Social-Emotional Learning at Home: A Parent's Guide
You are already teaching social-emotional learning. Every time you help your child name a feeling, navigate a disagreement, or consider someone else's perspective, you are building the skills that research consistently links to lifelong wellbeing. This guide will help you do it with more intention.
What You'll Learn
- Social-emotional learning (SEL) builds five core competencies that predict academic success, relationship quality, and mental health
- You do not need a curriculum. The most powerful SEL happens in everyday family moments like dinner, bedtime, and sibling conflicts
- Simple activities like emotion check-ins, perspective-taking during stories, and gratitude practice take minutes but compound over years
- SEL looks different at every age. What works for a preschooler will not work for a tween, and that is by design
- Stories are one of the most natural and effective SEL delivery mechanisms because they let children practice empathy from a safe distance
What Is Social-Emotional Learning and Why Does It Matter at Home?
Social-emotional learning is how children develop the ability to understand emotions, build relationships, and make thoughtful decisions. While schools increasingly incorporate SEL programs, the home remains the most powerful classroom for these skills—because emotional learning happens best in the context of secure relationships.
If you have heard the term “social-emotional learning” and felt like it was something that belonged in a classroom, you are not alone. SEL has become an education buzzword, and with that comes the impression that it requires lesson plans, worksheets, and trained facilitators. It does not.
At its core, SEL is simply the process through which people—children and adults alike—learn to recognize and manage their emotions, care about others, make good decisions, behave ethically and responsibly, develop positive relationships, and avoid negative behaviors. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) organizes these skills into five competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.
The research behind these competencies is substantial. A landmark meta-analysis of 213 school-based SEL programs involving over 270,000 students found that participants demonstrated an 11 percentile-point gain in academic achievement compared to controls (Durlak et al., 2011, Child Development, 82(1), 405–432, doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01564.x). They also showed improved social behaviors, reduced conduct problems, and lower emotional distress.
But here is what that research does not always emphasize: the home is where SEL begins. Jones and Bouffard's framework for SEL development emphasizes that social-emotional skills are not learned in a single context—they develop across settings, with the family providing the foundational environment that shapes how children apply these skills everywhere else (Jones & Bouffard, 2012, The Future of Children, 22(1), 17–43, doi:10.1353/foc.2012.0003). Long before a child enters a classroom, they are learning to read emotions from your face, manage frustration during play, and navigate the complexity of sharing with a sibling. Your family is the first and most enduring SEL program your child will ever experience. The question is not whether you are teaching social-emotional skills at home. You already are. The question is whether you are doing it intentionally.
What Do the Five SEL Competencies Look Like in Daily Family Life?
The CASEL framework can sound academic, but each competency maps directly to everyday family moments. When you understand what each one looks like in practice, you start seeing opportunities to nurture these skills in conversations you are already having.
Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is the ability to recognize your own emotions, thoughts, and values—and understand how they influence your behavior. For children, this starts with the most fundamental skill of all: naming what they feel.
What it looks like at home: Your child says “I feel frustrated” instead of throwing a toy. They notice their heart beating fast when they are nervous. They can identify what they are good at and what feels hard. They start sentences with “I feel...” instead of acting out the emotion physically.
How to nurture it: Name your own emotions out loud. “I am feeling stressed right now because we are running late.” Ask your child to notice where in their body they feel different emotions. Create a family feelings vocabulary that goes beyond happy, sad, and mad to include words like disappointed, overwhelmed, proud, and grateful.
Self-Management
Self-management is the ability to regulate emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in different situations. It includes managing stress, controlling impulses, motivating yourself, and setting and working toward personal and academic goals.
What it looks like at home: Your child takes a deep breath instead of hitting when angry. They can wait for their turn during a family game without melting down. They set a goal for reading a chapter book and stick with it over several days. They use a calming strategy they learned—like counting to ten or squeezing a stress ball—without being reminded.
How to nurture it: Build a “calm-down toolkit” together—a physical or mental collection of strategies your child can use when emotions feel too big. Practice these strategies during calm moments, not in the middle of a meltdown. Help your child set small, achievable goals and celebrate the effort, not just the outcome.
Social Awareness
Social awareness is the ability to take the perspective of and empathize with others, including those from diverse backgrounds. It involves understanding social and ethical norms for behavior and recognizing family, school, and community resources and supports.
What it looks like at home: Your child notices when a sibling is sad and offers comfort. They can articulate why a character in a book might feel a certain way. They show curiosity about people whose lives are different from theirs. They understand that the same situation can feel different to different people.
How to nurture it: During stories, pause and ask: “How do you think she felt when that happened?” When conflicts arise between siblings, ask each child to describe how the other one might be feeling before jumping to solutions. Expose your child to diverse perspectives through books, conversations, and community experiences.
Relationship Skills
Relationship skills involve the ability to establish and maintain healthy and supportive relationships, and to effectively navigate settings with diverse individuals and groups. This includes communicating clearly, listening actively, cooperating, negotiating conflict constructively, and seeking or offering help when needed.
What it looks like at home: Your child uses words to express what they need instead of whining or demanding. They can compromise during play with friends or siblings. They apologize when they have hurt someone—and mean it. They ask for help when they are stuck rather than giving up or having a meltdown.
How to nurture it: Model healthy conflict resolution in your own relationships. When you and your partner disagree, let your child see you work through it respectfully. Practice active listening with your child: put down your phone, make eye contact, and reflect back what they said. Create family traditions that require cooperation—cooking together, building something, planning a trip.
Responsible Decision-Making
Responsible decision-making is the ability to make caring and constructive choices about personal behavior and social interactions across diverse situations. It involves considering ethical standards, safety concerns, social norms, the realistic evaluation of consequences, and the wellbeing of self and others.
What it looks like at home: Your child thinks before acting when faced with a choice. They can articulate why certain rules exist. They consider how their decisions might affect someone else. When they make a mistake, they can reflect on what they would do differently next time.
How to nurture it: Instead of simply enforcing rules, explain the reasoning behind them. When your child faces a decision, walk through it together: “What are your options? What might happen with each one? How would that affect your sister?” Let your child make age-appropriate choices—and experience natural consequences—so they learn to evaluate outcomes firsthand.
What Are Simple SEL Activities You Can Do at Home Tonight?
You do not need special materials, a teaching degree, or even extra time. The six activities below fit into routines you already have—dinner, bedtime, weekend mornings—and each one targets specific SEL competencies. Start with one. Practice it for a week. Then add another.
Emotion Check-Ins
At dinner, go around the table and ask each family member: “How did your heart feel today?” or “What was the strongest feeling you had today?” The question is deliberately physical—it anchors the emotion in the body and makes it easier for children to access. Over time, this normalizes emotional expression and builds an expansive feelings vocabulary.
Competencies: Self-awareness, social awareness
Feelings Vocabulary Games
Play emotion charades where family members act out feelings without words and others guess. Use a feelings wheel—a visual tool that shows related emotions in concentric circles—to help children find precise words for what they feel. Research shows that the ability to differentiate between emotions (called “emotion granularity”) is linked to better emotional regulation (Barrett et al., 2001, Cognition & Emotion, 15(6), 713–724, doi:10.1080/02699930143000239).
Competencies: Self-awareness, self-management
Perspective-Taking During Stories
During your bedtime story or any shared reading, pause at key moments and ask: “How do you think they felt when that happened?” or “What would you do if you were in their shoes?” This simple practice builds the neural circuits for empathy. It works with any book, but it is especially powerful when the character is facing something your child relates to.
Competencies: Social awareness, relationship skills
Gratitude Practice
Before lights out, ask your child to name three things they are grateful for from the day. The twist: at least one has to involve another person. “I am grateful that Maya shared her crayons.” “I am grateful that Dad made pancakes.” This shifts attention outward and strengthens the connection between gratitude and relationships. Research links gratitude practice in children to increased prosocial behavior and life satisfaction (Froh et al., 2008, Journal of School Psychology, 46(2), 213–233, doi:10.1016/j.jsp.2007.03.005).
Competencies: Social awareness, self-awareness
Collaborative Problem-Solving
When sibling conflicts arise—and they will—resist the urge to play judge. Instead, become a facilitator. Ask each child to describe the problem from their perspective. Then ask both: “What could we try that would be fair to everyone?” This approach, rooted in Ross Greene's Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model, teaches children that problems are solvable and that their ideas matter.
Competencies: Relationship skills, responsible decision-making
Role-Playing Social Situations
Pick a social scenario your child finds challenging—joining a group at recess, asking to play, saying no to something they do not want to do—and act it out together. Take turns being different characters. Make it fun, not clinical. Stuffed animals or action figures work brilliantly as stand-ins. This kind of behavioral rehearsal gives children a script they can draw on when the real situation arises, reducing the cognitive load of thinking on their feet.
Competencies: Relationship skills, self-management
How Does SEL Look Different at Each Age?
A five-year-old learning to name “sad” and a twelve-year-old learning to process jealousy are both doing social-emotional work. But the approach, the language, and the expectations need to match the child's developmental stage. Here is what each age band looks like in practice.
Building the Foundation: Naming Big Feelings
Preschoolers are just beginning to understand that they have an inner emotional life. Their primary SEL work is learning to name emotions, both in themselves and in others. They are also developing the rudiments of turn-taking, sharing, and simple empathy—recognizing that another child is crying and that this means something.
At this age, keep it concrete. Use pictures of faces showing different emotions. Read books where characters experience feelings and name them explicitly. When your child has a big feeling, help them label it: “It looks like you are feeling really angry right now. Your fists are clenched and your face is red. That is anger.”
Impulse control is limited at this stage—that is developmentally normal, not a behavior problem. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for self-regulation, is one of the last brain regions to fully mature. Research on early emotional competence shows that preschool emotional understanding and regulation are direct predictors of social competence with peers (Denham et al., 2003, Child Development, 74(1), 238–256, doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00533). Expecting a three-year-old to consistently manage impulses is expecting something their brain is not yet wired to do. Your role is to be the external regulator they do not yet have internally.
Expanding the Toolkit: Managing Frustration and Building Friendships
School-age children have enough cognitive development to begin genuinely managing their emotions, not just naming them. This is the age when calming strategies—deep breathing, counting, walking away—start to actually work, because the child can understand why they work. They are also navigating the complex world of school friendships, which means practicing cooperation, dealing with unfairness, and learning that not everyone thinks the same way they do.
Social awareness deepens at this stage. Children begin to understand fairness not just as “I get what I want” but as a genuinely reciprocal concept. They can take another person's perspective with prompting, though they may not do it spontaneously yet. This is a perfect age for perspective-taking exercises during stories and conversations.
Goal-setting becomes meaningful at this stage. Help your child choose a personal goal—finishing a book, learning a skill, saving for something—and check in regularly. The experience of setting an intention and following through builds self-management skills that extend far beyond the specific goal.
Deepening Complexity: Self-Reflection and Peer Pressure
Tweens are capable of genuine self-reflection—thinking about their own thinking, evaluating their own behavior, and understanding that their emotions are influenced by their interpretations of events, not just the events themselves. This cognitive leap opens the door to more sophisticated SEL work.
At this age, peer influence becomes a dominant force. Children are navigating social hierarchies, managing the pressure to conform, and making daily decisions about who they want to be. Responsible decision-making—the fifth CASEL competency—takes center stage. Conversations about ethical dilemmas, hypothetical scenarios, and real-life choices they are facing become powerful SEL tools.
Complex empathy also emerges during this period. Tweens can understand that someone might feel two conflicting emotions at once, that a person's behavior might not match their feelings, and that systemic factors (poverty, discrimination, disability) affect people's experiences. Nurture this by discussing current events, exploring characters in more complex novels, and validating the nuance they are beginning to see in the world.
How Do Stories Build Social-Emotional Skills?
Stories are one of the most natural and powerful SEL delivery mechanisms because they allow children to practice empathy, emotional regulation, and decision-making from the safety of a narrative world. Research on narrative transport theory shows that when a child is absorbed in a story, they process the character's experiences as if they were their own.
Think about what happens when your child listens to a story about a character who feels left out, gathers courage, and finds a way to connect. Your child is not just hearing words. Their brain is simulating the experience. Neuroscience research has shown that narrative fiction functions as a simulation of social experience, allowing the reader to “practice” social interactions and emotional responses in a safe context (Mar & Oatley, 2008, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173–192, doi:10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x). Stories are not escapism. They are rehearsal.
Every core SEL competency can be exercised through story. Characters model self-awareness when they name their feelings. They demonstrate self-management when they choose to breathe instead of react. Social awareness develops when the reader considers why an antagonist might behave the way they do. Relationship skills are practiced when characters communicate, cooperate, and resolve conflicts. And responsible decision-making is at the heart of every narrative arc that involves a choice and its consequences.
The effect deepens when stories are personalized. When a child encounters a character who shares their name, their interests, and their specific struggles, the distance between “the character” and “me” collapses. The child does not just observe empathy or courage being modeled—they experience themselves as someone who is empathetic and courageous. That shift in self-concept is the heart of lasting SEL development.
This is the approach behind HeroMe. Each personalized adventure is built around your child's real-world experiences and challenges, embedding social-emotional learning into a narrative that feels like it was written just for them—because it was. When your child reads about their own character navigating a friendship challenge, managing a big emotion, or making a brave decision, they are building the internal scripts they will draw on when those moments arise in real life.
References
- Barrett, L. F., Gross, J., Christensen, T. C., & Benvenuto, M. (2001). Knowing what you're feeling and knowing what to do about it: Mapping the relation between emotion differentiation and emotion regulation. Cognition & Emotion, 15(6), 713–724. doi:10.1080/02699930143000239
- Denham, S. A., Blair, K. A., DeMulder, E., Levitas, J., Sawyer, K., Auerbach-Major, S., & Queenan, P. (2003). Preschool emotional competence: Pathway to social competence? Child Development, 74(1), 238–256. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00533
- Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymnicki, A. B., Taylor, R. D., & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The impact of enhancing students' social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development, 82(1), 405–432. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01564.x
- Froh, J. J., Sefick, W. J., & Emmons, R. A. (2008). Counting blessings in early adolescents: An experimental study of gratitude and subjective well-being. Journal of School Psychology, 46(2), 213–233. doi:10.1016/j.jsp.2007.03.005
- Jones, S. M., & Bouffard, S. M. (2012). Social and emotional learning in schools: From programs to strategies. The Future of Children, 22(1), 17–43. doi:10.1353/foc.2012.0003
- Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173–192. doi:10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x
Frequently Asked Questions
Build Your Child's Emotional Intelligence Through Story
Create a personalized adventure where your child practices empathy, self-awareness, and problem-solving through a story built around their world—because the best SEL happens when it does not feel like a lesson.
