How to teach children to master their experience of the world; their reality
Human beings have the potential to think, feel and act in ways that bring them happiness and success.
We’re capable of being the ‘architects of our own experiences’, as Lisa Feldman, a professor of psychology, states, but the power to do so depends on whether we have mastered the regulation of our internal state. Our inner reality creates our external reality.
In today’s world, our parenting and educational approaches are geared to maximise our children’s intellectual literacy and capability. However, it is their emotional literacy that we need to bring a magnifying lens to.
Why do we focus on teaching our children to think and reason, when the secret sauce of happiness and success lies in maintaining emotional balance and being able to regulate our emotional state?
Emotional regulation, which is the ability to manage our emotional state and understand the emotional states of others, is paramount to success in life. The research on Emotional Intelligence or Emotional Quotient (EQ) makes it clear that it is a greater determiner of success than one’s Intelligence Quotient (IQ). To reach any leadership position, a high EQ — the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes is essential.
Additionally, the ability to understand ourselves emotionally, helps us create the balance that is necessary for us to optimise our potential. These skills are especially beneficial for children, when taught from an early age.
How they deal with their feelings will set the neural basis for their health, happiness and success. This means that we must strengthen a child’s inner resources to face an inescapable range of experiences from outside sources.
Gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and slander; each one of these emotions will be experienced at some point in a child’s journey through life. Can we accept that our children will go through a range of negative emotions, just as they will through the positive ones?
We cannot protect them from negative emotions, even if our instincts as parents tell us that they need to be sheltered from the pain. As much as a heart break will hurt or failure will make them feel humiliated, we will have less control over their experiences than they do. However, by empowering them to deal with the emotions rather than avoiding them, we can help them become stronger and feel confident.
How can you empower your children to develop emotional intelligence?
When your children are young and don’t have a complete range of vocabulary, you can start to show them cards or charts with faces of various emotions drawn on them. When your child experiences an emotion, like when he is happy with the food he is eating or sad because of his crayon has crumbled, show him the chart with the faces and help your child to label the emotion as a word.
You can push this further when your child is older by asking him to express his emotions. If he looks visibly angry when a sibling breaks a toy — ask your child if he is irritated or disgusted. You will slowly increase the range of words and vocabulary for your child to express. If he says that he is irritated — ask him for the intensity.
The description for intensity can start out by physically asking your child to express the size of the feeling — is it a tiny amount of irritation or a huge amount?
It is very important for your children to begin to gain emotional mastery as well as understand how to regulate their emotions. Emotional mastery begins with being able to feel emotions and then it grows with articulating and labelling the feeling and its intensity.
As children get slightly older an effective activity that you can do, while watching a tv program, is to keep the volume on mute and have a playful discussion on labelling the feeling of the actor by his or her expression. On the flip side, talk about how the sound is used by directors to add to the total intensity of the viewer’s empathy with the actor on screen. So, play the TV with and without the volume. Talk about the differences. This will help your children to learn how to read facial and body language cues, a skill that people with high EQ are able to do.
What we learn about emotions when we are young is engraved into our neural pathways. Therefore, we should begin by parenting for core beliefs such as, ‘I am enough’, ‘it is safe and okay to feel my feelings’, ‘I have the right to express my feelings’, ‘life is essentially safe and nurturing’ and other self-assuring perspectives.
This also means that we need to show unconditional love and acceptance. No child should feel like he or she needs to perform in order to be loved and accepted. This can be achieved by focusing on our children’s state of being. So, instead of always asking our children ‘what did you do today?’ we should ask them ‘how are you feeling today?’
All this while, our attention has revolved around IQ and while its overall average has been increasing around the world, the average EQ has been steadily decreasing. This is one of the reasons why depression and conflicts have been on the rise.
At schools, more importance is given to learning to read and write and do math, rather than to build our emotional muscles and brain connections. That is why the extremely important job of teaching emotional mastery remains largely with the parents. The way we parent needs to help make sure that children not only survive, but thrive in a world that is sure to give them a full range of emotional experiences.
Perhaps, if the children of today learn to develop and flex their emotional muscles, we can look forward to a world that is more understanding, tolerant, loving, connected and peaceful. Less depression. More bliss. What a wonderful world this would be.
