Social-Emotional Learning & Development: Building Relationships Requires Learning More About Yourself
Welcome to Vanguard Gifted Academy’s educational blog. This is our fourth installment on Social-Emotional Learning & Development: Why SEL is Essential in Today’s Education. I’m Elizabeth Blaetz, Head of School at Vanguard Gifted Academy. In this blog we’ll cover building relationships and how they require learning more about yourself.
Complexity in Social Relationships Causes Increased Challenges for Gifted Learners
Building relationships, whether they are with friends, team members, classmates or social groups in the community can be difficult for people of all ages. Gifted children often face additional challenges in finding their niche in relationships. They feel out of place among age-level peers, even when they have similar interests. You can have two kindergarteners, one is gifted and one is not, and they’re playing dinosaurs together. Suddenly, you’ll realize the gifted kindergartener wants to talk all about the information he knows about every dinosaur. As he continues to talk on and on, because oftentimes gifted youngsters are verbally precocious, the other kindergartner is waning, his interest is not there, and he wanders away.
This little kindergartner who’s sharing all this excitement and knowledge about dinosaurs doesn’t quite understand what he’s doing wrong. So, this kindergartener likely will head off and find some older children that he can talk to. The older children are interested in the details, and they know details about dinosaurs, too. So now they’re talking about dinosaurs. But when the conversation ends, they don’t want to socialize with this little guy. They’re off to do the things that they do with peers their own age. This leaves the gifted child at a loss. Here again, he doesn’t have a niche that’s already been established for him. He doesn’t find that he fits into either group of friends, and oftentimes he ends up in tears.
Does this scenario sound familiar? Social relationships require risk-taking. In order to feel comfortable socially and be willing to take the risk, a gifted child has to develop social confidence. Social-emotional learning opens the door for gifted children by helping them develop social confidence. Social confidence comes from understanding your emotions and developing strategies to manage how you react in social situations. When children find they can manage their response to social situations successfully, they have the confidence to engage in and develop positive relationships.
How to Increase Social Confidence in Gifted Learners
So, the big question is, how do we guide our gifted children towards social confidence? The first step is helping them understand and identify their emotions in a given situation. Gifted children have strong emotions which can jump up very unexpectedly. After an emotion has occurred and your child has calmed down, help your child identify how they were feeling and what sparked that feeling. Be patient and listen, confirming it’s okay to feel that way. Talking about your own emotions might also help open the door for them to realize that everybody has emotions.
Many gifted children are sensitive to loud noises. They run away, hide and perhaps cry when people are cheering at an event, applauding at a concert or popping balloons at a birthday party. Once their emotions have been revealed, these children see everyone’s responses to their emotions. And now, other negative feelings occur. Usually they feel odd and different. So the next step in helping them is getting them involved in exploring strategies for managing their emotions. Again, it is helpful to model a strategy that works for you when you have a common emotion with your sensitive child. But be flexible - let your gifted child uncover and develop his own strategies. Help him realize that sometimes he will have to try several different strategies before finding the one that works.
Let’s return to our scenario of the sensitive child. A strategy might be to bring sound dampening earbuds to an event where there is a potential for loud noises, or the child might try quickly placing his hands over his ears. Perhaps, just knowing ahead of time that there’s going to be loud noise will enable him to manage the feeling internally. Test these strategies at home by creating a loud situation. Then, the next time you’re going to an event, ask your child which strategy he plans to use. See how it works. Celebrate when the strategy works, and even if it doesn’t, eagerly return to the potential strategies that you have left to try for next time.
Tips for Helping Gifted Children Communicate their Emotions
The final step is to guide your child to realize how to communicate his emotions when building relationships. Identifying the emotion and when it occurs is a good way to start. It will help if you can prompt your child to use simple language. For example, “I feel — insert the emotion — when we’re at — insert an event. So I — insert an action.” As your child is learning to use language to explain himself in social settings, he also has to be preparing to understand other people’s emotions. So, be sure to model communication of your emotions and responses in social settings, as well.
To wrap up with our example, perhaps your child is invited to a birthday party at a place that will be loud. Your child now has to decide which strategy to use and to explain it to his friend. There could be several options. Your child might say, “I feel afraid when there are a lot of noises, so I decided not to come to your party.” “I feel afraid when there are a lot of noises, so I am going to wear earbuds to your party.” Or, “I feel afraid when there are a lot of noises, but I will be okay because you told me ahead of time, and the party will be fun.”
Now, your child is able to start a relationship with this friend. The friend won’t feel rejected if your child has decided not to come to the party. Nor will the friend be curious, causing your child embarrassment by asking why he’s wearing earbuds. When your child can express and share his emotions, he can develop good relationships. No matter what strategy your child selects, he should feel good. He is managing his emotions. With each positive feeling about managing his emotions, his social confidence will grow. While this example is about a younger child, it could also be about a high school student who is invited to a concert. Learning to communicate about emotions also helps with conflict resolution, and the message only needs to be tweaked a little bit. For example, “I feel — insert the emotion — when you — insert the occurrence. So please — insert action.” So, “I feel scared when you make loud noises behind me. Please stop that.”
Learning to identify, manage and explain your emotions will lead to developing better relationships. For more information about this, there is a wonderful website called CASEL. It is a great resource for social-emotional learning at home and at school. They have a wheel that offers a lot of words that help children and adults identify emotions because that can be really difficult sometimes.
Here is a link to the short videos developed by CASEL [insert link to CASEL resources] and each will talk more about some of the topics shared in this blog installment.
Thank you for continuing in our series on social-emotional learning. We hope that Vanguard Gifted Academy’s educational blog will continue to be a valuable resource for you. If you have any comments or questions about what we discussed in this article, please visit our website, vanguardgiftedacademy.org or give us a call at (224) 213-0087.