Infants, toddlers and preschoolers build the foundation for future development as they grow their capabilities in emotional regulation, relationships, cognition, motor skill development and language.

From as early as the first month, infants display emotions that indicate their awareness of their surroundings. At four months, they start recognising differences in facial expressions and will try to elicit happier expressions on their parents' faces. In their first two years, children laugh not only when tickled, but also in response to their own behaviors such as making a funny sound that gets an emotional reaction from others. From ages three to five, children start learning about resolving conflicts in ways which will help them to vent frustrations and maintain self-esteem. From ages seven to 12, children will develop self-concept, which is often determined by their ability to socialise and fit in well with their peers, and when they receive approval from parents and siblings.

Parents can play key roles at this stage to foster and support their children's emotional intelligence. Here are some steps that they can take:

• Create a caring, positive, and supportive environment where children can feel safe to express emotions, take risks, and seek help. Parents can participate in group activities that promote the importance of emotional intelligence. Community activities, such as those under the Singapore Kindness Movement, are some of the suitable ones.
• Be emotionally responsive. Be your children's role model when it comes to modeling empathy.
• Use an emotional vocabulary in context. Children learn to be more sensitive to their emotions when parents use feeling words in their conversations with them. Most of us tend to use few emotion words in our dealings with children, and when we do, we often use the same few ones repeatedly. It is important that we move beyond simple emotion words like "sad", "glad", and "scared". Shades of feeling are most helpful in illustrating how we feel, and can be used when describing our own feelings or our child's. Words like "irritated", "frustrated”, "anxious" and "disappointed" can be used daily to help provide an emotional education in the home or classroom.
• Use storytelling as a platform to infer and discuss characters' thoughts and emotions. For example, ask children questions like "How do you think the princess feels? Why? What happened in the story that made her feel like this? What can she do?" Stories can also be used for looking at problems with different perspectives.
• Help children to consider the emotional viewpoints of others by identifying the impact of actions and events, and how these relate to feelings. Ask questions like "How do you think Mabel feels about her mother going away?"
• Help children find ways to stay calmwhen encountering a situation of strong emotional response. Parents can use phrases like "take a deep breath" or they could provide "space for reflection" for the child.
• Coach children to solve social problems through a process of identifying the problem, acknowledging emotions, eliciting ways to solve the problem, and assessing the solution.
• Instead of protecting shy children from the world and catering to them, parents should encourage but not coerce their young children to participate in challenging situations like meeting new children or going to new places. Parents can encourage children in ways that do not overwhelm them, and teach them how to master something new through first-hand experiences.

Although children are born with different temperaments and have different ways of approaching situations, understanding emotional intelligence helps parents and teachers work with these qualities so children can cope better in the world.

Source:
Brazelton, T. Berry & Greenspan, S. (2001). The Irreducible Needs of Children: What Every Child Must Have to Grow, Learn, and Flourish. Perseus Publishing

Lieberman, Alicia. (1993). The Emotional Life of the Toddler. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc.