Available for Interviews: Julie DeLucca-Collins
Julie DeLucca-Collins shows people how to create simple habits and go from overwhelm to self-doubt to having more peace, purpose, power, passion, and prosperity. She is the author of Confident You: Simple Habits to Live the Life You Have Imagined.
What Julie DeLucca-Collins can say in an interview on
Social Emotional Learning and Your Family:
Social and emotional learning (SEL) is an integral part of education and human development. SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.
Benefits of implementing SEL skills include improvement of students’ social and emotional skills, attitudes, relationships, academic performance, and perceptions of classroom and school climate, decline of anxiety and acting up, long-term improvements in students’ skills, attitudes, prosocial behavior, and academic performance.
5 Ways SEL Can Be Achieved
1) Create environments that promote a positive sense of well-being and healthy connections between peers and with adults. Help your child express and name emotions. This helps young people understand what it is that they’re feeling. If children are struggling to identify their feelings, ask them to express it through drawing, a facial expression, or through a movement in their body. Older students can try journal prompts like: “If I were a weather reporter and my feelings were the weather, it would be _____ today.” They may be able to describe a cloudy, gloomy day but not have the emotional vocabulary to specify their feelings.
2) Prioritize strong, two-way communication between families and schools. To promote SEL, we’ll need to work closely to learn from and support one another in creating environments that can support students socially and emotionally. Share what you are and what is working. Remember that everyone is working together and that there is no manual of how to navigate our current world. You will create less stress for yourself and your child if you give others the benefit of the doubt.
3) Be intentional with your time to connect with children. All educators, community partners, parents, and others who touch the lives of young people are also experiencing disruption in their lives caused by COVID-19, which may result in stress, anxiety, uncertainty, and feeling overwhelmed. Many parents may be more physically present than they ever have because they are now home. But that does not mean they are truly present due to increased work demands while supporting learning at home. Many of us are also stressed ourselves, making us less emotionally available. It is important to dedicate structured time to connection and not assume that it will happen organically because we are more “present” now than ever before. Be intentional about when you’re connecting with children and when you are working.
4) Pay close attention to your own social emotional needs in order to be the community of adults who best serve young people. Practice continued self-care strategies, including eating healthy, getting enough sleep, exercising, and finding time to take breaks. We must stay calm and realistic. They sense when we are worried and anxious, and our emotions directly affect the emotions of our children. We must build in time, even if only ten minutes a day, for our own wellness practices—journaling, going for a walk, meditating, exercising, for example.
5) Provide consistency in daily routines to foster a sense of safety and predictability. Craft a daily routine for you and your children to stick to. Create intentional time and structure for social emotional learning. This would ideally be five to ten minutes of dedicated practice every day. Make sure all learning activities include routines and rituals, engaging activities, and optimistic and reflective discussion on what the activity provided.
Interview: Julie DeLucca-Collins
Julie DeLucca-Collins is a coach who helps individuals and businesses identify their dreams and create a road map to get there. She helps people navigate through the real or perceived obstacles in the way. Clients gain new confidence to take bigger leaps. She recently released her new book, Confident You: Simple Habits to Live the Life You Have Imagined. For more information visit: www.goconfidentlycoaching.com/
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