What are social emotional skills? Why are they important

There was an incident in my life which I can never forget. My son was around 2 years old, would speak some broken words. He was extremely hyperactive and hence falling down, getting hurt was a common factor. His ability to express was not as powerful as his age group children

He was playing around at home around 4'O clock in the evening when I heard a loud sound coming from the room. He started to cry loudly. I took him on my lap and tried to calm him down. There was no visible injury or hurt that I could see. Tried looking at his legs, back, face, forehead there were no marks or injuries. But he wouldn't stop crying.

More than an hour, his crying had not reduced. Now I began to worry and panic, nothing and absolutely nothing would calm him down. I took him down and wanted him to play around. He was not ready to get down from my arms. This continued for a while then I started to develop shoulder pain. His crying had reduced but the poor boy was still processing some pain.

I could not hold him any longer, so I sat down and tried to put him on the floor. The moment his feet touched the floor he began screaming and crying again. At first I did not notice it, but then when I tried to repeat the same action his crying intensified and went back to howling.

Suddenly it struck to me that all this while, his foot was the one that was injured and had internal pain. He was not able to express or communicate the same to me! Suddenly I was filled with guilt and helplessness. My disability to understand the pain of my child was a lot to handle for me.

From that day onwards I started to take keen interest in developing his communication skills. Then it was a long journey for the next two years.

My point is, while we as parents and teachers worry about grades, marks, rank, academics etc, we tend to lose focus on another most important skill that is social emotional skills or social emotional learning.

When we look at ourselves today, where are we using sign teta, cos teta or tan teta. Do we use Pythagoras theorem ? molecules and periodic table? What is the skill that comes handy to us adults. Our ability to communicate with different kind of people every day, collaboration, the way we treat others and the way we would like to be treated, practicing assertiveness. Our academic degree is very important because it places us at a certain role, but to climb the ladder of success and excellence it is our SES that makes an affable person.

Since our childhood education did not involve us to learn these life skills, it is by default our duty to implement SES in our children. This has to begin at a very tender age and hence preferred to implement during kindergarten stage.

Dalai Lama said, "When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget educating their hearts" and I firmly believe that. In the upcoming blogs we will discuss in details different topics like kindness, communication, curiosity, positive habit, friendship, gratitude and many more!