Emotional intelligence involves being aware of one's own feelings and being able to manage them effectively and being able to respond appropriately to other's feelings. This awareness of feelings in oneself and in others should lead to quality relationships. Emotionally intelligent parenting focuses this awareness in our relationships with our children, but it doesn’t stop there. It extends to helping our children develop their own good relationships with others.
When a crisis occurs or chaos reigns in the household, an emotionally intelligent parent is expected to follow certain steps:
1)First acknowledge your own feelings about the situation and the child involved. Every situation or stimulus in the environment triggers stored up feelings (both negative and positive). Most times these feelings are not relevant to the present situation and so should not be a guide to the reaction to the situation.
2)Recognize the negative feelings that can potentially block good thinking and put them aside to be dealt with later.
3)Listen closely to what the child is saying, paying attention to the emotional message beneath the words or actions- what is the child trying to show? How is he hurting? Why is he hurting? What is the underlying trigger for this hurt?
4)Respond to the child's hurt, not to the words or to the behaviour that results from the hurt; but rather to the need for comfort or safety to release the hurt feelings that are triggering the inappropriate behaviour.
But emotionally intelligent parenting is not only for crises or chaos times. It should be the "natural" way of parenting. Outside of these crises times emotionally intelligent parenting is about:
1)Teaching children how to correctly identify and label their feelings. This means teaching the feeling words, not only sad, glad, mad and scared, but also the variations of these such as frustration, excitement, etc., and to identify the real origin of these feelings.
2)Helping children correctly perceive others' feelings and therefore appropriately responding to them. Steve Tobias, Psy.D. in his article "The feelings vocabulary" (http://www.kidseq.com/article.html) explains the difference between anger and frustration and how important it is to be able to tell the difference. He says, "frustration means something is hard to accomplish. Anger usually means that someone is trying to hurt you (even yourself as in when you berate yourself for doing something wrong)". The appropriate response to frustration is different from the response to anger.
3)Helping children deal with their feelings in appropriate ways. This includes assisting them to see and understand another's point of view. According to Child Development theorists children below age 6 or 7 have difficulty seeing another's point of view. They can only see the world form their own perspective. As they get older and their development proceeds with good guidance they get better at understanding and tolerating other people's point of view and therefore are better at cooperating and compromising. Maurice Elias, Ph.D. provides some interesting suggestions for teaching children how to perceive and react to other's point of view in his article " A better perspective: helping kids to see the other side of things (http://www.ok.org/homemaker/tishrei60/pa...
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