Emotional Intelligence in Early Childhood

We all struggle to see from another’s perspective. Believe it or not, we start learning that ability in infancy! On this episode of Learn With Less, Ayelet explores the ways infants and toddlers learn to develop emotional intelligence and the ability to take another’s perspective. Below is the transcript of this week’s “Developmental Thought,” an excerpt from the full episode. For additional information, music, play ideas and the complete interactive family experience, please listen to the entire episode. Emotional language, which we’ve discussed in previous episodes such as “Labelling Emotions,” is extremely beneficial for young children not only in their development of social/emotional abilities, but also in their development of what’s called “social cognition.”  This is an area of early development that extends into the rest of our lives, and as you may guess, it has to do with social and emotional understanding as well as intelligence, or what we sometimes refer to as “emotional intelligence.” >>Don’t Miss Our Corresponding Blog Post!<< Taking Another’s Perspective A big part of this area of development focuses on a term known as “theory of mind,” which encompasses many skills and develops over time in the first five years of life. Essentially, theory of mind is the ability to take another’s perspective, and to understand that not everyone shares the same thoughts, ideas, and feelings as you do. There is a fairly clear progression of abilities that help a child to form their emerging understanding of theory of mind, and, again, it develops over time over the first 5 years. Imitation, sharing, testing behaviors, empathy, pretend play – these are all part of the development of theory of mind, and are all skills and abilities that take time and develop in “layers,” as my guest Megan Lingo so beautifully stated in last week’s episode, “Wordless Picture Books.” I think it’s so important to remember that infant and toddler learning doesn’t happen overnight – we see these big skills like walking and talking “happen” one day, and we tend to focus on the “day our child accomplished something” instead of the many, many steps and experiments and failures and learning moments that formed the ability to successfully accomplish that task. Attend and Imitate One of the skills that goes into the development of “theory of mind,” is the ability to pay attention to others and imitate them. A young infant is already imitative in certain ways, often watching a caregiver’s mouth and extremities for information that will be integrated and made meaning of over a series of interactions that inform her about the way the world works. This is why people often enjoy building in routines or rituals from early on, and why interaction, consistency, and repetition with variation are all so integral for a young child’s brain development – it informs the infant about communication, feelings, movement, patterns, etc. Emotional Language We spoke briefly about the ability to recognize and talk about emotions,