How to Raise Your Child's Emotional Intelligence?

Children are hyper aware of their surroundings. A child experiences feelings stronger than an adult can, which means it’s really important to have your child in the best emotional state possible.

Generally speaking, children also learn much faster compared to adults, and this can be used to grow their emotional intelligence potential with time.

There are many ways you can teach your child about emotional intelligence and help them make sense of their own emotions.

We’re going to explain all the various strategies that you can use to raise your child’s emotional intelligence.

1. Teach Your Children Empathy & Compassion:

The easiest way to improve your child’s emotional intelligence is by being emotionally intelligent yourself.

You should spend a lot of time listening to what your child has to say, how they see the world through their eyes, and what you can do to guide them.

Remember, a 4-year-old child will have a very different take on things compared to an adult.

Teach your child basic listening skills, encourage self-expression, and give them good positive feedback whenever possible.

Of course, you shouldn’t go the other way and spoil them, but it’s totally fine to make them feel wanted and valued.

2. No Repression or Aggression:

The other side of teaching children empathy is to never teach them to repress their feelings. Obviously, few parents do that intentionally.

It’s always important to stay mindful and notice if your child is having a hard time expressing themselves or if they feel suffocated at home or at school.

Repressed feelings tend to kill empathy in children, and it’s also the gateway to other nasty habits during the teenage years and adulthood.

Likewise, you should never resort to aggression when raising your child. Avoid scolding them, spanking them, or verbally abusing them.

As far as their social environment goes, your children shouldn’t be taught aggression, or they’ll end up being bullies or impulsive individuals as they grow up.

All of these things stifle emotional intelligence and leave your children lacking in verbal ability and understanding of social cues.

3. Develop a Problem-Solving Methodology: 

One of the most underappreciated ways of raising emotional intelligence is through problem-solving. 

It’s a fact that children who problem-solve are high in emotional intelligence and are much more likely to be in tune with themselves compared to other children who are lacking in that area.

Problem-solving can be as simple as learning how to solve math equations right without looking at hints. More advanced problem-solving involves the child actually doing things in the real world.

For example, if you enrol your child in a drawing class, they’ll be able to latch on to skills that help them draw better, which in turn means a higher likelihood that they are thinking and regulating their emotions to accomplish the task.

If all the above sounds too intimidating yet for your children, perhaps it’s better to start at the very beginning.

If they’re still unable to walk properly, you can start there! Teach them how to walk, making sure you guide them and cheer them on as they do the task right.

No matter how big a task is, it can be broken down into simpler steps and explained in a way that makes sense logically and emotionally.

4. Introduce Them to Literature: 

Another powerful method of developing a child’s emotional intelligence is through stories.

The art of story-telling is an excellent way of evoking emotions and forcing individuals to examine themselves. Applied to children, you can start by reading to them bedtime literary stories.

You can give them a summary of the story, explain the themes, characters, and motivation behind every action, and determine whether any examples can be followed in real life.

Larger-than-life characters bring out the emotional and imaginative side in children really well. It’s why almost everyone loved Peter Pan, Tom Sawyer, and Alice in Wonderland as they grew up.

Reading and getting inside the heads of literary characters will soon have a profound impact on how your child speaks, expresses themselves, and deals with turbulent situations.

As they grow up, they can be introduced to more advanced stories that test their understanding of the world at large, complex ones where there are social and moral dimensions to explore.

Of course, literature is not just restricted to books. It’s everywhere. There are a lot of movies, cartoons, and TV shows that have amazing stories your child can learn from and engage with as they discover their emotions.

Literature and fiction are your best tools when it comes to gradually raising your child’s emotional intelligence.

5. Describe Their Emotions:

Your child has just come home from school, teary-eyed and tired. You ask them what’s wrong, and you hear the following:

“Our teacher at school scolded us for not doing our homework properly.” 

How would you react in this instance? The best way to react is to validate their feelings, tell them their teacher wanted the best for them, and not be sad. You just gave a name to the emotion that they were feeling at the time.

This method of labelling emotions helps your child make sense of what they felt. If you just tell them not to be sad without offering an explanation or, even worse, brush them off completely, it will create confusion in their minds.

They’ll be unable to understand what just happened, and they’ll be ill-equipped to understand how to deal with sadness.

The above applies to every other emotion out there. Love, hatred, jealousy, envy, anger, and laziness are all worth discussing.

Strive to always validate, educate, and explain what’s happening to your child. The more involved you are, the better their emotional intelligence will be for it.

6. Coping Skills Build Emotional Intelligence:

Building on what came before, this last idea is all about learning skills to deal with emotions.

Angry children, when raised not to repress their feelings, can be taught how to calm down. You can tell your child to always take a deep breath when feeling angry, and they’ll do so promptly.

Another key skill here is personal responsibility. At the end of the day, you won’t be able to stay by your child’s side all the time. This is why it’s crucial that they learn that they are not powerless when dealing with their emotions.

They can learn to control, harness, and direct their emotions, positive or negative, towards doing something healthy. This might come later, especially during teenage years, but its importance cannot be stressed enough.

Finally, another vital skill is acceptance. Teach your child to accept the feeling as it is happening and not succumb to it. While we did discuss the parent’s role in validating their child’s feelings, the child still has to learn to do so on their own as well.

If your child is feeling sad, it makes sense fir them to cry, and you really should let them do so. Everything else can wait until they’ve calmed down and are ready to listen.

All of these skills contribute to raising emotional intelligence and making it permanent.

In Conclusion:

Navigating the complex process of raising your children requires that you take the necessary steps to improve their emotional intelligence.

There’s no doubt that EI is just as important as IQ, and it’s a big predictor of success later in life.

Emotional intelligence is also the surest way to raise healthy individuals who will leave a positive impact on their environment when they grow up.

We made sure to include a little bit of everything here to help you guide your children and raise their emotional intelligence using various methods. Hope this was useful!