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Mental Skills
Children
Children
- Can read and interpret emotions of others; can tell when someone is angry or upset.
- Can’t understand abstract emotions like pity, greed, gratitude.
- Use different ways to control their own emotions: close their eyes and ears; remove themselves from the situation; sometimes can resist temptation to respond to whatever is disturbing them.
- May develop first true relationship because friends become very important.
- How they play: At age 3, they typically play near a friend, find it difficult to take turns and to share things; at age 4, they may begin cooperative play, still difficult to share but begin to understand turn-taking, begin to offer things to others; at age 5, enjoy playing with other children, often cooperate well, have special friends.
- Use less physical aggression than when younger.
- Use more frequent verbal aggression like insults, threats, teasing to hurt other children; bullying appears: they understand the power of rejection.
- Understand social rules and can act in accordance to them.
- Are eager to carry out some responsibilities; offer to help.
- Understand that praise or blame happens because of what they do.
- Begin to understand the difference of doing things “on purpose” and “by accident;” focus more on the damage than on the intentions of the perpetrator.
- By age 4, begin to have a sense of their ethnic identity and of the ways their social group is perceived in the society.
- Increased capacity to use imagination; can imagine terrible things can happen to them and can lead to fear; nightmares can happen.
Tips for Parents
- Teach your children to use words when they are angry, sad. [“You are sad because grandpa is gone.”]
- Ask your children to show angry, mad, sad, happy and surprised feelings using their faces and tell you what makes people feel that way.
- Ask your children to draw a picture of their mad feelings and talk about them.
- Give your children opportunities to accomplish something like organizing toys and books, helping with making up the grocery list; delivering short messages to others, giving their own ending to a story in a book.
- Help your children cope with fantasy fear by pointing out the difference between reality and fantasy.
- Keep your children away from situations that create real fear such as seeing violence in the home or neighborhood, watching violence on TV and receiving physical punishment.
- When there is a fight:
[a] Stop the fighting, go first to the child that is injured to calm him or her.
[b] Use time outs to calm down the child who is the aggressor [No more than one minute for each year of the child’s age].
[c] When both children are calm, talk to them and ask: What happened? What is each one feeling? Ask them to think of a solution; tell that it’s OK to be angry or mad but not to hurt.
[d] Praise both children for thinking of a solution. Remember to show your love and care even though you disapprove of their behavior.
Date created: June 2017