In addition to a child's cognitive development, one of the main concerns of parents and teachers is undoubtedly their emotional development. This concern is linked to the fact that emotional intelligence is fundamental for the development of a child's personality, as well as for their intellectual development.

This skill describes the child's ability to identify, understand, express and control their own emotions, but also to recognize the emotions of others.

This ability has an impact on the way in which the child will relate constructively to himself/herself and to other people. In other words, by acquiring this skill, the child becomes aware of himself/herself, recognizing his/her emotions and understanding how these emotions can affect others. Therefore, emotional understanding is one of the essential characteristics of emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is essential for meaningful social interactions. These interactions help children acquire the best strategies for self-regulating their emotions. In fact, children will learn to model and adapt their emotions to different contexts and, in this way, will be able to achieve positive changes in their relationships with others.

However, there are children with complex communication needs who do not have the ability to self-regulate their emotions.

The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Communication

Emotional intelligence plays a key role in people's lives and communication provides fundamental tools for learning, but also for children's involvement in their social relationships and for regulating their behaviour and emotions. Children need to be able to express their thoughts (expressive language) and understand the thoughts of others (receptive language) in different social and learning situations.

Therefore, for children with communication difficulties, this skill needs to be worked on in a reinforced and systematic way. The way in which you intervene with these difficulties will make all the difference in how the child will establish friendships, manage conflicts, manipulate feelings, reflect on their behavior and cooperate and play with other children.

Children with communication difficulties rarely initiate conversation, often use closed answers such as “yes” and “no” and have a limited and superficial emotional vocabulary. Many children rely on adults or peers to express and interpret feelings and regularly use childish language.

Thus, we can conclude that emotional intelligence and communication are fundamental skills for a child's comprehensive development.

Activities to work on Emotional Intelligence

There are numerous activities that help children learn to manage and deal with emotions in a simple and structured way, such as viewing/dramatizing and exploring stories with emotional content and adapted play activities. In the case of stories, these should be accompanied by illustrations or other resources related to the text and the action of the story, thus making the absorption of the content and its understanding more accessible.

Regarding activities, these must be simple and dynamic, accompanied by images, symbols and voice, or other resources, namely games, puppets, among others.

In this way, by providing diverse learning opportunities adapted to each child, it will be possible to develop communication and emotional intelligence. Those who have developed emotional intelligence will be able to communicate with different people and in a wide variety of contexts.