When the social and emotional development process progresses well, a child acquires 5 basic social and relational skills:
Self-awareness:
The individual knows what interests him and his strengths. Understands what you feel and recognizes your emotions. For this reason, he has self-confidence and a positive and hopeful approach towards the future.
Social Awareness:
Recognizes and appreciates others' perspectives, empathy, and similarities and differences with the group. They know, find, and can use support resources in the family, school, peer groups, and other environments.
Relationship skills:
The individual can initiate and maintain cooperative, mutually satisfying and healthy relationships. Can take a constructive role in interpersonal conflicts. Can avoid conflicts, be part of the solution, and seek help when needed.
Self-management:
Can control impulses, persevere in coping with obstacles, and manage life stress. He can focus on his life's goals and follow the necessary paths. Can find appropriate ways to express emotions in different situations.
Responsibility and choice-making:
Knows the possible consequences of any action according to general ethical values, safety-threatening factors, appropriate social expectations. He can make choices accordingly and take responsibility for his choices.
The first steps of social emotional development are gaze, attachment, attention and gestures.
View:
According to the baby's behavior, even at the age of 4-5 months, when the adult smiles, the baby smiles, when the adult stops smiling, the baby stops smiling and He frowns. These kinds of behaviors and interactions are the first baby steps of social emotional development and relationship skills.
Attachment:
In the first year of life, very strong and deep emotional bonds form between babies and the adults who care for them. John Bowlby, the creator of attachment theory, said that babies develop interest and attachment to one or more important adults between the ages of 6 and 30 months. He observed that he established strong bonds based on ethnicity. This intense emotional relationship is at the core of emotional learning. Daily rituals of care, love and attention find their place in the child's inner world as core experiences of what to expect from other people. Thus, the foundations of relationship skills continue to be laid.
Joint Attention:
This means that the baby participates when another person points something to the baby or expresses with gestures and facial expressions something that attracts the baby's attention. Around the age of about one, babies gradually learn to switch gaze between the adult and the object, thus establishing joint attention. When something is incomprehensible to the baby, he shifts his gaze to the adult. This behavior, which may be done to get more information or to relax, is also a joint attention behavior. Joint interest and attention are also considered the foundation of relationship skills.
Deliberate gestures and pointing
Babies can also begin to point to objects and events around the first year of life and begin to make some intentional movements. May nod yes or no or wave at the adult. These intentional behaviors form the basis of social emotional development and communication skills.
Social emotional development: preschoolers socially learning about others' perspectives
The next key stage in the social emotional development journey is the emergence of understanding of others' perspectives.
Ahmet put his toy car under his bed before going out with his mother that day. His mother took the toy and put it in the closet without him seeing it, thus changing its location. After going out and about, Ahmet wanted to get his toy car. We can show the video of this story to 3-year-old and 5-year-old children and ask: "Where do you think Ahmet will look for his toy?" How do you think the answer of a 3-year-old child and a 5-year-old child will differ? Of course, they will give different answers when it comes to seeing the difference between their own perspective and Ahmet's perspective.
Researchers who created a story similar to the one we told They found that children go through a developmental stage related to understanding others' perspectives. They said that three-year-old boy Ahmet would look for the toy in the closet. Because from their perspective, the toy was in the last cabinet. They cannot evaluate the incident from Ahmet's perspective. But the 5-year-old will most likely give you the correct answer. Because, unlike her, she is aware that Ahmet does not see the toy's location changing, and she can evaluate the situation from his perspective.
The example above exemplifies the skill of “understanding others' point of view”, which is another stage of children's social emotional development. Of course, as children develop, they reach higher levels of social emotional learning.
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