What is Relational Competence

This chapter highlights the possible benefits of applying the social emotional learning model to play strategies for hospitalized children as a leverage to promote children's adaptive coping responses and development. Social and emotional learning can be viewed as a process of developing and using those skills required for identifying and regulating emotions, essential in maintaining a sense of self-identity, fostering positive relationships, feeling and displaying empathy for others, making choices, finding ways to solve problems and achieve personal and collective goals. Although the study regarding this cluster of life-evolving skills and its developmental implications has been mainly focused on the school context, in this chapter, the authors aim to present fruitful application to the hospital context, where social and emotional competence may support children when coping with a stressful phase of their lives; according to this perspective, a significant emphasis will be placed on promoting a systemic approach that encourages several factors for promoting children' adjustment.