Promote emotional education of young peopleIt is everyone's job, especially in these turbulent times. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that proper emotional intelligence was essential to face difficulties with resilience, especially those that appear without warning.
For this reason, the Psychosocial Support Reference Center has joined four other associations to develop a guide with which to promote the emotional education of young people and children.
The guide, entitled A hopeful, healthy, and happy living and learning toolkit (in Spanish, A toolbox for living and learning in a hopeful, healthy and happy way) has more than forty activities divided into five different blocks:
- Self-knowledge: It is the process of getting to know oneself. It consists of identifying those characteristics that make us unique individuals: our thoughts, our feelings, our values, our traits… It is important that the emotional education of young people starts with self-knowledge, because knowing who we are helps us to set personal goals and find the path that guides us through this complex world.
- Self-control: is the ability to manage one's own feelings, thoughts and actions. Self-control is essential to achieving our personal goals and making wise and informed decisions.
- Social awareness: It is the ability to understand the problems faced by people around us and to feel empathy towards those who experience different problems.
- Social skills: set of strategies and attitudes that allow us to function in situations where other people are involved.
- decision making: is a process that involves choosing between several available options.
The activities last between 30 and 90 minutes. These activities are designed for working with groups, although they can easily be adapted to be carried out at home.
The best activities to work on the emotional education of young people
The goal of this activity is for young people to understand what self-knowledge is, why it is important and how to develop it.
To do this, show him/her your country's coat of arms and explain how each element represents an important part of the national identity.
Next, Give them a blank coat of arms and ask them to make their own with what represents the most important parts of their life: their passions, what they are good at, who they want to become…
The aim of this activity is to make young people aware of the dangers of stress accumulation so that they learn to manage problems as they arise.
To carry out the activity, Young people should imagine that their life is a bus that they themselves drive.As drivers, they want to reach certain places and have the power to let certain passengers on or off.
Some of these passengers are pleasant: they represent pleasant memories, experiences and positive thoughts. Others are unpleasant: they are those emotions or decisions that cause them problems and that they wish they hadn't experienced.
First, you have to name these passengers: three good ones and three bad ones. Then, you have to imagine three different scenarios:
- Struggle: While the protagonist of the activity is driving, the passengers start arguing. The driver responds by arguing with them.
- Surrender: To stop the passengers from arguing, the driver accepts their suggestions and gives in to their whims, changing the destination of his bus.
- Opening: The driver is open to suggestions from passengers and welcomes them on their journey, always making it clear where they are going and who is in charge.
Which of the three options generated the best feelings? The open one? Then encourage them to manage negative emotions and thoughts in that way from now on.
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This activity serves to open a debate around empathy, with the aim of increasing young people's knowledge about it.
To do this activity, divide the floor in two with a rope or tape. Ask the youth to stand on one side of the line and ask them to cross the line if they are familiar with any of the experiences you are about to read about. Some examples:
- Have you traveled to any foreign country?
- Have you been feeling sad lately?
- Are you worried about a family member?
- Have you ever been bullied?
- Do you know someone who has been a victim of abuse?
- Have you ever been subjected to a sexist, racist or discriminatory insult?
Then, ask them to express how they felt when crossing the line, if it was difficult for them to do so, and if they learned something about themselves or about others.
This activity aims to raise awareness among young people about the dangers of submitting to external pressure.
This is a very simple exercise. First of all, They have to describe what is safe behavior for them and what is dangerous behavior.
Then, they have to write two recipes: one is made up of all the ingredients that make a behavior safe (for example, that it is well thought out, that it is done in good company, etc.), the other, of the ingredients that make a behavior unsafe (having doubts about whether it should be done or not, being forced to do it, hurting someone, etc.).
By describing the characteristics of safe and unsafe behaviors, they will be able to better distinguish between those activities they want to do and those they don't, and they will become stronger in the face of external pressure.
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