About Me
Social Emotional Learning for kids
Kumudu De Silva
All great things start with a passion for doing something you deeply desire, and my passion was to be the best mom to my children.
I’m a proud mother of two boys, aged eight and thirteen. However, an unfortunate result of being a working mom is that I only got 2-3 hours a day to spend time with my children. Striving to progress in my own career and assisting my husband with his growing business meant that I was determined to spend my limited time with my kids by having fun with them but at the same time, guiding them to becoming self-confident, goal oriented young adults.
Since my children were already learning academics and education curriculum at a school level, I realized that it is important to focus on development aspects they don’t learn from school in my limited time with them. I felt that the provision of emotional strength to children is very important during their early childhood days. To me, when children are emotionally strong, they are better equipped to handle real world situations and figure out what is good and what is not, on their own.
This led me to look for materials and content that I could share with my kids to help them become self-confident, manage their emotions, have empathy, be able to make responsible decisions and solve real world problems. Yet, I had my reservations about giving internet connectivity to my children at home as I was not confident with content filtering options. Ultimately, the only real choices available to me were good reading books.
The kind of books I had in my mind would also have suggested ways for my children to be in control of their thoughts and behaviors, be mindful, self-confident and goal oriented. However, I was unable to find any such books that fit this purpose written in a Sri Lankan context. This left me no option but to create what I wished for my kids on my own. After all, isn’t that what all parents do, giving the best to their children, whatever it takes?
Over two years, I conducted a lot of research, studied different mindfulness practices, gathered literature in child psychology and became a mindfulness practitioner. The end result were many books for my two children.
I’ve narrated the stories to my kids many times, in particular as bedtime stories, and they have always been fascinated by it. They even shared it with their friends and parents, who really loved it too and encouraged me to share my stories with everyone and help kids develop not only academic skills but also social and emotional skills.
And that led me here, publishing my stories and sharing it with many other children.