Review Developmental and Emotional Progress -Child

Summary of Recommendation and Evidence

Population	Recommendation	Grade (What's This?)
Screening of both Genders	This screening is recommended for children.	B

Overview

Child development refers to how a child becomes able to do more complex things as they get older. Development is different than growth. Growth only refers to the child getting bigger in size.

When we talk about normal development, we are talking about developing skills like:

Gross motor skills: using large groups of muscles to sit, stand, walk, run, etc., keeping balance and changing positions
Fine motor skills: using hands to be able to eat, draw, dress, play, write, and do many other things
Language skills: speaking, using body language and gestures, communicating, and understanding what others say
Cognitive skills: thinking skills including learning, understanding, problem-solving, reasoning, and remembering
Social skills: interacting with others, having relationships with family, friends, and teachers, cooperating and responding to the feelings of others.

Children’s emotional development

Children’s responses to the different feelings they experience every day have a major impact on their choices, their behaviour, and on how well they cope and enjoy life.

Emotional development involves learning what feelings and emotions are, understanding how and why they happen, recognising one’s own feelings and those of others, and developing effective ways of managing them. As children grow and are exposed to different situations their emotional lives also become more complex. Developing skills for managing a range of emotions is therefore very important for their emotional wellbeing.

Factors influence children’s emotional development

Parents and carers have an important role to play in supporting children’s emotional development. They do this through responding effectively to children’s emotions, through providing examples of how they manage feelings, and through talking with children about feelings and how to manage them. In similar ways, school staff can provide important support for children’s emotional development.

Many things influence the ways that children express emotions, both through words and behaviour. These influences include:

Values and beliefs about appropriate and inappropriate ways of expressing emotions that children learn from parents, carers and school staff
How effectively children’s emotional needs are usually met
Children’s temperaments
Emotional behaviours that children have learned through observation or experience
The extent to which families and children are under various kinds of stress

Progress in Developing emotional skills

The table below shows the main pathways in emotional skill development for children in the preschool to primary age range.

Skills needed	Children withbeginning skills	Children with developing skills	Children with more developed skills
Emotional self-awareness	tend to have one emotion at a time act out how they feel flip between one emotion to another quickly	start to understand that they can have more than one emotion in reaction to the same event as long as they are similar (eg happy and excited)	understand that they can have opposite feelings to the same situation (eg feel both happy and sad that the school year is ending)
Recognising other people’s emotions	rely on physical clues to identify emotions (eg tears = sadness)	take into account clues from the situation to help explain the emotion (eg understand that a child might be sad because his/her toy has been broken.)	have a more complex understanding of the interaction between emotions, situations and people (eg the child is sad because the thing that was broken was a gift from a loved grandparent who died recently)
Emotion regulation – ie the ability to manage emotions effectively	are able to use simply ways to manage emotions with support from adults (eg choose a different activity to distract them from feeling frustrated)	are increasingly able to choose appropriate behavioural responses (eg asks and waits for assistance with difficult task)	are increasingly able to manage emotions by rethinking own goals and motives (eg decide that there is no point being angry about something he or she can’t change)

Key points for supporting children’s emotional development

By acknowledging children’s emotional responses and providing guidance, parents, carers and school staff can help children understand and accept feelings, and develop effective strategies for managing them.

Tune into children’s feelings and emotions

Some emotions are easily identified, while others are less obvious. Tuning into children’s emotions involves looking at their body language, listening to what they are saying and how they are saying it, and observing their behaviour. This allows you to respond more effectively to children’s needs and to offer more specific guidance to help children manage their emotions.

Help children recognise and understand emotions

Taking opportunities to talk with children and teach them about emotions helps children to become more aware of their own emotions as well as those of others. Encouraging children to feel comfortable with their emotions and providing them with practice in talking about their feelings helps children to further develop ways to manage their emotions.

Set limits on inappropriate expression of emotions

It is very important for children to understand that it is okay to have a range of emotions and feelings, but that there are limits to the ways these should be expressed. While acknowledging children’s emotions, it is therefore very important to set limits on aggressive, unsafe or inappropriate behaviours.

Be a role model

Children learn about emotions and how to express them appropriately by watching others – especially parents, carers and school staff. Showing children the ways you understand and manage emotions helps children learn from your example.