Emotional education for personal growth in the early years.

Abstract

This article offers a proposal related to early childhood emotional education. It is in line with Erikson’s (1959) ideas surrounding psychosocial development and his theory of attachment and social referencing, Bridges’ (1932) emotional development scheme, and Rogers’ notion related to “acceptance” of emotional complexity toward healthy development. This proposal is reinforced with approaches from Winnicott (1986) and Kohut (2009), who demonstrate that children’s emotional education is indeed a process of self-consciousness development through interaction with their primary caregiver(s). These approaches demonstrate that early childhood emotional education is really a process related to children’s development of self-consciousness through interaction, or lack thereof, with their primary caregiver(s). We coin our approach “emotional integration,” which is conceptualized as a response to the dominant “emotional regulation” narrative. While emotional regulation focuses on behavioral and structured routines for facing diverse emotional situations, emotional integration is centered on interpersonal relationship improvements in different emotional contexts. For the emotional regulation approach, the child regulates her behavior depending on the primary caregiver’s reactions. In emotional integration, the child acquires certain dispositions toward the self, starting from her interaction with her caregiver. In small children, caregiver behavior certainly has a determining role. For the emotional regulation approach, the caregiver tries to solve possible problems in behavior, whereas for emotional integration, the caregiver seeks to develop inner processes of personal growth through the child’s interaction with the other.

Achieving Transfer from Mathematics Learning

“…In other words, knowing the world requires knowing oneself and knowing others. These three dimensions of knowing are intertwined from the very origin of our lives, as psychoanalysis has shown [24][25][26].…”

“…As has been seen [41], self-knowledge occurs because the encounter with the other allows us to know about ourselves. These relationships are also the finality of our acts if they are true human acts [26]. Mathematical tasks are full of opportunities for students to contrast their thinking with others' thinking, thus, analysing the flexibility of their mental schemas and their capacity for accepting those of others.…”