How screen time is eroding your child's emotional intelligence
It’s become normal to be in a family restaurant and see the entire family - baby included - locked onto their screens. Very different to what it might have looked like a few years ago.
Recently, I sat in a restaurant and watched a family next to me not say a word to each other the entire time they were there. Each person locked in their own world through a screen. The parents were on their phones and the younger kids were on iPads. No one put their screens down, even after their meal arrived.
From my perspective, I found that sad, but the depth of that scene has deeper-reaching implications for everyone, particularly the children who are in their formative social-emotional years.
Mary-Anne Murphy
It’s become normal to be in a family restaurant and see the entire family - baby included - locked onto their screens. Very different to what it might have looked like a few years ago.
Recently, I sat in a restaurant and watched a family next to me not say a word to each other the entire time they were there. Each person locked in their own world through a screen. The parents were on their phones and the younger kids were on iPads. No one put their screens down, even after their meal arrived.
From my perspective, I found that sad, but the depth of that scene has deeper-reaching implications for everyone, particularly the children who are in their formative social-emotional years.
Because you can be almost guaranteed, that if that is what it looks like when the family is out together, that is most likely what it is like at home.
Children are in a critical foundational phase of their lives.
This is when they learn all kinds of things like how to read and respond to social cues, and how to start a conversation and keep it going - basic social skills they will need their whole lives.
The Impact Of Screen Time On Empathy
The rate at which children with significant impulse control and behavioural issues are increasing is mind-blowing.
Screen time inhibits the natural development of impulse control, social skills and social-emotional skills such as empathy. As well as things like how to read social cues from facial expressions.
Focus, empathy and impulse control are core elements of social-emotional intelligence that actively contribute to positive relationship-building and mental well-being.
Early childhood is the time that children learn to interact with the world they live in. They need off-screen experience to develop critical cognitive and SEI skills otherwise they grow up not knowing how to manage the world around them.
Screen time is setting kids up to struggle. So what can we do about it?
The World Health Organization screen time guidelines recommend no screen time for children for the first 2 years and less than 1 hour a day for children aged 2-4 years.
Here are three things a caregiver can do to help a child develop their social-emotional skills with boundaries and limits on screen time.
1 Create a healthy routine
Bored kids will seek out tech to pass the time or to escape things like chores, homework or uncomfortable social situations.
Creating a healthy routine with firm boundaries and limits that won’t fall by the wayside when life gets busy is key.
Kids learn from examples, so if they see their parents scrolling through social media for hours, they will want to do the same. Get them into the fresh air every day, encourage them to play and read, and make sure they have access to puzzles, books and creative expression.
2. Share hobbies and interests
Get excited about what your children are interested in. Ask them about what they are reading, what music they like to listen to, and what sport they would like to play.
Cheer them on, and encourage them to explore and try new things together. Hobbies build confidence and and help you bond with your child, to build a strong relationship that will stand you in good stead when they are in their teens.
3. Create Tech-Free Zones
Limiting devices at certain times of the day such as meal times or in certain rooms, like bedrooms will have a hugely positive impact on your child's development and overall mental wellbeing.
Devices are being used more in schools and after school, but it is coming at a huge social-emotional cost.
How Screens Reduce Empathy
“Until babies develop language, all communication is non-verbal, so they depend heavily on looking at a face and deriving meaning from that face. Is this person happy with me, or are they upset with me? That two-way interaction between children and adult caregivers is critically important for brain development.” Charles Nelson, Harvard neuroscientist
Empathy is a critical social-emotional competency skill that underpins core interpersonal skills.
Excessive screentime is like feeding a child junk food all the time, it makes them cranky and doesn’t provide all the good vitamins and minerals that a child needs to grow. But more than that, it is like placing a mute button on your child’s capacity for empathy, which has far-reaching effects into adulthood.
Want to know more about how to help your child with developing their essential social-emotional learning skills? Momentum Learning has a wide range of learning options for youth, educators and parents. Get in touch with us. We would love to hear from you.
Work with Us
Momentum Learning has been supporting Leaders, Teams, Teachers, Rangatahi and their Whānau to develop their social and emotional intelligence since 2020. Talk to us about exploring this for your organisation.
Let’s work together.
The link between mental health and social-emotional intelligence
The link between social-emotional intelligence and mental health is significant. Our mental well-being is heavily influenced by our ability to navigate our social-emotional world. How we regulate our emotions, the people we choose as friends, and how we manage stress, solve problems and interact with others underpins the quality of our lives.
Mary-Anne Murphy
The link between social-emotional intelligence and mental health is significant. Our mental well-being is heavily influenced by our ability to navigate our social-emotional world. How we regulate our emotions, the people we choose as friends, and how we manage stress, solve problems and interact with others underpins the quality of our lives.
"Perhaps the problem isn’t that we have too much anxiety or depression, but that we’ve been taught to ignore the things that truly matter." Johann Hari, Lost Connections
EI for a better life
Think of mental health as the foundation of a building. A strong and secure base of safety and security from where every other aspect of life grows. A safe and dependable place that we lean into for extra support.
Now think of the structure of the building that is on top of the foundation. A well-designed structure and purpose-built building is strong, resilient and efficient. This is your social-emotional intelligence.
Good mental health gives people a strong and stable foundation for everything else. Our quality of life is entirely underpinned by the quality of our mental health. You can have the best structure on top, but if the foundation is lacking, then everything else will fall over.
A purpose-built social-emotional structure determines how we interact with others, and the relationships we build and nurture - it shapes the lens through which we interact with the world around us.
Even if our foundation is a bit wobbly or our structure has a few missing pieces, just like buildings can be renovated, people also have ways to repair, strengthen and enhance our lives. EI offers limitless possibilities for an improved quality of life, but it needs a strong foundation to lean on.
The first step in this life-long journey is self-awareness. Really looking at all of the cracks in the foundation and acknowledging that there are parts of our structure that need work, is a pivotal step in the right direction. And it is often the hardest of them all.
Community connection for anxiety and depression
“Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people, he said—it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else.” ― Johann Hari, Lost Connections
So what use is a great building on a strong foundation if it is empty? It needs people who want to come and live, work and hang out in the building. Being connected to a community is one of the vital elements of mental wellbeing.
The first stage of the Four Stages of Psychological Safety (Timothy Clark) is inclusion. It is a fundamental human need to belong and to connect with others. When people feel included, they feel safe to share, learn and challenge the status quo. Community connection is directly linked to how people's mental health is supported.
Te whare tapa whā - five ways to well-being
Te whare tapa whā, developed by Sir Mason Durie in 1984, describes mental health and well-being as a wharenui (meeting house) that has four walls and a foundation.
The four walls represent pillars of what makes up our mental health and wellbeing and the foundation represents our community, our family, our roots.
The idea is that when all of these elements are in balance, our well-being thrives. When they are disconnected and out of balance, then we become disconnected and out of balance too.
Taha wairua
spiritual wellbeing
Taha hinengaro
mental and emotional wellbeing
Taha tinana
physical wellbeing
Taha whānau
family and social wellbeing
Whenua
land
"The endpoint is to have someone who is well in every sense of the word." Sir Mason Durie, creator of Te whare tapa whā
The relationship between EQ and mental health
The correlation between high levels of emotional intelligence and good mental health has a significant impact, that much is clear. So how do we get this, who teaches this to adults and where do people even start?
Because emotional-social learning is a model, a capability concept and a tool kit, all of the skills can be learned, developed and finessed. Anybody can be taught and learn these skills at any stage of their life.
Working with the expert facilitation of the skilled team at Momentum Learning can help individuals and teams develop and culturally locate these cross-cultural skills.
If you are interested in knowing more about EQ training for yourself, your team or your organisation, we would love to hear from you. Contact us today.
Work with Us
Momentum Learning has been supporting Leaders, Teams, Teachers, Rangatahi and their Whānau to develop their social and emotional intelligence since 2020. Talk to us about exploring this for your organisation.
Let’s work together.
How social-emotional intelligence can help your career success
Emotionally intelligent people are by nature flexible, adaptable and resilient. They are inspiring as leaders with a high level of self-awareness. Their emotional intelligence (EI) skills help them to effectively balance compassion and empathy, with the ability to assertively set and communicate healthy boundaries.
EI is now not only considered a critical leadership skill set, but it is also a highly sought-after one. No matter what your career goals are, investing and developing a social-emotional intelligence toolkit have become imperative for every level of career success.
Mary-Anne Murphy
Emotionally intelligent people are by nature flexible, adaptable and resilient. They are inspiring as leaders with a high level of self-awareness. Their emotional intelligence (EI) skills help them to effectively balance compassion and empathy, with the ability to assertively set and communicate healthy boundaries.
EI is now not only considered a critical leadership skill set, but it is also a highly sought-after one. No matter what your career goals are, investing and developing a social-emotional intelligence toolkit have become imperative for every level of career success.
“It all starts with self-awareness. It’s not all about you, but it all begins with you. As a leader, if you’re not in a good place, not stable and not clear about what’s unique about you, then nothing’s going to flow from that.” Jeremy Darroch, Group CEO Sky.
Emotional Capital
Emotional intelligence is not a personality trait, but rather a set of emotional competencies that are developed to enhance leadership, nurture relationships and confident social skills.
Every personal interaction you have, and every decision you and your business make, is likely to be built on emotion. RocheMartin, Inspired Emotional Intelligence
Think of emotional capital as a type of skills bank. By developing these skills, you are investing in your own emotional capital bank. When you need to access these skills you can use them to transact with. Whether you are leading your team to success, getting buy-in from stakeholders or nurturing loyal relationships.
So if emotional capital was currency, have you thought about how you are spending it?
Optimism as a Strategy
People with high emotional intelligence skills are inherently optimists.
Optimists frame issues differently, they see opportunities and can adapt quickly to changing circumstances and environments. They strategically access their emotional capital, drawing on strong relationships with teams they’ve built and nurtured.
A great example of how optimists leverage their framework was during the global pandemic. They were the ones who identified silver linings and mobilised a response that would not only see their organisation survive but outperform their competitors in the end.
Empathy vs Sympathy
One of the biggest attributes of EI is empathy. Empathy requires a very deep understanding of what the other person is going through on an emotional level. While sympathy is relatable more on an intellectual level. While we can sympathise with another person's lived experience, sympathy gives us no real emotional understanding of it.
Empathy requires us to put ourselves in another person's shoes and dig deep into the emotional experience they are having.
This is done through things like being an active open-minded listener who can respond without bias in a validating and deeply genuine way.
EI competency can be learned, developed nurtured and used to improve your relationships with others, strengthen networks, broaden perspectives and ultimately clear the pathway to career success.
Do you want to know more about how to access the EI toolkit for yourself or your team? Get in touch with us, we would love to hear from you.
Work with Us
Momentum Learning has supported Leaders, Teams, Teachers, Rangatahi and their Whānau to develop their social and emotional intelligence since 2020. Talk to us about accessing this essential curriculum methodology, through Regionally Allocated PLD and other funding pathways.
Let’s work together.
Is your child struggling to make friends? How SEI skills can help.
Making friends is not something that comes naturally to all children.
It’s hard to see your child being left out and not included, but it doesn’t mean your child isn’t likeable, has anything wrong with them or doesn’t get invited to events because of their personality.
It just means that they need some help building social skills. Social-emotional intelligence (SEI) is a toolkit that can help.
Mary-Anne Murphy
Making friends is not something that comes naturally to all children.
It’s hard to see your child being left out and not included, but it doesn’t mean your child isn’t likeable, has anything wrong with them or doesn’t get invited to events because of their personality.
It just means that they need some help building social skills. Social-emotional intelligence (SEI) is a toolkit that can help.
Skills kids need to make friends
Making and keeping friends is a skill. Even kids who are shy or who are struggling with impulse behavioural issues and things like delayed speech or ADHD can make friends. SEI provides children with a tangible framework they can use in everyday situations to help them make friends.
Such as:
How to pick up on and respond to social cues
How to listen attentively to others so they can understand what is being said
How to share and take turns
How to start a conversation
How to disagree appropriately
How to label their emotions to effectively communicate their feelings.
With a bit of encouragement and validation, every child can find the confidence to use their new tools and start practising their friendship skills.
Why do some kids struggle to make friends?
Sometimes children struggle to make friends simply because they haven’t met another child they feel that they can connect with.
It could also be that a child has had a negative experience or two and now feels too anxious or nervous to be the first one to reach out. Some children get as far as starting a conversation but might not know how to keep one going. They sometimes personalise responses from other kids that might not be familiar to them.
For example, if they say hello to a child but the other child doesn’t say anything back. They might feel as if they have done something wrong, not knowing that the other child might have a hearing disability and simply didn’t hear them.
Basic communication and language skills become a bigger barrier if kids don’t know how to navigate through them.
This is something that SEI is perfect for, it helps kids be more confident with their friendship-making skills and gives them tools to explore different dynamics and be brave in new situations.
"A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees." Amelia Earhart
Is it normal for my child to not have friends?
Every parent wishes for their child to be socially adept, happy and curious, open to finding a commonality with anyone.
But in real life, kids can be shy and nervous, feel overwhelmed and overstimulated and become reluctant to work their way through their hesitations. If they haven’t had much experience socially, they might not have a reference to draw from.
This is why developing good SEI skills can have a hugely positive impact on your child's overall social well-being and happiness.
SEI skills that can help your child make friends
These are just some of the social-emotional skills that can help your child make and keep friends.
Empathy
Helps kids connect emotionally
Interpersonal skills
Helps kids to establish social awareness
Assertiveness
Helps kids to communicate feelings and set boundaries
Conflict resolution
Helps kids to develop confident problem-solving solutions
It will help them to:
Better understand themselves and others
Have the courage to persevere even if it doesn’t go right the first time
Learn how to invite other children to join them
Have the confidence to accept an invitation from others.
Friendships need a good level of social and emotional competence to thrive and social-emotional learning skills can help children to develop these concepts in their younger years, setting them up to be well-rounded, happy adults.
As caregivers, we can answer the call for compassion. For us to bring the heart back into our humanity. It starts with us, and our children will lead the way.
If you would like to know more about how to support your child or students access these skills, get in touch with us, we would love to hear from you.
Work with Us
Momentum Learning has been supporting Leaders, Teams, Teachers, Rangatahi and their Whānau to develop their social and emotional intelligence since 2020. Talk to us about exploring this for your organisation.
Let’s work together.
How Social-Emotional Intelligence can build resilience in teenagers
Teenagers. Raising them sometimes feels like you are trying to eat vinegar through a fork. And just because you were a teenager once, doesn’t necessarily prepare you for raising one of your own.
The hardest thing as a parent is seeing someone you love more than anything else in the world (who may not love you at the time) make mistakes - some of them big ones - and not intervening.
Giving teenagers a social-emotional intelligence toolbox and then providing opportunities to learn how to apply them in real-life experiences, are the kind of gifts that set kids up for life.
Mary-Anne Murphy
Teenagers. Raising them sometimes feels like you are trying to eat vinegar through a fork. And just because you were a teenager once, doesn’t necessarily prepare you for raising one of your own.
The hardest thing as a parent is seeing someone you love more than anything else in the world (who may not love you at the time) make mistakes - some of them big ones - and not intervening.
Giving teenagers a social-emotional intelligence toolbox and then providing opportunities to learn how to apply them in real-life experiences, are the kind of gifts that set kids up for life.
Things like self-awareness, resilience and courage come from autonomy, creating space so that they can make their own mistakes and just be available for guidance, not correction, ultimately allowing them to choose their own path.
Helicopter and Lawnmower Parenting
We know them, we are not so secretly them and some of us have been raised by them. Those helicopter and the lawnmower parents, hovering above us and holding our hands every step of the way or just bulldozing ahead, mowing down any potential or perceived obstacle or challenge coming their way.
This kind of parenting robs kids of experiences that promote resilience. It also denies them opportunities to discover and explore their inner perseverance, all things that give kids the courage to problem solve and try new things.
These kids then grow up into insecure teenagers with no faith in their own abilities and poor levels of social-emotional intelligence. Skills that would help them make good decisions as teenagers and help them navigate one of the hardest, most confusing times of their lives.
Wrapping kids and teenagers in cottonwool sets them up to fail. Rather help kids feel capable by honing their EQ skills, setting them up for success.
The #1 skill children need to succeed
Imagine a tall, strong pōhutukawa tree. It has a thick trunk, deep roots and a generous canopy of branches, lush with leaves and those iconic red blooms around Christmas time. It’s a hive of activity for bees and birds, providing shelter and shade.
In the worst of storms and even with the strongest wind, that tree won’t blow over. It’s because as a young tree, it was provided with support and guidance, helping it grow tall, straight and strong.
Resilience and mental toughness are the most important life skills for teens. Resilient kids have the confidence to try new things. It gives them the courage to not give up when the going gets tough and builds an indestructible bond with themselves that is impervious to outside influence.
“If you think your kids may have been slightly short-changed by inheriting your DNA, don’t worry, genes are not destiny. Just following a few simple rules for creating the right cultural conditions that celebrate resilience, can tip the scales in the right direction.”
Dr Martyn Newman, RocheMartin
Emotion Coaching vs Emotion Dismissing
Are you an emotional coach or an emotional dismisser?
Do you find yourself in a panic if your child is unhappy, stressed or frustrated and immediately try and fix what is making them feel that way? Or do you stop, acknowledge the feelings, validate the experience and help them identify what is happening?
Emotional Dismisser
Invalidating, downplaying or ignoring someone else emotions
Critical when mistakes are made
Using phrases like “You are so sensitive” and “You always make things bigger than they are”
Taking over when errors are made
Using labels such as “You are always inconsistent” and “You are so careless”.
Emotional Coach
Validate all emotions as healthy
Empathise negative emotions - That’s tough to deal with
Patient validation of feelings - I’m here and I am listening
Helps others verbally label feelings - I hear how you are feeling
Communicates boundaries to distinguish between feelings and behaviour.
When children understand that all emotions are healthy and that being angry or sad is a normal part of life, we give them the tools to help them self-regulate their emotions and make good decisions about their behaviour and how they communicate their boundaries.
We can teach our kids to do things, but it is how they are able to respond to the world around them that shapes their mental well-being and happiness.
Want to know more about how to help your teen be more resilient and develop their EQ skills? Momentum Learning has a wide range of options for youth, educators and parents.
Get in touch with us. We would love to hear from you.
Work with Us
Momentum Learning has been supporting Leaders, Teams, Teachers, Rangatahi and their Whānau to develop their social and emotional intelligence since 2020. Talk to us about exploring this for your organisation.
Let’s work together.