This Service-Learning (SL) experience gave me the opportunity to interact with children from lower income families and it created a greater awareness about the complexity of emotion dysregulation which they face. One child left me appalled during the session on Anger when she mentioned that “touching her body” triggered her anger and that she would “beat her hamster” when she felt angry. This made me realize that there are underlying issues to the emotion dysregulation that children from lower income families face and that it is difficult to tackle this issue because of the various circumstances they are in. However, through programmes such as this SL, it is possible to reach out to these children and teach them emotion regulating skills and highlight this as an important soft skill. Hence, I am interested to participate in future programmes that aim to enhance similar soft skills to children at-risk. 

 

Facilitating this programme made me feel more confident in conducting future SL projects. Before the implementation, my group planned the sessions with sufficient buffer time and I expected our programme to go smoothly. However, session 2 came as a shock as we had less than 20 minutes to conduct it and I remember how stressed we felt about what we could accomplish that session. Thankfully, my group was able to adapt quickly to the situation and we managed to complete one of our main activities. This experience revealed my flexibility and made me feel confident in running a programme even if sudden changes were to occur again. This learning will allow me to advise my future teams to have the same flexibility and adaptability to unforeseen changes during our implementation, therefore reducing our stress levels.