Supporting Children’s Sense of Meaning: Identity, self-narratives, hope, optimism, direction and contribution.
Meaning, along with Sense of Safety, is an indicator of well-being. It is the driver of children’s lives, helping them to engage in constructive activity and connect successfully with others. Meaning comprises children’s sense of identity, their narratives about who they are, how they fit into the world and where they belong. A positive sense of meaning is marked by children’s hope and optimism for the future, their broad sense of purpose and direction and the belief that their activity has value and contributes to the world around them.
A positive sense of meaning develops when children experience the following conditions.
1. Alliances: Children form strong relationships with others such as attachments with caregivers and whānau, friendships with peers and rapport with teachers or coaches.
2. Positive Experience: Children sense positive emotions when they engage in activity regularly associated with experience social, emotional or physical pleasure. They also experience positive motions when they participate in intrinsically motivating, absorbing pursuits and enjoy a strong sense of accomplishment.
3. Consistency: Repeated constructive interaction in children’s lives help them to develop the templates they need understand and predict patterns of activity in familiar environments and to discern nuanced interactions across their various settings.
4. Optimal Disequilibrium: Learning and well-being requires that children’s brains are sufficiently challenged to pique their interest in particular activities. The brain must be somewhat unsettled to learn new things but not so swamped as to be overwhelmed by tasks or life circumstances that new learning is restricted largely to defensive perceptions and unhelpful responses.
Helping children develop a strong sense of meaning that helps them to successfully navigate the way through their lives involves focusing on the four dimensions listed above. For caregivers, whānau and teachers, this means fostering authentic positive relationships, creating opportunities for children to engage in preferred and satisfying activity, ensuring consistency within children’s various environments, along with overlaps of social and cultural practice between settings, and ensuring that children’s activities are sufficiently challenging to provide novelty and new learning but not so difficult that they become stressed and learning is limited.
From:
Annan, J. (2022). 7 Dimensions: Children’s emotional well-being. Auckland, Mary-Egan Publishing. ISBN: 9780473634407