What is SEL and How Does It Make Parenting Easier?

podcast school social emotional skills Oct 14, 2022
 

 

Transcript:

Note: The transcript below may not be exactly the same as the podcast because it has not been edited for accuracy

 

HOST: Tara Gratto

Introduction

Hello, and welcome. I'm Tara, the founder of Raising Resilient Children, where I support parents and educators with tools and skills for feelings, kindness, and everyday mental well being also known as social emotional skills and empathy. As a longtime educator, former preschool owner and parent, I know that there is no cookie cutter approach to raising children and information can be overwhelming. Let's tackle some of this by having some important conversations and digging into some different topics.

 

Today, I'm gonna talk about the core of what you need to know to support you and becoming the parent you want to be. When I read a preschool, there was this distinctive look that parents got when things were just going downhill fast. And you could just tell they felt like complete failures. You know, those days when your patience is done, but your children are not done testing it. We've all been there. Often that face was accompanied by like a half joke about 'why don't kids come with a manual', and 'I can never do what you're doing because I'm not a teacher.'

Parent as Guide and Teacher

All right, it's time to do some myth busting. Teachers are not just the people you find in a classroom. There's a teacher inside each and every one of us. When you take on the role of parent, you become a guide, and a teacher. Sure, you might not be teaching academics, but you are teaching the really important stuff, the life stuff. Don't allow doubt to creep in just because you don't think you can stand in front of a group of students. You stand in front of your children every single day. And you're teaching them even when you don't speak a word.

Why am I making a point about this?

It's because I want to dispel a second myth, that there are some things that teachers and educators just do better. What may feel like someone else is doing a better job at is just a difference in knowledge and understanding. They have that manual that your kids didn't come with in the form of education and experience. But here's the thing, that manual is limited for them, because they are not you and nobody knows your child's needs the way you do.

What if you could take some snippets of that education manual and apply it to your parenting? Even better,  what if you could write a guide for your own family? Here's what I learned in my preschool. When you help parents learn some things about child development, about emotions, about kindness, about social emotional development. It makes everyone's life easier. It makes parents lives easier. It makes children's lives easier, and it makes the communities that you belong to easier. Here's the other thing I learned. You don't need the whole education to support parents. You just need excerpts put into everyday lingo, so they can go off and parent with some of the tools and skills to support their parenting goals.

New Pathways in Parenting

The world is changing, old ways of parenting are frowned upon. And this is not a bad thing. However, this has left an entire generation of parents building a new path. Forging new paths isn't easy and it's particularly difficult when it isn't your area of expertise. We tend to rely on our experience to guide us with things. It helps us to be confident.

How does one show up with confidence in parenting, when we're not using our experience to guide us?

It's tricky. There's no doubt about it. It's also layered with guilt and second guessing. Today, I'm going to share one of those lessons with you that thing that some teachers know and parents don't, but it's really helpful when you do. It's called SEL or social emotional learning. It's also called social emotional intelligence, emotional quotient or EQ, right, we have IQ and EQ. And for a while it was also called soft skills. And then people started to get upset about it because that meant soft skills are less meaningful or important compared to hard or academic skills. It's the thing that comes by many names, but let's break it down into something easy to understand.

What exactly is SEL or Social Emotional Learning/Development?

These are the skills and tools that we need for our feelings. Feelings are that unavoidable reality, though we have tried really hard to suppress them for as long as most people can remember. Problem is that hasn't been working out so well. Perhaps that is because they are literally a part of every single thing that we do. I say this to my children all the time. Tell me one thing that you do that doesn't have feelings involved. Just one. It's kind of crazy to think that there's this piece of us that we don't always support super well but deeply impacts the things that we do. Having said that, we tend to focus a lot of attention on our children's feelings or at least the unwanted behaviors that can accompany their big feelings.

Here lies more aha moments when I helped the parents in my preschool understand more about those feelings and what they were saying. Ways to build tools for them, while also developing an understanding with children that we all have feelings. Everyone's life got easier. In other words, when I shared the basics of SEL, it made parenting easier. So let's take this one step further.

How can you get started writing your personal guide for your children so that you can become the parent you want to be?

There's three basic steps for building tools for feelings.

Step One: we've got to be able to identify our feelings labeled with feelings. I have a whole podcast episode on how you can do that using books and narration.

Step Two: use tools when you have feelings, emotional regulation. What do we do? Well, we all have feelings. Tools don't always have to be this big extravagant thing, it could just simply being able to identify your feelings.

Step three: And this one's more layered. Understand that others have feelings too, right building and fostering empathy and awareness. These are the basis for social emotional skills. This is the basis for supporting you with tools and skills for parenting in a way that will help you make every day easier. Want to dig in further. When you start to build tools and skills for supporting feelings, you're going to discover that it's easier to navigate all kinds of challenges. Remember, most of us grew up in a world where emotional suppression was the ideal. And that's left us without experience for how to parent in a way that supports feelings without having those feelings take over the entire day. I'm going to be the first to tell you supporting feelings is really important, but it can't be at the expense of functioning and getting out the door on time.

*This Bootcamp ran in Fall 2022 - for more information on how to work with me please check out the BRTK Bundle*

If you're ready to dig into this topic a little bit further, I invite you to my free parenting toolkit boot camp kicking off on October 11. This is something I'm gonna be sharing in my upcoming free seven day parenting toolkit boot camp. This boot camp is packed with valuable tools to support you with becoming the parent you want to be. You're going to learn three key tools for understanding behavior, how feelings work and what discipline with kindness looks like. In the free seven day parenting toolkit boot camp you will learn what social emotional skills are and why you need to know them as a parent. How Dinah rain and the stress cycle is impacting your parenting. And I will be introducing you to a piece of my signature framework parent clues for problem solving so that you can start to understand what your child's behavior meets. Save your spot in the boot camp today at Tara gratto.ca forward slash join to start your path on becoming the parent you want to be



For more information about the BRTK bundle click HERE

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