How to enhance your kids’ EQ, or emotional intelligence, to boost their happiness and success
- Experts say enhancing EQ has long been underestimated and ignored, but parents can do a lot to help improve it
- Tips include assessing a child’s emotional skills, pointing out examples of high and low EQ, and being honest about one’s own EQ shortcomings
Parents worn down by the torrent of brainy books and blogs on child rearing may be tempted to focus on the most proven, pragmatic basics.
But they shouldn’t shy away from the concept of emotional intelligence, even if it sounds a bit touchy-feely. Experts say enhancing “EQ” may be a fundamental way to boost a child’s happiness and success, and parents can do quite a bit to promote it.
Our emotional intelligence, as opposed to our intelligence quotient or IQ, is the ability to identify our feelings and emotional responses, regulate them, and empathise with others’ feelings, says Marc Brackett, the founding director of the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence and the author of a new book on the subject, Permission to Feel.
He says we’ve long underestimated and ignored EQ, especially in kids, instead focusing on academic success and testing them to measure it. Meanwhile, their emotional skills and well-being have fallen by the wayside.
But he and other advocates say building emotional intelligence is a straightforward way to enhance physical and mental health, memory, decision-making, relationships, creativity, grades and job performance.
Brackett thinks people are catching on. The skills are being taught in many schools, typically under the title of social-emotional learning, which includes decision-making and communications.