, but also to handle the rapid flow of information brought about by technological and social developments. A 32 member working group in the United States that includes educators and major companies related to education was established to identify and standardize 21st century skills. This partnership P21 identified the disciplines that should be taught to students in basic education and above in the 21st century, and these disciplines include grammar, world languages, economics, mathematics, art, science, geography, history, and citizenship. The history and geography subjects could be taught under social studies. These disciplines could be taught by themselves with themes such as environmental literacy, global awareness, financial literacy, civic literacy, and health literacy. One area that's been highlighted in previous episodes are the skills addressed under the umbrella of life and career skills, communication and collaboration, flexibility and adaptation, initiative and self direction. Social and cross cultural skills, leadership and responsibility skills are all closely tied to emotional intelligence directly and indirectly. One of the dimensions of empathy, which is a characteristic of emotional intelligence, is respect for diversity. 21st century skills that can be taught to children in social studies classes include a positive self perception, the ability to interact with and empathize with diverse people, and the ability to think critically by recognizing biases and differences. Respecting diversity can be taught in early childhood as this helps the child prepare for for the future. Social studies can contribute to the children's ability to make friends, be more open to collaboration, be helpful, empathize with others, and take on a more positive stance for diversity. Further, Geography Studies in Early Childhood teaches children to become respectful for themselves and other people's cultures, to appreciate and accept diversity, and to understand their culture and community by learning more about them. Montessori has pointed out that children who undergo disciplines such as history and geography enter adolescence more preparedly and responsibly develop emotional intelligence and become more balanced in physical, academic, and social skills. There's some evidence that suggests that preschool children begin to understand socioeconomic differences and use their learning experiences to construct stereotypes. Geography activities help to teach children that there are people who live in different conditions and that this should not be a reason for discrimination. Some researchers have indicated that a reduction in traditional games played in a child's environment can affect the child's intelligence. In other words, the digital based games may not increase intelligence or especially games played on smartphones because those games seem to nurture negative behaviors such as selfishness, arrogance, pessimism, and loneliness. These traditional games include checkers, chess, board games, marbles, sack races, etc. These are helpful in the education process because they teach your child strategies that can help develop creative as well as critical thinking skills. Games of this nature also develop children's personal and social skills. Traditional games are very important in increasing children's emotional intelligence. Playing these games teaches children to manage their emotions, gives them the desire to win games or to accept defeat, and also develops social relations with friends and neighbors. Increasing children's enthusiastic insights is one of the main perspectives that determine the happiness of the child's life path. Insight in this instance is a person's expertise that can be seen from the speed and accuracy in supervising his or her ability to act. The speed and accuracy are related to a person's ability to deal with a problem and is shown by activities within a certain period of time according to that person's abilities. Children's emotional intelligence can be in the form of a child's ability to realize, control and monitor the feelings that occur in themselves and provide activity through having an attitude to achieve their happiness. The basic potential that needs to be instilled in children from an early age, meaning ages 5 through 6, is emotional intelligence. According to the experts, children's emotional intelligence is important in determining how their attitude will be when they become adults. Parents can give their children freedom regarding playing traditional games because these games increase children's emotional intelligence and considering that emotional intelligence is a very important aspect of social life, it is of equal importance or maybe more so than intellectual intelligence. A 2021 study examined the relationship between emotional intelligence, academic achievement and motivation for students between the ages of 12 and 16. Research indicates that there's a positive relationship between academically successful students and higher emotional intelligence compared to unsuccessful students. By teaching emotional and social skills in schools, the ability to succeed academically could be greatly improved. It's difficult to assess the student's academic performance without incorporating their emotional intelligence and overall intelligence. The results of this study indicated that there's a positive relationship between emotional intelligence and academic achievement. That strong link can be explained by the fact that emotional intelligence encourages people to suppress negative emotions like frustration, self doubt and anxiety and instead concentrate on positive emotions like trust, empathy and congeniality. Additionally, students that were more conscious of their feelings tended to do well in school. Student academic achievement includes considering students personal beliefs about their own capacities without specifically focusing on general intelligence abilities, meaning that motivational, emotional and social factors are key elements in understanding students behavior toward academic achievement. Motivation is influenced by individual expectations, the results of of an activity, self efficacy, interaction with the environment and other factors. Emotional factors consist of emotional intelligence, emotional competence, and emotional well being. All of these lead to the acquisition of knowledge, understanding and regulation of emotions. Children between the ages of 8 and 12 years old achieve an understanding of complex emotions how those adapt to the context and have an association with moral or ethical values. The understanding of emotions is associated with learning because they are related to attention, willingness to learn, or behavioral self regulation. School age children are affected by several academic factors that influence their emotional well being. Research has shown that there's a direct proportional relationship between academic achievement and emotional intelligence. In other words, when academic achievement scores increase, emotional intelligence also increases. Emotional intelligence without empathy may bring about aggressive behavior because of the interrelationship of emotional intelligence with other personality traits in determining different social outcomes. Empathy refers to the ability to understand others emotions, while emotional intelligence refers to accurate knowledge, identification and management of emotions in both self and others. They're basically distinguishable concepts that have different effects on social behavior. Without empathy, however, emotional intelligence may lead to antisocial behaviors. In studies that investigated whether emotional intelligence had a negative side focused on its association with emotional manipulation and antisocial behavior. The studies also indicated that non pro social emotional manipulation was stronger among males than females. The primary conclusion from this 2021 research study was that emotional intelligence is just one form of intelligence and that seemingly pro social behaviors of emotionally intelligent people might be driven by self interest rather than pro social motivation. The study also indicated that the silent aggressiveness displayed in some emotionally intelligent students might lead to one of the more dangerous problems in schools and that is bullying. Now, in general, emotional intelligence is negatively related to to bullying. However, some types of bullying, such as social exclusion and relational bullying require high levels of social and emotional understanding. There are three emotional intelligence, the ability model, the mixed method model, and the trait model. The emotional intelligence model posed by Goldman contains five sub dimensions self awareness, self management, empathy motivation, and social skills. Self management is the capacity to effectively cope with emotions. Motivation includes motivation, drive, commitment, initiation, and optimism. Social skills are types of skills that help students establish cooperative and positive relationships with others as well as sustain those relationships. These skills consist of influence, conflict management, leadership, building bonds, collaboration and cooperation, and team capabilities. Emotional intelligence is the concept that should be fostered in schools within the context of social emotional skills. Developing emotional intelligence skills skills allow students to recognize and express their emotions in a cooperative way, develop a sense of empathy, and establish positive relationships with others. This, however, involves utilizing systematic and planned instruction. Systematic and planned development of emotional intelligence for children 10 years old and that age was selected because it's a period in which students experience transition from primary school to secondary school and late childhood. So for children that are 10 years old, this makes them more competent to cope with problems that could emerge in those transitions between primary and secondary school as well as late childhood and in some cases puberty.

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That's why planned development of emotional intelligence for children of this age is so necessary it's been said that IQ is the floor and emotional intelligence is the ceiling for success. Researchers claim that one fifth of success could be attributed to IQ and the rest is attributed to emotional intelligence. IQ tends to be fixed whereas EQ is not fixed and can be developed. Emotional intelligence keeps growing with age and maturity and therefore can be enhanced. Learning a new language is emotionally driven and emotional intelligence skills improve learning potential of foreign languages. Motivation also plays a large part in learning a foreign language. Emotional intelligence is also a probable influence on the development of reading skills in language learning. Since emotional intelligence is a key component in learning educational systems, stakeholders and others should include the element of emotion and emotional intelligence in lesson plans so as to make learners conscious of their emotions and the role played by emotions in success in general and in language learning in particular. There are notable dimensions of emotional intelligence that are held by self regulated learners. The results of a recent study revealed that self regulated learners maintained all dimensions of emotional intelligence in which self actualization, problem solving, happiness, optimism and empathy were dominant. But self actualization was the most significant dimension held by self regulated learners because they were very enthusiastic, they liked to do work with responsibility and felt self satisfaction after doing a quality job. The results also showed that there was significant difference between boys and girls in respect to self acting organization revealing that girls were more self actualized than boys as girls were more enthusiastic and did work with more responsibility as well as they felt satisfaction after doing quality work. Self regulated learners strive for success and success depends on emotional intelligence. In order to develop emotional intelligence of self regulated students, experiences should be given to the students in which the they can talk with assertiveness, maintain good interpersonal relations with their peers and others and feel empathy as well as stress tolerance. Opportunities should be provided so that students could work cooperatively and mentor each other as they develop competence and emotional intelligence. Practice should be given through different strategies and new knowledge shipping links with previously acquired knowledge. The results of the study indicated that there is a need to develop self regulated learners who can take responsibility for their learning and also develop higher emotional intelligence especially in boys. Joy, optimism and success in school life and in the future workplace are the positive outcomes of emotional intelligence. Self regulated students that have above average emotional intelligence will be able to perform with high quality as the jobs of today and the future require workers who can understand their own emotions as well as others and work accordingly to solve problems, think creatively and work in a successful team environment. So how does what I've just discussed apply to you? Here are the action steps you can take regarding this topic, raising a socially and emotionally intelligent child, involves seeing your child's actions through the lens of their development and then pausing to intentionally respond to his or her needs versus responding reactively. To help build your child's social and emotional awareness, you need to understand one how and when children begin to think about mental states such as thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires and 2 how to explicitly talk to children about their behavior when they are young. Since this is when the seeds of social and emotional awareness are developing, your child is constantly learning from others. Children as young as 18 months recognize that other people have desires that are different from their own. The ability to view the situation from different perspectives forms the core of emotional intelligence because it helps us make sense of other people's thoughts, feelings, and actions. Language is what keeps us connected and plays an essential role in shaping social and emotional intelligence. Your child is paying close attention to the words you choose, how you interact with others, and how your words align with what you do. After your child has learned words and is speaking fluently, you can develop their emotional vocabulary by talking with your child about their feelings. Talking to your children about emotions is one of the main predictors of emotional competence, or how children learn to express and control their emotions and recognize emotions in others. You can do this simply by labeling emotions you encounter throughout the day, whether that's in a book or a movie, or observing another child on the playground, at school, or in the park. It's also important to discuss how you identify the emotions, usually by facial or physical gestures. You can choose stories or books that build emotional vocabulary. Another great way to build your child's emotional language is is through play, because play is how children learn. Research indicates that children who engage in more pretend play tend to be more advanced in language, memory, and reasoning, and they also tend to have a more sophisticated understanding of other people's thoughts and beliefs. To help build your child's emotional vocabulary, intentionally labeling emotions you are modeling and then ask about your child's emotions. Once a new emotion has been introduced, you can expand on it by sharing the belief or the desire that sparks the feelings. You can describe the physical sensation from the feelings, or you can rephrase your child's response and explain how their response made you feel. For children in grade school, learning through homework is not so much focused on memorization these days, but more on helping children understand why they are learning and what they are learning. Some important points for you to consider in this process include letting your child understand the goal of learning, in other words, why he or she is learning in the first place. Letting your child analyze the task guiding your child to seek help from different resources Letting your child complete the work on his or her timetable with close monitoring by you to ensure that the work is completed and implemented. Providing guidance to use different strategies to accomplish a task and teaching your child that persistence pays off. Developing emotional intelligence in your child takes patience, intention, practice, and attention. Once the foundation is set, it will continue to build as your child matures. It's certainly worth it given the positive outcomes in life for people who are emotionally intelligent. Here are this episode's takeaways. Emotional intelligence has been correlated with life satisfaction for students. Life satisfaction equates to well being in adolescence. Emotional intelligence that's mature and formed can be caused by a large factor of social support from family, peers and school. Emotional intelligence can be taught and understood at the age of adolescence and earlier. Emotional intelligence raises the level of life satisfaction. People with above average emotional intelligence tend to be high academic achievers with good social relationships and high self efficacy. Emotional intelligence at an early age is essential for children to grow up and become individuals who can realize their goals and dreams. Emotional intelligence is important and fundamental to the success of preschool environments that produce successful children. Children who can follow instructions, pay attention and listen are able to solve problems and be patient. Demonstrate above average emotional intelligence Student academic achievement includes considering students personal beliefs about their own capacities without specifically focusing on general intelligence abilities. This means that motivational, emotional and social factors are key elements in understanding students behavior toward academic achievement. Emotional intelligence is the concept that should be fostered in schools within the context of social emotional skills. Developing emotional intelligence skills allows students to recognize and express their emotions in a cooperative way, develop a sense of empathy, and establish positive relationships with others. If you don't want to miss out on any of the content that I have provided and what I will provide next, then be sure to subscribe to my podcast. Be sure to share this episode with anyone that you think will find it valuable. Be sure to tell your friends, family and community about my podcast. Thanks for listening today. I hope you'll come back for more K12 educational discussions with even more exciting topics to untangle. Be sure to stay tuned. On the next episode, I'll be discussing academic achievement in public schools versus charter schools. Until next time, aim to learn something new every day. Love my show. Consider being a regular subscriber.

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