We recently invited Dr. Justin Coulson from Happy Families to Timber Tots to discuss with our team what emotional intelligence is and its importance and impact upon the Early Childhood sector for children parents and educators alike.

Emotions are at the heart of human existence and they impact every aspect of our lives continuously throughout the day. They drive decision making and judgement, they shape our memories, our learning and our attention and they influence the quality of our relationships we build.

Emotional Intelligence, otherwise known as the emotional quotient, therefore becomes important to understand, use, and manage these emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and to defuse conflict.

In the early childhood sector, this skill is critical to manage emotional situations, which on average is faced over 70 times a day. The skill to be able to understand a child’s emotion, feel empathy and work with them to help immediately changes the game. Our emotions are to be respected and reflected upon. This includes our children’s intense emotions at seemingly non-intense situations – how a child feels is how they behave.

With practice, children improve their capacity for emotional self-regulation however it’s not until the age of 9 or 10 that children have developed and are able to more consistently use complex strategies for emotional regulation. If we understand this, our approach to children who are emotional can immediately be adapted.

As parents and educators, Dr. Justin discussed the three general responses to an emotional situation, two of which are mostly ineffective when dealing with children.

The Angry or Disapproving Approach – is where negative emotions are seen as something that has to be squashed. An example is where a parent yells “Would you cut that out right now! Stop being so ridiculous! Calm down!’ For a misbehaving or challenging child, this will only make things worse, often by further escalating the child’s emotion.

The Dismissive Response or Turning Away – is where we try to distract our child or ignore their emotions. For example by ignoring bad behavior in the hope that it will stop or go away.

The Kind Response or Turning Toward – is where we recognise the emotional situation and invite our child in. As parents and educators we are able to see the emotional situation as an opportunity to connect and bond through labelling the emotion and problem solving.

The key to the ‘kind response’ is for the emotional leader to remain calm and communicate with our children. We must be in control of our own emotions in order to understand our children’s. Dr. Justin suggested that it was important to implement some key strategies to achieve a successful outcome. These included:
– Be curious, not furious
– Explore don’t explode
– Understand don’t reprimand
– Name the emotion to tame the emotion

Emotional intelligence is an evolution of development – both for us as adults but particularly for children. It is something that we all must continually work upon to improve. Dr. Justin Coulson believes that by turning toward our children in emotive states, by showing kindness and understanding we will create strong emotionally resilient children.