Children need to feel emotions and practice accepting them to develop self-control and emotional intelligence.
Self-regulation of emotions is a crucial component of emotional intelligence. It is the capacity to control one’s emotional experience and expression. Children’s emotional self-regulation skills grow with practice. Most youngsters begin to use methods to avoid distracting external stimuli around four.
When children reach the age of ten, they begin to use more complicated mechanisms for emotional self-regulation. These tactics are divided into two categories:
- Children who do their best to address the problem
- Children who tolerate their feelings
A youngster engages in problem-focused response; they can make a change to address a problem. They do this by identifying the issue and developing a strategy to solve it. When they believe the issue is impossible, they resort to emotion-focused coping by trying to accept and manage to suffer.
Emotional intelligence includes each of these tactics. Awareness, comprehension, and the capacity for expressing and managing one’s emotions are all parts of emotional intelligence.
Emotions are not an inconvenience.
For you to help strengthen your child’s emotional intelligence, they’ll need to be aware of and understand emotions. Emotions are not an inconvenience, and it’s part of human evolution that has a purpose and motivates one’s behavior.
At times, it can be tempting to give your child a gadget for them to calm down. But, in truth, it isn’t a good move. You need to let your child experience feeling the emotions, so they can develop self-control and enhance their emotional intelligence.
How can you help your child amplify their emotional intelligence?
According to Dr. John Gottman, improving and enhancing your child’s emotional intelligence is always feasible. Dr. Gottman outlines the five phases of emotional coaching. It comes from his phenomenal work of “Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child” that will aid parents in helping their children build their emotional quotient.
And these techniques are to:
- Recognize your child’s feelings.
- Viewing emotions as a means of connecting and teaching
- To empathize with and validate a child’s feelings.
- To assist children in labeling their feelings.
- To assist your youngster with problem-solving with constraints.
When you teach your child to inhibit impulses and avoid distractions, they’ll become more engaged in prosocial behaviors and accomplish their goals. The five phases don’t have to be finished in a single conversation if the issue requires a giant leap to overcome. The secret is to be patient.
