Thursday, Jul 1, 2010Coaching Emotional Intelligence Children

You can help develop your child’s emotional intelligence by coaching him. Coaching emotional intelligence in your child helps him identify, assess and manage his emotion. Children who experience support and love from their parent’s coaching succeed in fostering friendships better and in living lives that are healthier and more successful. They also are less likely to be involved in antisocial acting out, drugs, violence or premature sex.

You can best  “Emotional Coach” your child by first understanding your reactions.

How do you deal with your child’s feelings? Are you uncomfortable if his emotions are negative? Does his sadness make you uncomfortable or angry? Does his emotion make you feel out of control? Looking back in your life and discovering why you feel as you do. Look backwards at how your parents handled your emotions. Have you adopted their methods? The following attitudes will make you a great Emotional Coach.

• You value your child’s feelings even if you don’t appreciate their actions.
• You permit your child to experience his emotions as valuable.
• You see negative emotions as an opportunity to grow, become closer and teach him problem solving.
• You work to understand his feelings because they are so important.

My child’s negative emotions help me teach him and become closer to him. Encourage your child to talk about his feelings, classify them, and know that you understand him.  This will help you establish closeness. If your child doesn’t understand what’s being taught to him at school, let him vent his frustrations and assure him that you understand how he feels.  Then, help him gain the necessary understanding he didn’t get at school.  You’ll both be closer to one another and he’ll progress with his school work.

Walk a Mile in His Shoes Using Empathetic Listening. This is the key skill of Emotion Coaching. If you want to learn Empathetic Listening, use your eyes, your ears, your imagination, your words and your heart to let your child know his feelings and desires are perfectly acceptable. Watch for evidence of his emotions, like sullen silence.  Listen for the messages lying beneath his words. Try to imagine how they must be feeling. Say what you see or hear in non-judgmental words. Feel what he’s feeling in your own heart.

Teach Your Child The Name of His Emotions. Using your observations, name the emotion your child is experiencing, because they don’t know what the emotion is in the early days of their lives. Labeling can help your child recover more quickly from a powerful surge of emotion he’s not experienced before. It’s not useful to tell your child what he should feel.  It’s enough to identify what he is feeling.

Explore Possible Solutions. Consistent follow through with consequences for behavior make a child feel secure. Teach your child what the limits are. Find out what your child was trying to accomplish. Let him offer other solutions before you do. If his solutions aren’t workable, ask questions that will show him what might happen when he gives them a try. Some questions you might ask are:

• “Does this solution seem fair to you?”
• “How will this solution work?
• “How are you likely to feel? How are other people likely to feel?

You might see that your child’s solution won’t work.  It’s sometimes better to let him go through with it for the sake of his learning.

By using these emotional intelligence coaching techniques, you can develop your child’s maturity and success in life experiences.