Aspire Magazine: Inspiration for a Woman's Soul.(TM) Dec/Jan 2019 Aspire Magazine Final | Page 71

So, what does that really mean? It means that
as a parent you are responsible not only for
making sure your child changes her clothes
but also for her learning how to change
her mind, see the positive, slow down, and
express her emotions constructively. It’s
really an enormous task, which is why I’m
a huge proponent of social and emotional
learning (SEL) in the classroom; research
shows that it is children’s emotional
intelligence that helps them succeed in life.
Kate, a mother of two girls, contacted me
about her eight-year-old daughter’s choices.
Marisa knows the family rule that at 7:00 am
the TV in her room must go off, which leaves
her thirty minutes before they need to leave
for school. Yesterday Marisa’s dad, Mike,
turned off the TV at 7:05 am, and Marisa
turned it back on again. Mike wasn’t having
this, and said, “This is not happening. You
must turn the TV off and get ready for school.
I’m not going to be late today.”
Marisa instantly went into tears and screaming.
She yelled at her dad, “You hate me” and “I
hate you.” The tears and screaming persisted
for fifteen minutes. Kate tried to help her calm
down, but Marisa was already emotionally
hijacked and hadn’t yet learned to create
enough space between stimulus (anger) and
response (tears, screaming, mean words) to
make a different choice.
Since life is simply a
sum of our choices,
the earlier we teach
our children how
to make smart
choices, which
integrate the whole
brain (right and
left hemispheres),
the more positive
their life trajectory
becomes.
The emotionally healthy child is learning
how to make choices that are good for him
or her and good for others, which I call smart
choices. Since life is simply a sum of our
choices, the earlier we teach our children how
to make smart choices, which integrate the
whole brain (right and left hemispheres), the
more positive their life trajectory becomes.
At this point we couldn’t change how Marisa
had already responded, but she can learn
how to make smarter choices with her big
feelings in the future, which includes:
• paying attention (catching the feeling
when it’s small)
• pressing pause
• responding versus reacting
Children like Marisa can learn how to pay
attention to their feelings and stop before
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