Giving Compass' Take: 

• As parents start transitioning to the new school year, here are some helpful tips to foster healthy emotional development for their kids. 

• How will these help foster emotional development? How can certain learning styles and educators help with this too?

• Read about how educators can help develop social-emotional skills. 

As we help our sons and daughters get ready to return to school, let’s reflect on our own readiness to promote our kids’ best emotional development during the school year. Consider these dimensions:

  • Responsibility: Resist the urge to become the homework police. Let them take responsibility for homework; let them approach it in their own way.
  • Brain development: Neuroscience has revealed the centrality of adequate sleep in consolidating the day’s learning — athletic and academic — especially the night before a performance or important test .
  • Resilience: It builds each time kids encounter and survive moments of ordinary childhood adversity.
  • Self-esteem I: It develops in part when they do for themselves all that they’re capable of doing, rather than depending on us to find their sweater, solve their math problems or tidy up after their snack.
  • Self-esteem II: Feeling authentically worthy develops through being loved and validated for qualities of good character and simply for being a valued part of our lives, not for earning certain grades or demonstrating athletic prowess.
  • Humility: Help them understand that they aren’t the center of the universe, that their individual wants and needs (like homework, practice or a friend’s slumber party) cannot always trump the needs of others (like family dinner time, a sibling’s piano recital or grandma’s birthday party).

Read the full article about promoting emotional development at SWHELPER