Akanksha Pandey

Children with EI are better equipped to manage life’s inevitable vicissitudes. Here are some family activities and games to develop your child’s emotional intelligence and conflict resolution skills: Akanksha Pandey

The tween years, spanning from eight to 12 years old, are a time of exploration, growth, and discovery. As tweens navigate this journey, they’re not only learning about math, science, and history. They’re also learning about themselves, their strengths, weaknesses, and emotions.

During this development phase, it’s important for parents to focus on nurturing children’s emotional intelligence, or EI i.e, capability to understand, use, and manage emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict. Children with EI are better equipped to manage the inevitable vicissitudes of life. Here are some family activities and games designed to develop your child’s emotional intelligence and conflict resolution skills.

• Emotion charades. Get together with friends and/or family and take turns to act out different emotions without speaking. Participants need to guess the emotions. This game enables children to recognize and express emotions in a playful way.
• The feelings wheel. Print out a feelings wheel (www.feelingswheel.com) or draw one yourself on chart paper, with different emotions written on it. Affix a strip of card in the middle with a split pin. Spin the wheel and talk about the emotion the split pin stops on. Share what made you feel that way and how you coped with the negative/positive emotion. This activity helps children become aware of their emotions and how to manage them effectively. You could also ask children to decorate the feelings wheel with colours and drawings to make it their own personal masterpiece!
• Conflict resolution role-play. Divide into pairs and act out different conflict scenarios, taking turns to resolve a disagreement. Practice active listening, express emotions calmly, and discuss solutions which work for everyone. This game helps develop conflict resolution skills. Remember, the goal is not to win or lose, but to find a solution that makes everyone happy.
• Kindness challenge. Challenge children to perform random acts of kindness every day. It could be as simple as complimenting a classmate or helping a child to carry her books to school.
• Feelings collage. Ask children to create a photos collage that represents their emotions. They could use old magazines, newspapers, etc to cut out pictures, words, or phrases that reflect how they feel or want to feel. Encourage them to get creative and let their emotions shine!

Practicing and training children to acknowledge and manage positive as well as negative emotions is critical for them to build positive inter-personal relationships and succeed in school, college and workplaces.

(Akanksha Pandey is a Bengaluru-based clinical psychologist, Head of the School Mental Health Program & co-founder of Compathy Health)