What does it entail to train a child to be emotionally intelligent?
As a parent, encouraging your child to label their emotions is a vital role in raising an emotionally intelligent child. How do parents teach their children to learn emotional intelligence skills?
Answers ( 1 )
Name it and claim it.
It is what you have to do yourself: You must model the behavior you want your children to exhibit. So, you name your own emotions, and you claim responsibility for them.
"I become so frustrated when I see that someone used the last of the toilet paper roll and did not replace it with a new roll. I know that person is not acting thoughtlessly, but it feels like it to me!", not "You make me so mad!" You name your emotion, and then you claim responsibility for your emotion.
That is actually what emotional intelligence is- not a simple ability to assign emotions to other people- which, face it, is none of anyone else's business to be doing- but the ability to name, accept and be responsible for one's own emotions.
So, parents model the behavior they wish to see in their children.
With a caveat: While naming and claiming is easy, it is facile to believe we "control our emotions" or "What someone else does shouldn't affect me because I am responsible for how I feel!" If that were so, our emotional centers would not lie in the, quite subjective, ego-driven areas of our brain in the temporal lobe, instead of our more thoughtful, reasoning area of the frontal lobe. We can train ourselves to consider the reasons we "feel" a certain way, and learn to accept the emotion without acting upon it, but that is a skill so far up Erikson's Theory of Emotional Development, most human adults don't get that far. So be sure to not "blame" a child for feeling a certain way (although you can help the child refine the descriptor words for the emotion) nor should you despair should the child act upon such. Control is a skill many, many adults cannot exhibit; do not expect more than your child is capable of exhibiting.
https://childdevelopmentinfo.com/child-development/erickson/#gs.4a7l5r