Teaching Heart: For Parents: The Three Key Skills for Academic Success

    There are three very important social and emotional skills that kids need to develop to be successful in school, relationships, jobs, and life in general. The three skills are:

1. The ability to regulate emotion.
2. The ability to control impulses
3. The ability to focus and pay attention

    These three skills begin to get “wired” into a infant’s brain in the first year and half of life and continue to get “wired” throughout the early years of a child’s life. Regulating emotion, controlling impulses, and paying attention provide the foundation of all social and emotional intelligence.
    How can you develop these skills in your child ? The key is your presence when you are with your child. How does a parent stay present with a child? It can be very challenging. The quality and authenticity of your attachment and connection to your child is determined by your ability to feel, tolerate, manage, regulate, and express your emotions, sometimes out loud. Your ability to stay present is also effected by your ability to be feel your body sensations and speak out loud about them. Ultimately, the connection with your child is increased by being a mirror that accurately reflects what a child is feeling emotionally and sensing physically. Yes, you want to try to tune into what a child is feeling, but more importantly, you want to tune into what you are feeling emotionally and physically. Good chance that what you are feeling and sensing will be the same or close to what your child is feeling and sensing.
    What you model to your child is so much more powerful than what you say. Approximately 88% of your communication is expressed by your body language and your tone of voice. Your actual words (the literal meaning) make up only about 7% of what communicate to your child. When you speak out loud about your emotions, your physical sensations, and model self care, you are helping yourself to be present and you are building a connection with your child. You are also modeling to your child how to feel and regulate their intense emotions and physical sensations and how to take care of herself(himself) in midst of feeling emotions and sensations. It is a very simple process, but it is difficult to do.
    Children will set up to feel what they are feeling, and they often will keep amplifying their emotions until a parent or adult can genuinely connect with their emotions. You can’t be intellectual and be in your head if you want connect in a heartfelt way with your child’s emotions. It can help to tell the truth about how hard it is to stay present or how hard it is feel emotions or how you want to go to your head and figure it out. Telling the truth brings a realness and honesty to a room and opens up a space for connection to happen. The main thing that kids need to know in times of intense emotions and bodily sensations is that you will stay with her(him) and try your best to be present. You don’t have to be perfect because there might be times that it is too challenging to be fully present, just be genuine, honest, and vulnerable. If you want to learn how to be more fully present with your child, come to my presentations on Wednesday, October 5, and Tuesday, October 11. The first presentation will be focused on learning how to develop your child’s ability to regulate her(his) emotion, and the second presentation will be focused on learning how to develop your child’s ability to control impulses and pay attention.