How to Help Your Child Build Their Emotional Intelligence

How to Help Your Child Build Their Emotional Intelligence

Recent child development theory focuses on the importance of children being connected to their emotions to foster good overall mental health. Healthy emotional development can positively influence relationships, behavioural problems, and school achievement. Emotion coaching provides a set of guidelines parents can use to help their children to become more emotionally aware and eventually self-soothe.

There are five main steps in emotion coaching:

  • Attend to the emotion;
  • Identify and label the emotion, i.e. “I can see you’re feeling…”;
  • Validate the emotion “because…”;
  • Meet the child’s emotional need (i.e. If the child is sad, offer comfort); and
  • Collaborative problem solving “What can we do about this…”

At The Therapy Centre, we provide emotion coaching to parents whose children are being treated for a variety of issues.

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