Self-regulation

In schools, children need to be conscious of their emotions and know how to regulate them in order to coexist peacefully with peers and adults as, in any other case, education cannot be successfully accomplished by a kid who is not capable to control his emotions and has a harmful behavior.

Nevertheless, to have a successful regulation of the own emotions, the emotional development needs to be understood and interiorized in order to act properly and according to the emotional stage from which the child is immersed. 

Odle defines the emotional development as the emergence of a child's experience, expression, understanding, and regulation of emotions from birth through late adolescence. The context, social and cultural influences play an important role in the emotional development of a kid. 

By now it is unknown when emotions appear. It it true than a child who has just 6 weeks of life can smile, but this smile does not express more emotions until the same kid has six months. Laguther, which is a step further than the smile, is not developed until the child is four or six months old. Negative emotions are believe to be expressed earlier, and anger is more common in infants than sadness.

It is not until the ages of two and three that the kid has emotional comprehension expressed through language and developes empathy. With empahty, the child is able to differentiate the own emotions with other's emotions. Complex emotions are introduced in this stage. 

Once children enter school, they learn more about themselves and what they feel, as well as how specific situation can involve specific emotions. They also understand that the same situation can lead to experience two or more emotions, some of the similar but sometimes they can be opposite feelings. At the age of six children understand that a situation can provoke a determined emotions and, simultaneously another emotion is felt. 

Emotional development is significant as it influences school success. For example, if a student is dealing with negative emotions or has the feeling that is being rejected or has peers problems, this kid can have troubles when concentrating on a task during an activity at school. For that reason, being aware of one's own emotions, sensations and feelings, as well as knowing how to regulate them, are important to perform well at school.

Emotonal regulation occurs when someone is able to recognize and control the emotions. Children should be able to use strategies that help them regulate their emotions as sometimes what they feel can damage their school performance, social interactions and life at home. According to Odle, at the age of four children already learn how to change an emotion in order to be substituted by the emotion that is expected by someone or for a situation. But it is not until the ages of seven to eleven that children learn strategies in order to develop self-regulation. They are aware of emotions can arise in others when we are feeling an emotion. For example, a child from this age is conscious that if he is feeling sad, this sadness can contageous people from his environment and they will end up feeling the same way.

A child can react differently according to how the person with whom he is having a discussion will react. This can be seen mostly in the family context as most of the times children tend to express negative to mothers as they are more permissive than fathers, and also because they know that their fathers tend to react negatively to displays of emotions. Self-regulation is essential to emotional development because it means a progressive ability to regulate emotions according to demands of the situations and social context.

Some strategies to self-regulate the emotions are distraction, favor positive emotions states and reduce negative states. A kid who is having a bad performance at school because of negative emotions has to learn how to amuse those emotions so they do not prevent him to have a successful education. Distraction can be managed by different strategies. Personally, what helps me to distract my emotions and to relax when experimenting harmful feelings is reading. With reading I enter another world. I life someone else's life and my problems seem so far away when reading. That is what children have to learn: what can help them forget for some minutes their situation.

Relaxation is a successful regulatory strategy that can be taught at school and helps keeping negative thinkings away. Children need to comprehend that, by breathing, imagining peaceful and nice places, and having a comfortable positions can help them staying calm and positive.

Self-regulation is dealt at school but has to be promoted by parents as well. 

Self-concept and self-esteem have also an impact in students' performance and are factors to be taken into account when developing emotional regulation. Self-concept is related of the idea of who I am whereas self-esteem implicated the assessment of the person I am. Both concepts are evaluative judgments of how we see ourselves. The idea of myself is not fixed, it can change as yeas go by, according to the context, the experiences lived, etc. However, identity construction is not only a personal point of view, how others see ourselves and they way they treat us contributes positively or negatively in our self-concept and self-esteem.

We start by having a simple and general image of ourselves. We believe that only us are important so we just compare our abilities and capacities to ours. We know we are good at football because this season we are scoring more goals than last year's season, but we never compare ourselves with others. At the age of eight we start to do this comparission with peers, family members, people from our surrounding and normally self-esteem descreases as we notice we are not as perfect as we beleived we were. We are aware that our neighbor is better at painting than us, and this affects negativly our self-esteem.

Self-esteem is constructed by the image that we have of our physical aspect, skills, the realtions with our families, peers, teachers, etc and, in the educational context which is the one that concerns me the most in this portfolio, amadecis are also a huge source of negative or positive influence in our conception of ourselves.

Pygmalion effect is really close to self-esteem. This well-known effect explains teacher's expactations of a student. The way teachers see ourselves has an effect in the way we consider our capacities and abilities. If the teacher believes we can still do great algthough we have failed an exam, we will have the courage to keep studying hard, but if the teacher believes we cannot improve our marks we will consider ourselves as failures and will be no motivated to study.

This graphic explains clearly this effect.