[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Life Interview
Development in young children consists of a gradual growth in the ability to recognize, label, and appropriately respond to their feelings. Each of these steps is important to their emotional health and must be learned through repeated interactions with others. As such, emotions serve adaptive functions as children attempt to adjust themselves to their social communities. These functions include the ability to communicate inner states, respond to emerging situations, and master their environments. For adults to facilitate such growth, they must first realize the intrinsic nature of children's emotional development and its impact on all areas of development. The television personality known as Mister Rogers once called himself an "emotional archaeologist." Like an archaeologist, the adults in children's lives need to "collect" information about children. As they gather data, the adults "meet" children at their developmental levels, joining them in creating meaning from this information. Adults need to dig for clues, dust off implications observed in children's dramatic play, scrutinize evidence found in child-to-child interactions, interpret information shared by parents and children, and collect samples of child-created products.
As children develop emotionally, they construct increasingly complex narratives that structure their experiences in terms of socially available concepts of emotion. Emotional life is construed as the "enactment of narrative." In other words, emotions are feelings that come in response to experiences, circumstances, or other people. Stimuli from the environment cause physiological responses in the body that lead to feelings such as anger, fear, sadness, or surprise.
Certain emotional tendencies are innate in mammals, although they change developmentally across the life span as a function of environmental as well as internal brain experiences. Although we have long appreciated the role of experience in psychological maturation, we can now link changes in emotional behaviors to environmental and brain changes throughout life. Several factors influence children's emotional development during their preschool years......
