In other blog posts, we have discussed how the very act of engaging in art-making and the creative process provides well-being with little intentionality due to the naturally occurring protective factors. In this coming series, we shift our discussions from those benefits that co-occur during creative activities to using the arts to teach the social and emotional skills that promote not only self-regulation but those that foster resilience, determination, and grit.
Social and emotional skills (SE) are the collective skills, knowledge, and attitudes that allow people to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make informed decisions. Social and emotional development begins at infancy with the first interactions between child and caregiver and continues through adulthood, occuring on pace with cognitive abilities and physical brain development. Exposure to trauma and adversity affects that brain development, negatively impacting a child’s ability to regulate and process emotions as well as their ability to relate to others. While not all children will experience trauma, they all will face challenges in their lives, and so all children can benefit from learning skills that will assist in responding to adversity. Additionally, emotional and cognitive abilities are interrelated, so a child with well developed social and emotional skills is more likely to succeed academically.
The arts provide an experiential path for exploring SE skills. Social and emotional skills differ from cognitive skills and activate different parts of the brain, so they cannot be taught in a cognitive manner but rather need to be felt and experienced. Exploring SE skills through art-making and the creative process allows children to explore and experiment, find understanding through association, and experience real time reactions in a safe and controlled environment. Think about every television show that has suggested the characters explore their feelings or practice an emotional conversation through role-play. Drama class! The arts provide opportunities to explore self-soothing techniques, practice responses and reactions, and build interpersonal skills while in a regulated state so that children can more easily call upon those skills during times of adversity.
There are several schools of thought as to how many SE skills exist or how they can be categorized, but in my work with Girls First, we break SE skills into four thematic umbrellas; Self-Regulation, Personal Agency, Self Efficacy, and Empathy. These are taught in a scaffolded manner, with Self-Regulation being taught in the first year with great emphasis placed on understanding, naming, and managing emotions and building our self-soothing muscles. Personal Agency and Self Efficacy are taught in the second and third years. Personal agency refers to skills or the idea that “I can” while Self Efficacy refers to attitude, “I believe I can.” Empathy is taught in the final year as we take everything we have explored for and within ourselves and turn it around to mirror and understand others.
The following series will follow this same path with each blog post further exploring each of the SE themes and providing short, creative activities that can assist children in bolstering their social and emotional development and learning.