Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child

My wife is a child psychotherapist. To no one’s surprise, the children who come to her for treatment with the fewest and least severe symptoms are from families where the parents invest more time with their children.

Sorrowfully, the majority of “her kids“ complain, in one way or another, that their parents don’t spend enough time with them. In some hapless cases, parents spend little or no time with their children, instead, too much care is left to relatives, friends, paid caregivers, and the babysitting services of electronic devices.

Licensing Parents?

For far too many children, their parents, the very people who are most obligated to provide the highest quality of care, are regrettably derelict of duty. We‘re required to be licensed before driving our cars, maybe parents should be as well?

“Here, Fix My Kid”

With understandable concern, my wife observes a few parents dropping their kids off for therapy with an unspoken but discernible attitude of “Here, fix my kid.“ These “drop-offs” are often the same children who complain that their parents do very little with them.

Consequently, one of the most frequent behavioral prescriptions my wife “writes” for parents is to spend more quality time with their children, emphasizing that it may be the single most important thing they can do to further their child’s development.

Making use of everything in her “clinical tool belt,” my wife strongly encourages these parents to regularly and meaningfully engage with their children. On occasion, when it appears clinically expedient, that is, when her kids are willing and prepared, a child’s favorite game used during their play therapy is sent home with the child to encourage playful parent-child time.

The Post-Natal Transmission of Traits

On the wall of my wife’s office hangs a placard wisely entitled: Children learn what they live. It goes on to say: If a child lives with approval, the child learns to value themself. If a child lives with security, the child learns to trust. If a child lives with shame and ridicule, the child learns to be shy and feel guilty. If a child lives with encouragement, the child learns confidence. (Author unknown). Here, very persuasively, the early environment is arguably an incubator or transmitter of the child’s character traits.

Similarly, but on a molecular level, Nobel Prize winner and developmental psychiatrist Eric Kandel stated, “Gene expression is a function of learning and experience.“ Kandel’s bold declaration is a favorite of mine because it points to the primacy of the environment, and environments are malleable. Importantly, the quality of the parent-child environment shapes the child’s early learning and experience in a de facto epigenetic-like way, helping to forge character traits out of the child’s genetic predispositions.

Quality Time Revisited

As psychotherapists, my wife and I strongly agree about the importance of quality time, the cliched but still crucial recommendation that parents carve out time in their schedules for their kids—ideally, set times. Surely, time invested in shared activity of almost any kind is unquestionably invaluable.

We further agree that quality time achieves its highest expression—conferring its peak benefits—during those coveted moments when parents reach an accurate understanding or finely tuned empathy for what their child is experiencing, especially emotionally. When a child feels sensitively and respectfully understood in a deep, caring, and detailed way, parents are potently injecting validity and importance into how the child reacts, responds, and adjusts to their experiences. This, in turn, doubles down on the parental investment in the worth of the child.

My Child Lacks Discipline

My wife often points out to parents that the easiest, most economical use of parental time and energy is telling a child what to do: “You should do this.” “You ought to do that. “You must do this.“ For many parents, these injunctions are the most natural and reflexive forms of discipline. However, this economy of parental time and energy doesn’t always work.

Perhaps more effectively, regular, purposeful investments of parental time can keep the parent-child relationship well-nourished and healthy, thus elevating the child’s compliance with parental expectations and improving discipline.

Certainly, a premier characteristic of emotional intelligence is self-discipline or its next of kin, self-regulation. Yet parents frequently bemoan their child‘s lack of discipline. While disciplining a child is often fraught with difficulty and frustration, a significant portion of this difficulty may be reduced or alleviated with a quick assessment of the quality of the parent-child relationship in the moments preceding the implementation of any disciplinary effort.

Simply, the effectiveness of parental discipline often hinges on the here-and-now quality of the parent-child relationship. Disciplining founded upon a good relationship is more likely to be effective. From the child’s perspective, “I don’t want to be told what to do by someone who hardly spends time with me, someone who doesn’t really understand me?“

A Personal Story

Once, on returning home from my office, I saw that my 8-year-old son had neglected his chores. When I asked him to do them, he stubbornly refused. I repeated my request in a firmer tone, and once more he refused. Rather than risk a third round of opposition, it occurred to me that it had been a while since we’d shared father-son time.

Now enlightened, I asked my son if he’d like to go to the park before dinner to play “two touch,“ a game he loved. Later, on returning home from the park, without my asking, he did his chores. Renourishing our relationship paid off; it had nudged my son’s willingness to cooperate, and both of us benefited.

Need-Feeling Identification and Regulation

Imagine this common at-home “catastrophe,“ siblings at war with each other over a “stolen“ toy, and the expected retaliatory punch. Upon hearing the yelling and screaming, Mom dashes like a first responder to the scene of the crime and hears, “She stole my doll, when I asked her to give it back, she hit me. It hurts!“

Under such circumstances, parental attention is typically drawn to the most conspicuous, egregious signs of misbehavior, in this case, the punching. However, without ignoring the inappropriateness of physical violence, complete parenting would include legitimizing the aggressive child’s needs and feelings as represented by her ambition to play with her sister’s doll. By doing so, mom’s investment of time and understanding elevates the probability of the aggressive child’s participation in a mom-led discussion on the best, most appropriate way for the child to arrange to play with her sister’s doll or get one of her own.

In sum, the parental endowment of quality time, in all its forms, is the very stuff of which the child’s emotional intelligence emerges and flourishes.