“One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels,” said Gustave Flaubert, one of the most famous novelists in a letter to his mistress Louise Colet in 1852. Flaubert’s sensitivity characteristic as a novelist had successfully produced this quote which best describes how human being can control their action yet their emotion controls them unconsciously. That’s why we need emotional development skills at the earliest ages of our lives, especially for children who deal with the transitional stage to maturity (adolescence).
Here, children's literature has a big important role to develop emotional and social skills for children's cognitive stage. Children's literature also has taken on an additional role: empowering young minds with critical thinking skills to foster social-emotional learning (SEL) in a safe social setting (Myracle, L. 1995). Social-emotional learning (SEL) is the process of developing self- awareness, self-control, and interpersonal skills that are vital for school, work, and life success.
One example of how children literature delivers more than just a written lullaby is a movie entitled “Inside Out.” This movie is a great example of how children literature is used as a bridge to develop the social-emotional skill for children since the movie brings Riley’s emotions as creatures which control her mind unconsciously. Hence, this paper will discuss about how social- emotional development skill is being portrayed in Inside Out movies.
Firstly, Inside Out emotions figures teach children to pay attention to how their emotions work and why those matters. For years, adults have used children's literature as an adjunct tool to help guide a child's thinking, instill moral values, strengthen personal character, and shape behavior. There is evidence that our brains treat interactions between fictional characters in the same way as real-life social experiences. This makes stories a great tool for exploring human social and emotional life as we interact with the interests, struggles, motivations, and feelings of the characters.
Fictional stories encourage children to benefit from the experiences they have never had-including those that give rise to challenging emotions-within the protection of a world that is not real. Literature also acts as a reference point for children as role models for coping mechanisms, innovative problem-solving, and the recognition of differences (Roberts and Crawford, 2008). In Inside Out movie, we can see how our unconscious emotions are being portrayed into animations that control the main character’s mind. They are Happiness (Joy), Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust.
These emotions demonstrate what it might be like in the mind of an 11-year-old girl who struggles with having to move to a different city, away from her friends, away from her hockey league, and has a hard time pretending to be happy for her parents. The inside of Riley’s mind is depicted as an elaborate computer system controlling her thoughts and actions. This imaginative portrayal echoes Ekman’s 1993 study where he states that the expression of these emotions is universal across cultures. Each of these emotions is represented as a pilot inside Riley’s head responsible for directing her day-to-day functioning.
Here, children can learn that their emotions can control their actions and how their emotions are important in their daily activities by watching Inside Out. This issue can be a great discussion between parents and their children since the movie describes the problem that happens in Riley’s headquarter and how the emotions work to solve it. Therefore, the narratives of Riley’s emotions in the headquarter help children to acknowledge their emotions and help them in problem- solving acts.
Secondly, Riley character best depicts the emotional state of the transitional phase or adolescence. Good stories have relatable characters: they face real-life situations that include universal experiences such as loss, failure, and achievement; they show recognizable emotions such as joy, fear, and anger; and they have familiar personality traits. When a relatable character navigates universal experience and effectively solves difficult issues, children are encouraged to see themselves as agents of progress in their own worlds.
In Inside Out, the main character is Riley, who deals with her new environment as well as her transitional phase to maturity or adolescence. Many parents see that the adolescence phase can feel like a vortex of rapidly shifting emotions. In fact, some earlier theories about adolescent development indicated that "storm and stress" should be expected and suggested that adolescents appear to overreact to daily circumstances. However, more recent research refutes this obsolete idea.
Developmental experts have since discovered that what may seem to be "storm and stress" is, in fact, the normal outcome of youth learning to deal with a much wider variety of new and unfamiliar circumstances. (Larson and Ham, 1993). Here, Riley as a character is a great example to represents how adolescence sees their circumstances. Despite all the emotions in her mind, Riley manages to overcome her feeling bravely. We can see in a scene where she cries during her class due to the loneliness in her new alienated environment.
Here, adolescent can learn that is okay to pour our emotions, it is natural part of our emotional development. The end of the story when Riley finally comes out to her parents about what was happening also depicts how social ‘emotional skill is functioning to teach adolescents. It teaches us that we need to openly experience and share all our emotions, and that includes sadness, as painful as it may be sometimes.