Abstract:

This is a desk-review paper exploring young children’s emotional intelligence during play-based learning pedagogy. The paper focuses on young children between 0 – 5 years as the age group in the Early Childhood Development sector that is often neglected. The neuroscientists stress the importance of a period from birth to 7 years as the crucial one for every child’s holistic development as young children begin to learn concepts, skills, and attitudes that lay a solid foundation for their learning later in life. It is for this reason that the first 1000 days of every child’s life are considered important and this calls for positive nurturing to ensure their optimum development. In addition, during early childhood years, young children have numerous opportunities to learn, develop, acquire and master certain skills. Hence, emotional intelligence is imperative for young children when they learn in early childhood centres, more especially when learning through play. This is because play encourages cooperation, self-awareness, compassion, confidence, as the significant foundations when developing emotional intelligence. When young children learn through play in early childhood centres they become self-directed, diligent, and actively engaged with peers, hence, practitioners need to ensure that emotional intelligence skills are acquired and mastered from this level. The development of emotional intelligence at an early stage encourages the academic and lifelong achievements all-encompassing of personal, social success and enhanced health and well-being. Emotional intelligent children become healthy, able to deal with difficulties, respect differences, and become social giants as the collaborations with peers are enhanced. Moreover, emotional intelligence enables children to know, manage, and express their feelings when dealing with others and this lays a solid foundation for both personal and professional relationships. This implies that when emotional intelligence skills are nurtured and mastered at an early age, young children as they grow may have good interpersonal and leadership skills. The paper adopted Goleman’s emotional competence framework because this theory focuses on self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and social management. Although the paper focuses on young children, this theory is important because being emotionally intelligent is not an ad-hoc process, rather a skill that can be learned and mastered over time with good returns later in life. The observations from the literature reviewed show that although research has been done on promoting young children’s emotional intelligence a lot still needs to be done in terms of integrating it with play-based learning pedagogies. The paper discusses the importance of emotional intelligence in early childhood education centres when play-based learning pedagogies are adopted. In addition, the paper also examines how young children’s emotional intelligence is challenged when learning through play. The paper suggests the strategies that practitioners from the early childhood centres may employ in promoting young children’s emotional intelligence during play-based learning.

Keywords:

Early Childhood Development, Emotional intelligence, First-1000-days, Holistic development, Play-based learning, Pedagogy, Practitioner, Self-awareness, Self-management, Social-awareness, Social-management.