Embracing Your Child’s Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence or EQ is the ability to have self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and socials skills. These five components of EQ, when practiced daily, can help someone move through stress, overcome challenges and defuse disagreements with more ease while being able to communicate effectively with compassion. Not only should you be practicing these components but it is important to help your children develop healthy coping and socializing skills early. This is especially true for children of coParents because they are faced with a lot of different emotions during this pivotal transition.
Where IQ can be used to help determine someone’s intellectual ability, EQ is important for helping to manage a person’s emotions and improving their relationships. So if our goal is to raise happy, confident, resilient, and compassionate adults who are successful and fulfilled in life, then EQ is a vital key towards that vision for our children. Discussing and coming to an agreement with your coParent about how to support your child’s EQ will help them to develop a healthy mind.
When we’re talking about a child’s EQ, it is important to guide him or her in finding ways to identify feelings and be able to regulate their impulses in a healthy and productive way. A few suggestions would be to:
- Accept your child’s emotions. An example of what to say when they are mad would be: “That must’ve been frustrating.”
- Help your child label the emotion. For example, “I’m noticing you’re upset.”
- Encourage him or her to express their feelings by asking, “How did that make you feel?”
When it comes to neuroscience and parenting or coParenting, it is such a vital factor in being able to understand how the two relate to one another. So now that you have a bit more understanding about how the brain works, how children’s emotions can affect their learning and the importance of emotional intelligence, perhaps your awareness can shed some light on the importance of being more conscious and empathetic when your child gets flooded with feelings. You should always consider contacting a professional if you feel overwhelmed or stuck, because after all you want to do what is best for your child.
For more coParenting blogs and tools to help you in your coParenting journey, CLICK HERE and download our FREE coParenting app.
About Tangee Veloso
