Key points:
- Self-awareness skills are important for children as they develop and grow.
- These skills help children to understand and regulate their own emotions, as well as understand and empathize with others.
- Self-awareness skills develop over time and continue to grow into adolescence and young adulthood.
- Helping children develop self-awareness skills can lay the groundwork for success in many areas of life, including social, emotional, and academic development.
When we talk about children’s self-awareness skills, we are referring to their capacity to know themselves and, based on that knowledge, evaluate and respond appropriately to different personal and interpersonal situations. Thanks to self-awareness we know what we like, dislike, how were prone to react in certain situations, and how best to self-regulate our emotions and thoughts. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, these skills start developing around toddlerhood and continue to do so until adolescence and young adulthood, when a person’s personality settles a bit more after lots of self-exploration.
Having good self-awareness skills will help your child to:
- Understand their own feelings, thoughts, and subjectivity.
- Understand that their mind is unique and separate from other people’s.
- Make the connection between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
- Comprehend that other people are equally valuable than them, even if they think differently.
- Estimate how difficult or easy something might be.
- Understand their own strengths and develop a sense of self-worth and pride.
- Admit their mistakes and accept help.
- Develop empathy for others, as well as compassion for themselves.
- Notice in what situations and with what things they struggle, and to identify how to work on it.
- Think about how their actions might impact other people.
Because we constantly need to use our self-awareness skills in a myriad of different situations, and these skills lay the groundwork for many other social, emotional, and academic aspects of development, it’s important to help your kid develop their self-awareness skills. Your little one will reap the benefits of this throughout their life.
