Emotional Intelligence
Parenting with EQ Can Give You Another Set of Tools for Success
Managers have long realized the benefits of emotional intelligence. These same skills can help parents strengthen parent-child bonds and bring out the best in their kids.
Not unlike leadership styles, parenting styles have experienced a significant shift in the last several decades.
With Daniel Goleman’s popularization of the concepts of Emotional Intelligence (in his 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More than IQ), leaders have come to value softer skills, such as self-awareness (being able to accurately identify your feelings and their source), self-management (using that information to manage your behavior and your interactions with those around you), and empathy as important complements to traditional business skills, such as knowledge and experience.
Goleman conducted “…research at nearly 200 large, global companies [and] found that truly effective leaders are distinguished by a high degree of emotional intelligence. Without it, a person can have first-class training, an incisive mind, and an endless supply of good ideas, but he still won’t be a great leader.”
When we consider the similarities between leadership and parenting, it is easy to see why emotional intelligence can be important for parents, too.
Like successful leaders, successful parents combine knowledge and experience with empathy, wisdom, self-awareness and self-management. Parents can use these skills to safely navigate many of the common challenges of raising children.
How can parent's successfully navigate these challenges? By using emotional intelligence to maintain a level of clarity that allows them to respond to child behavior in ways that encourage, rather than discourage, children to cooperate.
Obviously children have a great deal less professional and life experience, but as human beings they share many of the same motivations that adults have. Children have many of the same needs from the person to whom they are subordinate (parent/guardian) that employees have from the person to whom they are subordinate (managers/supervisors).
Like most of us, children feel encouraged to cooperate and to do their best when they feel:
- Heard
- Appreciated
- Valued
- Motivated
- Expectations are clear and fair
- Liked
- Included
- Encouraged…take a moment to finish the list with some of the things that have motivated you to do your best at work on in a similar situation. Use these ideas to think about how you can bring out the best in your children.
There are many ways to parent using emotional intelligence. Here are some examples:
Choosing to provide empathetic and validating responses to children - Such responses are useful because-
- They strengthen parent-child bonds
- Improve parent-child communication
- Help children feel heard
- Help children become self-aware
- Provide children with safe opportunities to explore feelings and emotions
Actively working to create a cooperative home environment - There are many benefits to a cooperative environment, such as –
- Reduced power struggles
- Opportunities for children to practice responsible decision making
- Increased feelings of self-value in children
- Increased feelings of belonging in children
- Increased buy-in (the household is more likely to run smoothly when everyone decides and commits together on how chores and other responsibilities will be managed)
Choosing to examine and address their own unmet needs, which is useful because –
- People that are satisfied with themselves and their lives are likely to be more successful parents
- Parents are better able to establish and honor personal boundaries
- Parents reduce frustration and misplaced anger
Emotional intelligence is an important skill for parents because it gives you one more tool for a really tough job. Why not give it a try? When you bring out the best in yourself and your children - everyone wins.
