Techniques for teaching 6-year-olds to manage their emotions

This time we focus on how to teach 6-year-olds to manage their emotions. Techniques for teaching 6-year-olds to manage their emotions.

One of the essential processes for a human being (and that never ends throughout life) is to be able to properly handle their emotions. This largely determines their self-esteem, their way of relating to others, solving problems, and making decisions among others. Hence, the importance of offering emotional education to our children. This time we focus on how to teach 6-year-olds to manage their emotions. Techniques for teaching 6-year-olds to manage their emotions.

Many are the factors that determine the way in which each of us manage our emotions: our temperament, our learning, our experiences and the situations that we have to live. Therefore, helping our child in the process of knowing himself, expressing and managing his emotions, developing social skills such as putting himself in someone else's shoes and being able to solve problems and react to various situations constitutes one of our main challenges. As parents.

  • The emotional intelligence and learning of 6-year-olds
  • Strategies to help your 6-year-old manage his emotions
  • Work on emotional education, self-esteem and childhood fears

The emotional intelligence and learning of 6-year-olds

Now that our son has reached the age of six, we have more tools to continue working with him on this important aspect. Six-year-olds typically:

They have better developed their ability to understand their own emotions and those of others.

Language has become an essential element to identify, understand and express emotions.

Has greater ability to express themselves through drawings.

Family is still very important to him and now friends are starting to be too.

  • They begin to be able to put themselves in the place of the other.
  • Increases your capacity for self-regulation.
  • They go from imitation games to games that contain norms and rules (sports, board games, etc.) that sometimes it is difficult for them to follow when they feel they are going to lose. In addition, a sense of competitiveness begins to develop and losing in a game can generate a lot of frustration.
  • Many 6-year-olds still have fears of the dark, of being alone, of insecurity, etc.
  • They begin to make comparisons and wish for things that other children have.

Strategies to help your 6-year-old manage his emotions

Taking into account the skills and learning that 6-year-olds have acquired at this age, these are some of the strategies that we can follow to teach them to manage their emotions.

Book of emotions

You can help your child to create a book together with drawings, cutouts and descriptions of each of the emotions: expressions, sensations, situations, memories, colors, landscapes, etc.

The book can be gradually enriched and include more and more emotions according to their experiences. The goal is to increase your knowledge of each emotion so that it will eventually be easier for you to identify and react to them.

Labyrinth of emotions

With the game of the labyrinth of emotions we will help our child to continue knowing and identifying emotions: when we experience them, what they cause us, how to react, etc.

We can use a board from any other game (or do it ourselves with cardboard or cardboard) and stick small cards with expression of different emotions in some boxes.

Must Read: What are Math for Answers to the big question

We roll a pair of normal dice and move across the board; when a player lands on one of the boxes with an emotion, they must guess what it is about and make a list of situations where they have experienced it and how they have reacted. If the player guesses the emotion correctly and sets a suitable example, they can continue to advance to the goal.

Faces and gestures of emotions

Several cards are prepared and different emotions are written on them. Then the child takes a card and must represent the emotion with mimicry. The rest of the players must guess it; whoever gets it right is the next to participate. We can increase the difficulty by putting emotions or feelings less known to children.

With this easy activity, children learn emotional vocabulary, to put words to things they have felt, to notice how their feelings are manifested throughout the body, to observe others, to pay attention to non-verbal emotional communication and gestures and bodily expressions of emotions.

Turtle strategy

We can tell the 6-year-old that when he is angry or angry and about to act impulsively (hitting, pushing, insulting, yelling or the like) he can remember a turtle and act like it. That is, take shelter in an imaginary shell, to calm down and stop to think before acting. This will make it easier for him to find solutions to his problems without harming others or himself.

The objective is that, over time, they will be able to apply it when they need it and thus be able to better manage their emotions, at the same time that their impulsivity will decrease.

Stories and films for emotional education

Reading stories and watching movies together is a great way to help them reflect on the emotions of the characters, the various situations that generate them, and the different reactions that may exist. It is also invaluable in problem solving and social skills work.

Work on emotional education, self-esteem and childhood fears

The emotional education that we provide to 6-year-old children should also be focused on working on their self-esteem and the possible childhood fears that they may have developed. Let's see how it can be achieved

 Strengthen the self-esteem of 6-year-olds

It is essential to help our son on a day-to-day basis to discover his qualities, his abilities and all those that make him special; but also its areas of opportunity, that is, those aspects in which it must improve.

We continue to be a model for them in every way, so he must see that we appreciate our strengths and also those of others; that we are happy when good things happen to us, but also that we are happy when they happen to others.

Regarding competitiveness, we must be attentive to encourage you to give your best effort, but above all, to enjoy the activity in question, even if it does not always turn out as you would like.

If your child continues to have fears

We must remain vigilant in the event that our child has fears: to make him feel safe, have good communication with him, take care of what he watches on television or on the tablet, what he talks to his friends, etc. At this age, friends begin to tell stories or teach them things that can increase their fears. If they can't find a way to express them, their emotions will easily overflow.

At 6 years of age, there are many conditions to work with children more deeply on the subject of emotions, let's get the most out of it and enjoy the process.