PARENTING PLUS:Teaching children about their emotions
I HAVE written before about helping children to recognise and express their emotions so that they don’t have to act out their distress through their behaviour.
When I speak to groups of parents I often quote the research findings that children who are emotionally supported in this way have better physical health and score higher academically than children whose parents don’t offer such emotional guidance. These children get along better with friends, they have fewer behaviour problems and generally experience less negative feelings and more positive feelings.
What you are doing, by focusing on the feelings of your children, is creating emotionally intelligent children and emotionally intelligent children are more resilient. So while an emotionally intelligent child will still experience sadness, anger or fear under difficult circumstance, they will be better able to cope with this distress and to comfort themselves and to bounce back.
Being emotionally aware like this is a proven buffer for children against the impact of lots of life’s troubles.
I have listed here Daniel Goleman’s five stages of development of emotional intelligence to help you to make sense of both your own development and the development of your children.
1 Knowing your own emotionsThis really is a self awareness to be able to recognise your feelings as they are happening. It is harder than you think to notice how you feel, because many emotions are so over-whelming that we are too busy feeling them and reacting to them to work out what they are!
2 Regulating emotionsOnce we have that awareness of what we are feeling, we need then to be able to regulate it. Regulating it might mean, for example, not venting our anger but rather finding ways to calm ourselves down. Practically, with children, it can mean just not blowing your top when they misbehave.
3 Motivating oneselfWe need to be able to use our emotions to lead us in the direction of our goals. This sometimes means delaying gratification and holding back from being impulsive.
Similarly, if you feel angry, for example because you didn’t get selected for a team, you can choose to use your anger to motivate you to train harder so you might get selected the next time. This kind of emotional self-control allows you to stay focused and attentive on what it is that you want to achieve.
4 Recognising feelings in othersThis is really the extension of self-awareness to having an awareness of others. Being able to put yourself into somebody else's shoes means that you can often understand things from their perspective and so be more tolerant and patient. This ability to recognise the feelings of others is called empathy.
5 Managing relationshipsThis is where emotional intelligence can really benefit you in the longer term. Managing relationships is really about trying to manage the emotions of other people. It's a skill that great leaders (and great parents) have to be able to influence, motivate, encourage and support other people. When you use distraction to make a grumpy child laugh and forget about their troubles briefly, you are acting at the top level of your emotional intelligence!
So, try to be aware of your emotions and help your children to notice their feelings. This does give them a really strong base for building relationships with people and for coping with adversity.
However, developing emotional intelligence is a process. While we may find that some days we can be really attentive to our feelings and the feelings of our children, on other days we can be too overwhelmed to attend to anything!
This is not a bad thing; it is just life.
What I would encourage you to do, therefore, is to keep trying to be attuned to what you feel. Even to maintain an awareness that most behaviours occur in response to how we feel might be enough to remind you that your child may not be “just being bold”; perhaps they too are under pressure.
Clinical psychologist David Coleman is presenter of RTÉ One's Teens in the Wild
