Written by Nermin Magdy
Emotional maturity in children is a set of skills that enable them to understand and control their ability to respond to situations that arouse emotion and emotions.
We all know that a child is not born with emotional maturity, and this maturity does not happen simply by getting older, but rather requires experiences, attitudes, and upbringing.
A child is born believing that he is the king of his time, and that the whole world is at his service. Then he begins to discover - through trial and error - that others live around him, and that these others also have feelings, opinions, and desires.
The infant thinks that anyone around him can know why he is angry, or what exactly he needs at that moment, and if they cannot know, it means that they do not love him. As he grows older, he is able to express himself and his needs, and to express what is in his mind and heart. .
A child is also born with strange and simple fears, and when he grows up he learns how to control and reason with them. He is born not understanding the amount of fatigue and pain that any action may cause. When he grows up, he develops compassion and senses how not to burden others beyond his capacity.
These lessons and many more are called emotional maturity, and they require thousands of situations and occasions to take root within a person and for him to learn them. Such as when his toy is lost, or his animal dies, or he travels a long and boring journey in a carriage, or he has a brother or sister, or other situations big and small.
We cannot allocate a curriculum to educate and teach this matter, but the more the child is exposed to more experiences, the more he matures.
The fact that childhood and education scholars emphasize is that reading makes the child experience many experiences and feelings that he did not actually experience, and he acquires the experiences of these situations almost as if he lived them. The more we tell our children, the more emotional maturity they develop. In stories, children get to know characters with different characteristics who face endless events and problems in countless places.
The educator can always direct the time of telling and reading to a specific topic. For example, it helps the child overcome his fears of school, and so on.
Let us ask ourselves what experiences we want our children to have and read to them from books.
Let's talk.
