With different modes and ways of teaching comes a deeper understanding of how these can both benefit and maybe even hinder some children. With online learning comes fantastic opportunities for a lot of children and the chance to work on their own pace more easily, but does it satisfy your children’s social necessities? Continue reading to see how important a healthy balance of social and emotional learning can help your child.

What Is Social-Emotional Learning?

For some children, growing into a social butterfly comes easily. For some children, though, it’s hard for them to interact with others their own age and with grow-ups. Children can sometimes struggle with learning social cues and how to start conversations. Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) helps with this, as it helps build a child’s self-control, self-awareness, and interpersonal skills. These skills learned can range from self-discipline, impulse control, problem solving and more. The lessons range in their scope, depending on the age of your child and to keep them engaged and aware of their emotions and actions. These skills and development are critical for your child to grow and learn in school, as well as applying these SEL principles to their everyday lives and career. 

Why SEL is Important

You may be thinking: but my child is in a classroom and interacting with teachers and fellow students, that can help them build the necessary social skills they need, right? And while in-person learning does help your child learn some basics of social and emotional wellness, they won’t learn everything. And what they may learn may not be a good lesson in how to behave, either. Children may be frustrated, stressed, hungry and bored in the classroom, and could act out more often, showing a not so positive attitude to your children. With more focused lesson plans and activities on social-emotional learning, they can more specifically help build the positive and necessary social and emotional skills your children need to succeed. On top of the fact that some schools may be still be online only, this can present problems with your children’s emotional learning, depending on how old they are. If they’ve started school with only online learning, and have continued with this trend, they may be lacking some basic social skills simply from not learning in person. Making sure your child spends time with children their own age is vital to learn these emotional skills and be more in tune with their self-control.    

SEL No Matter Where You Are!

Your public schools may or may not offer more social-emotional learning-based lessons. Even if they don’t, it’s always good just to be in the know of what seems to work well in teaching your children. You can seek a private school that teaches more SEL based learning, or simply teach some SEL lessons more often at home to make sure your children grow up socially and emotionally strong.  

Katie Kyzivat