Socio-emotional skills help children build a connection with others. They help build healthy relationships with others. It makes children develop trust and empathy towards others. This development happens from a very young age. It is essential as it helps children connect with other people, build friendships, and gain confidence. These skills develop from birth, when the infant reacts by smiling, crying, making eye contact and facial expressions. Some of the activities to inculcate socio emotional skills in children are discussed below.

1. Role-play or Make-believe play

Role-play or make-believe play is one of the best activities for children to build socio-emotional skills. Children also love to play the role of their parents, siblings or anyone they observe daily, we should not forget that children are the very good observers and they pick up things very fast. While role-playing they try to imitate the exact version of their elders, during this process children develop social and emotional skills.

2. Peer play

While playing with friends children express themselves and you can also see that children are developing emotional and social skills like empathy, helping each other, negotiating and coming to a common decision all of these skills are develop while peer play. So let your children play with friends, siblings and if they don’t have any around them, take them to the park they will make friends quickly.

3. Stories

Often story time is the best part of the day for children. While reciting one, you should select stories which have some social and emotions part in it and explain them. You can also ask them question like ‘why do you think the king helped others’ or ‘why do you think the girl cried’ this will help to think of the socio-emotional skills and can associate with it better.

4. Flash cards

Show your child some flash cards with a child helping someone, happy faces, sad faces, excited pictures, etc. While showing them these cards ask them what the child is doing now. Child will understand the importance of good deeds and emotions that they come across in their daily lives. Relate these cards to the live examples that your child have come across for example ‘you have also seen your elder sister helping me daily in household chores.

Muskan Harjai
(Early Childhood Educator)

M.A. Education (Early Childhood Education and Care)