Encourage Child Emotional Development by Taking the Time to Listen

To encourage child emotional development we first need to allow our kids enough time to feel and acknowledge their emotions. And secondly we need to give them plenty of opportunities to express their feelings.

Remember when we were kids summer felt like for ever, waiting for our birthdays to come around seemed like an eternity.

Well our kids are the same. In general kids have a slower time frame then we do. Not only do they perceive time as being slower, it also takes them longer to process and understand their thoughts. Because of this it takes them longer to think about and come up with solutions.

To foster our child's emotional development we need to make sure our kids get this time.

If we don’t give our kids’ adequate time and guidance to process their feelings they could easily become confused and wrongly label their feelings. We as parents need to hold back on our urge to fix our child’s problems and learn to cope with the seemingly long time that it can take our child to process.

In reality it probably only takes a few minutes but with our ever increasing busy lifestyles this silence can seem far too long, especially when we know how to fix the problem in half the time and be well on our way to the next job on our to do lists.

But to help foster our child’s emotional developments successfully we need to respect all of our kids’ emotions. And then empower them to trust their own feelings by letting them come up with their own solutions. This means we need to bite our tongues when we want to jump in with the solution.

Just think of the how simple yet powerful this action of giving our kids our time really is. Not only are we encouraging our child’s emotional development BUT we are showing them just how important they are.

Our actions always speak louder then our words, when we are too busy for our kids then we are showing them that they are not worthy of our time. Implying that our kids are not worthy of our time can only hinder our aim to improve our child's emotional development.

But when we give freely of our time to them we are showing them that we value their emotions, we value their thoughts and we value them as worthy human beings.

To nurture our child’s emotional development successfully we also need to be aware of what is going on for our children.

One of the points in John Gottman’s book The Heart of Parenting that has been invaluable to me is to understand that our kids are very much aware of their smaller status in this world. Because of this they will often try to improve on this status by looking for ways to have some sense of control or power over their own lives.

This could mean taking longer to do something, needing to have things in a certain way, or even continuing an activity for a few seconds after we have asked them to stop.

So how does this help my child’s emotional development?

Taking the time to allow my kids to express themselves and exert some sort of control over their lives has helped me to be a better parent, in all respects. Not just in helping my child's emotional development. For example, I originally would label my kids taking the extra time to do as I asked as being rebellious or simply not listening. For me these were negative labels, that did not support my child’s emotional development.

I now label it as an attempt at independence (a positive label)which of course also helps in my aim to encourage my child's emotional development.

For me this simple act of changing the meaning of the labels I have put on my kids emotions and especially their behaviours has made an amazing different to my tolerance levels. Not to mention helping me to achieve my goal of nurturing my child’s emotional development.

I am a far more relaxed and accepting parent. I have also been able to let go of more of my authoritarian parenting traits that tend to pop up when I am over tired. Now instead of getting frustrated, upset or angry with my kids I take the time to decide what is important. I ask myself the following question;

Does it really matter if he bounces the ball one more time or takes an extra minute to finish the drawing he was doing before doing what I asked?

My answer in short is nearly always NO.

After all I got what I wanted; he has for example, stopped bouncing the ball. So why not show that I understand his need for some level of control over his actions by ignoring the fact that he bounced the ball a few extra times after I asked him to stop.

Instead thank him for doing as I asked, (and also be proud of myself for taking another step in encouraging my child’s emotional development).

This is just another very simple way that we can validate our kids’ emotions and needs, while also increasing her sense of self confidence. Simply taking the time to listen to our child and to give her the time to think will help our child's emotional development to flourish.