This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read" by Philippa Perry. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What’s your child’s emotional intelligence (EQ)? What’s your role in helping them develop their emotional skills?
As a parent, it’s your privilege and responsibility to teach your child how to understand, regulate, and express their emotions in a healthy way. If you’d like to join the ranks of effective emotion-coaching parents, Philippa Perry offers practical advice in her book The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read.
Continue reading to learn how to foster your child’s emotional development by coaching them in acknowledging and naming their feelings.
Emotion-Coaching Parents
According to Perry, recognizing, naming, and respecting your child’s emotions is a key way to form a strong bond with them and raise them to be mentally healthy individuals.
(Shortform note: The practice of noticing a child’s emotions and using them as opportunities for teaching and intimacy is called emotion coaching. Years of research suggest that children are healthier and more successful in all aspects of life when their parents employ this technique with them. If you want to be an emotion-coaching parent, consider using specific prompts that validate and soothe your child’s emotions—you can find numerous examples online.)
The Different Ways We Deal With Emotions
Perry states that, typically, parents who have trouble handling difficult emotions fall into two categories: They suppress their feelings, or they react disproportionately. If you tend to suppress your feelings, you’ll be more likely to do the same to your child, either by dismissing their feelings or telling them they should feel something different. Because this makes the child feel like their emotions are insignificant or undesirable, they’ll likely avoid expressing feelings to you in the future.
If you tend to react disproportionately, you might become overwhelmed by your child’s emotions, getting upset and crying with them. You take on their emotional state. In this case, your child may stop expressing their emotions to you because they feel like they’re upsetting you too much or you’re unfairly seizing their feelings.
(Shortform note: To avoid becoming overwhelmed by your child’s emotions, consider using the following steps. First, take a deep breath to center yourself before you engage with your child. Second, remind yourself that your primary goal is to help your child calm down and to build a closer relationship with them, not to add to their emotional turmoil. Third, refrain from taking your child’s feelings personally, especially when they’re upset with you—they’re not fully developed and aren’t capable of self-regulating their emotions like you are. Fourth, use a mantra to calm yourself down. For example, you might tell yourself, “This is not an emergency, but an opportunity to help.”)
Ideally, you recognize and respect your child’s feelings by naming and affirming them (which we’ll further discuss below), instead of denying them or making the emotions your own. When you’re able to do this, your child will feel understood and comforted instead of criticized. Over time, as you continuously show respect for their feelings and offer them love and understanding, they’ll learn to work through their emotions and comfort themselves.
(Shortform note: Some experts argue that, as you’re working on letting your child feel all of their emotions and helping them through the experience, you should remember that limiting your child’s behavior isn’t the same as limiting their emotions. Behavior is separate from emotions, and you should coach your child in this principle; though it’s OK to feel any emotion, not all forms of expression for those feelings are OK. For example, you might teach them that it’s OK to be upset, but it’s not OK to hit someone to show them that you’re upset with them. You set the behavioral limit that hitting isn’t OK, but there’s still no limit to what they’re allowed to feel.)
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read summary:
- The tools you need to cultivate a healthy relationship with your child
- How to make sure your child is an emotionally secure individual
- Why the way you speak about yourself has a big impact on your child
