Emotional Intelligence may be defined as having two components: emotional literacy and emotional regulation.
While many adults focus on teaching children to regulate, or manage, their emotions, that is only part of the equation for developing emotional intelligence.
First, it’s important to show children how to become emotionally literate: to identify, understand and express their feelings.
We wouldn’t ask a child to read a sentence without first learning how to identify letters, understand their purpose, and express the sounds.
With emotional literacy comes the comprehension that helps children with emotional regulation or managing the emotion they’ve discovered. It’s easier to regulate what you are aware of, what you understand.
Teachers and parents alike may need some guidance on how to teach these two components of emotional intelligence since most adults didn’t receive targeted training themselves.
Did you?
4 steps for building emotional intelligence
1. Attune to your perspective: intra-personal attunement
Adults want to know what ‘to do’ when challenging behavior arises. You might be surprised to know that the most important thing to do is to check in with how you are being. Not just what you do. To intra-personally attune.
This means you make the u-turn inward and consider what you are thinking, feeling, and sensing in your body in the face of this challenge.
How might you appear to the child right now: is your face tense, arms crossed, voice raised?
To promote emotional intelligence skills in the child, the adult must show up skillfully.
Your job is to provide co-regulation for a dysregulated child; therefore, you better check first to find your regulatory status: reactive or responsive? Dysregulated or regulated?
Even if you don’t know what to “do” in a moment of challenge with a child, you can always check in with how you are “being.”
When you intra-personally attune, you have the chance to attend and befriend to your own interior landscape. To consider if you are in a responsive or reactive state and choose a next step accordingly.
If you are reactive, you might ask a coworker or another adult to engage with the child in that moment. Feeling responsive?
Then you are ready to inter-personally attune to the child.
Moving from intra-personal to inter-personal attunement
2. Attune to the child’s perspective: inter-personal attunement
Shifting from what “to do” to how “to be” in a moment of challenging behavior can take a bit of getting used to.
Consider this: when you examine your presence and show up with balanced calm you are doing something for the child.
You are creating a climate of safety. This is foundational for the child.
When a child has a challenge, they need an organizing presence to help them feel safe again.
If you approach the child with directions and corrections, “What is wrong? Why aren’t you listening? Stop crying. We have to share in the classroom, etc.,” the child won’t feel seen, soothed, safe, or secure.
Their brain picks up on signals of warning from you: the child doesn’t perceive you as a source of safety; but rather, a source of danger. With attunement, you connect first, “Oh, gosh, you look so sad. Hmmm…..let me sit here with you for a bit.
Looks like Mandy got the truck you wanted, is that it? Yeah, no wonder you are a bit mad; Your face is so red, and you are crying big tears. That’s okay, it’s okay to just let it all out.”
Directions and corrections may feel like you are doing something, but the risk is what you are doing is pushing the child away from you. Disrupting their trust in you.
When they suffer and you do not meet them with signals of welcome, they may make the connection between their suffering and you as a source of threat/signal of warning.
You need to acknowledge their suffering.
Why attuned engagement matters
With attuned engagement, the child feels seen, soothed, safe, and secure. The 4 S’s of Attachment.
Just being understood helps most people begin to let go of troubling emotions.
If a child’s emotional reaction to something seems out of proportion to the situation, remember it’s crucial to consider what has happened from the child’s perspective, not yours.
When you describe and validate a child’s perspective, including feelings, you have the potential to interrupt the fight, fight, freeze, faint, fold or fawn reaction happening in the brain.
This starts the child down the path of calming down or regulating.
Attuning doesn’t mean you agree with or condone the behavior. Rather, you convey the message that the child’s perspective matters, including their emotional reaction to what occurred.
Think about that. Do you believe that a child is entitled to their emotions, beliefs, thoughts? If so, you might consider attuning versus directing and correcting when challenges arise.
Once you co-regulate the child back to a state of integration in the brain, form the trusted connection with them, you may find a time to teach the child what to do “instead” if the behavior displayed has been inappropriate or ineffective.
We all know how good it feels to have our experiences acknowledged rather than someone skipping over how we feel and jumping to what we need to change, fix, or do instead.
How adults get there
To be fully attuned, however, the adult must be fully present, open and receptive with what “is,” not in a rush to change the child, fix the situation, or tuning in with shame, blame, judgment or punishment.
That is not attunement.
When adults truly attune to the child’s perspective, a climate of emotional safety and security is created so the child’s nervous system begins the process of regulating.
With this, the emotions become integrated so that problem solving and learning may ensue.
Consider the following examples of how an adult can attune by describing and validating the child’s perspective:
- “Gosh, are you okay? You threw yourself on the floor when the bell rang for clean-up time. You seem frustrated that you have to stop playing to come to circle, huh? It’s hard to stop playing sometimes!”‘
- “You’re crossing your arms and sticking your lip out. Looks like you feel sad that you had to share. You wish you could have all the toys to yourself, don’t you? Sharing at school can be hard!”
- “You look mad that your tower fell! You worked so hard on it. Having to start over can be disappointing.”
Please note: these are examples of how to start a conversation, not the whole conversation. They do not include pacing guides such as pausing to consider the child’s response, etc.
Want emotional intelligence? You have to create safety first
3. Avoid shame, blame, or punishment:
For your co-regulation efforts to be successful, the child must perceive you as a signal of welcome, a trusted source of comfort.
If they come toward you during a moment of turmoil and you shame, blame, punish or ignore them their brain may learn to associate you with danger.
The result? They avoid you all together, or when you try to comfort them, they cannot be soothed.
Notice that the above examples of attunement do not contain shame/blame/punishment, nor are there offers for solutions to the challenge. Not yet. When you rush to offer solutions, to direct the conversation away from the child’s current state toward the ‘fix,’ the child may not feel felt.
They can’t sense a connection to you because you are ignoring their current state trying to get them back to happy.
Think about how this feels for you: you have something bothering you and someone just offers a solution without leaning in to how it was for you first.
Toxic positivity
Again, happiness might seem like a great goal, and it can be, but rushing to fix the child has myriad potential costs to the nervous system.
Happy is great, but not at the cost of signaling to the child that you only accept them when they are happy.
This leads to a phenomenon called Toxic Positivity. You might recognize this in yourself.
Do you feel the need to push down “negative” thoughts and feelings. To “stay positive?” Avoiding reality in this way creates myriad problems over time.
When you fail to pause and acknowledge a child’s perspective, the child might get the message they only belong when they are happy. You ignore their reality.
With this, you lose the ability to teach them how to pause to process their interior landscape so that they can effectively choose a healthy solution.
Don’t undermine all your efforts with this
4. Do not “but” or “should” on the child:
Did you notice that the attunement examples above do not validate the child’s perspective then offer a lesson with “but? Consider this exchange, “You’re mad the tower fell, but you cannot kick your friends when you are mad.”
When you do this, you undermine your attunement efforts and risk reactivating the emotions that caused the issue in the first place.
Just think about this for yourself. Would it sound authentic and soothing to you if I said, “Parenting can be so hard, feeling overwhelmed and confused much of the time, huh?
But you brought them into this world, so you are going to have to figure it out.”
Probably not.
In equal measure, avoid “should-ing” on the child, e.g., “You’re sad that you had to share, huh? You should tell her next time, ‘I don’t like that.’”
Save the lesson for when the child feels fully seen, soothed, safe, and secure. Pairing the attunement with the lesson dilutes your efforts and may disrupt the trust the child has in you.
Why this encourages emotional intelligence
Plain and simple: attuned interactions set the foundation for healthy child development in general, not just for emotional intelligence. When adults resonate with the child’s interior landscape, they send signals of safety to the child’s brain.
Such states of co-regulation may lead to traits of balance and integration in the child as their brain gets wired to anticipate the capacity to regulate oneself. Attunement helps build the child’s sense of trust in themselves, others, and potentially the world around them.
Attunement leads to a trusting connection between child and adult. Trust promotes healthy learning and development.
Engaging the child in an attuned conversation exploring their thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, body sensations, and emotions strengthens the child’s ability to identify and understand their mental activity.
Cultivating a sense of balance
Exploring one’s “interior landscape” in this way provides the foundation for mental health and well-being. For little ones, just knowing there’s a name for what is going on inside them brings some balance to the nervous system. It can create a sense of calm.
They begin to have a sense of agency over what is happening within them. But to benefit from this teaching, children have to feel emotionally safe and secure; that is why the adult needs to be intra-personally attuned, i.e., fully present, calm, and receptive.
Feeling “felt” by an adult may trigger the release of soothing chemicals in the brain and body that help strengthen the neural pathways needed for emotional regulation. These same pathways become activated as the child attempts to soothe himself in the future, helping to ease the process of calming down.
Final Thoughts about emotional intelligence
Children develop compassion and empathy in part by experiencing it from others. When adults validate children’s perspectives, they begin to develop insight into their interior landscape, including emotions.
This may help them to consider and understand how other children and adults feel in the future. Such insight helps promote compassion and empathy for others
Most adults did not grow up with a model for how to identify, understand, express and manage their emotions; instead, the message was to just MANAGE feelings, e.g., “Stop crying,” or “Don’t be angry!”
Today, science shows us the importance of teaching children how to identify, understand and express their feelings, known as emotional literacy, so they can learn healthy ways to manage those feelings, known as emotion regulation.
Together, emotional literacy and emotion regulation lead to emotional intelligence as a pathway to healthy development, learning and relationships.
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