How To Be Your Child’s Emotion Coach
18 18 growing growingupupchico roseville magazine magazine
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parenting
By Kelly McGinnis
W
ould you be surprised if I told you one of the biggest reasons parents and children struggle is the inability to achieve their goals? A recent study of 2.1 million people from 140 different countries was surveyed with the primary focus of measuring people’s happiness levels and positive emotions. The study showed that people between the ages of 18-22 showed exceedingly high levels of joy and excitement. Over time, the number of people reporting high levels of happiness decreased until around age 52, where it was an all-time low before slowly increasing. Researchers asked the particularly important question, “What causes these extremely low levels of happiness?” The answer might shock you: PARENTING. Let us look at it in a different way. Parents and kids often have competing goals. All the parents working from home know firsthand how difficult it is to achieve your work goals while simultaneously supporting and helping your children with distance learning. Kids get frustrated, too. They want to spend quality time with Mom and Dad, but we are distracted by our screens or phones. This is just the start of an emotional roller coaster. The next thing we know, our kids act out in defiance, throw a temper tantrum, or behave inappropriately. We immediately jump to action, trying to stop or redirect the behavior, and many times we miss the most important piece.
WHAT EMOTION IS BEHIND THE BEHAVIOR? If you take a minute to review the titles in the parenting section at the local bookstore, you will find a myriad of books offering to help solve many difficult behaviors such as: “How to stop a temper tantrum,” “Getting your child to sleep through the night,” “Why my child won’t eat his broccoli,” “Protect teens from negative effects of social media,” and more. The interesting piece is that all those titles focus on unwanted behavior. In fact, most parenting books focus on fixing behaviors. Dr. John Gottman set out to discover and identify what it takes to raise an emotionally intelligent child. “Dr. Gottman undertook a variety of scientific studies, which led him to the conclusion that the key to good parenting lies in understanding the emotional source of problematic behavior. He performed a detailed laboratory examination of children whose parents interacted with their emotions in various styles. The conclusions he reached were striking.” The parents that used Emotion Coaching and helped their children master the understanding and regulation of emotions were more successful. The children had higher self-confidence levels, performed better in social and academic situations, and were even physically healthier. For decades researchers have been looking into the different types of parenting styles. The findings continue to be the same.
