A century ago, a Swiss psychologist sat silent as he watched children in schoolyards generate rules for various unsupervised games. He was fascinated at how they would come to their decisions, and what they would do if someone was not following the agreed upon rules. The psychologist – Jean Piaget – would go on to revolutionize the way that parents and educators address childhood development.

Before Piaget, adults assumed that children thought like adults, that they merely lacked the accumulated information of an adult. But Piaget and other psychologists in his lineage showed the world that the way that children made sense of the knowledge they possessed differed from the ways that adults made sense of their knowledge.

It is now widely accepted that children grow through stages of development in cognitive, moral and socio-emotional domains. In other words, the way they organize information changes reliably over time, and they spend years at these stages. We create an “equilibrium” between self and world based on our capacity for controlling our bodies, our emotions, and our thoughts.

Furthermore, children in the absence of “good enough” conditions don’t develop as fully as those who are lucky enough to be in “ideal” conditions. This can be seen in the famous “marshmallow experiment” for young children (generally between 3 and 6 years of age). The young children who can control their impulse to eat a marshmallow sitting on a plate in front of them are rewarded with two marshmallows upon the return of a researcher who has briefly left the room.

Make no mistake that “briefly” for the adult and for the child are very different experiences. Longitudinal research shows that the children who can control those impulses end up doing much better as adults in nearly every measure – health, intelligence, emotional wellbeing, career, and relationships. From the perspective of childhood development, the key to all of this is the child’s ability to control their impulses. Quite the challenge when one is subject to the “impulsive stage,” as it is often called.

This suggests that there is a sequence to social-emotional learning. It begins with a child’s ability to be aware of a feeling. Once that occurs, they can begin the process of identifying and naming those feelings. After establishing the capacity to identify and name, the child can begin to take their feelings “as object,” as something over which they might have volition. Finally, when they can take their feelings as-object, they can better “hear” what adults have to say about taking action (or NOT taking action!). Teachers know this space very well.

Despite the above, adults can often miss the importance of such a developmental sequence. In the course of our daily lives, amongst the slings and arrows of postmodern life in an information economy, we can easily lose touch with where our children are along that emotional and behavioral spectrum. Furthermore, we do not always remain in the headspaces that we achieve – if adults cannot do this, how can we expect children to do so?

Children will slide forwards and backwards, sometimes in a given day, between extremely impulsive and emotionally stable (particularly from ages 5-7 during the rapid growth of the corpus-callosum, the “neuron bridge” connecting the brain’s two hemispheres).

Because emotional regulation seems vital for future outcomes, it behooves parents and educators to understand the broad strokes as are laid them out here. The implication is that any process or program that helps young children to be aware of their feelings is fostering that first, most important step in the development of healthy social-emotional learning, such as the Happy Sad app which we’ve designed together specifically for this purpose.

Without awareness, there can be no identification and naming of internal states; and without that, there can be none of the emotional regulation needed to have volition over their feelings – to not take that first marshmallow.

Those children who are both supported and challenged to be aware, to identify, and eventually control their feelings are being set up for success in adulthood. And it all begins with simple awareness.

Written By Happy Sad Chief Developmental Psychologist, David Zeitler. 

• David Zeitler spends his days humming and hawing about cool new research and ways to help people of all ages break through mental health & developmental barriers. He also helps the Happy Sad team build impactful, research-based products to support your kiddo’s wellbeing based on 20+ years of experience and real life experiences. Cool aye?