Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child (4 page)

In 1950, only 4 percent of new mothers were unmarried; today
some 30 percent are
. While most of today’s unmarried mothers eventually wed, a high divorce rate—now more than
half of all new marriages
—keeps the number of mother-only households high.
Right now, it’s
around 28 percent
, with about
half of these families living in poverty
.

Many children from divorced families lack the financial or emotional support they need from fathers.
Figures from the 1989 U.S. Census
show that just over half the mothers entitled to child support receive the full amount; a quarter received partial payment, and a fifth received nothing at all.
One study of children
from disrupted families found that two years after a divorce, a majority of children had not seen their fathers for a year.

Remarriage, if it happens, brings its own problems. Divorce is more common in second marriages than in first marriages. And while studies show that stepfathers often bring a more reliable income, the relationship often brings more stress, confusion, and sadness into a child’s life. Child abuse occurs more frequently in stepfamilies than in natural families.
According to one Canadian study
, preschool children in stepfamilies are forty times more likely than those who live with biological parents to suffer physical and sexual abuse.

Children in emotional pain don’t leave their problems at the schoolhouse door. As a result, schools nationwide have reported dramatic increases in behavior problems over the past decade. Our public schools—many already drained from antitax initiatives—are being called upon to provide an increasing number of social services for children whose emotional needs are not met at home. In essence, schools are becoming emotional buffering zones for the growing number of children hurt by divorce, poverty, and neglect. Consequently, there are fewer resources available to fund basic education, a trend that’s reflected in declining academic scores.

In addition, families of all kinds are stressed by changes that have occurred in the workforce and the economy over the past few decades. Effective income has been eroded over the past two decades, which means that many families need double paychecks to stay afloat. More women have entered the paid workforce. And for many couples, the power shift that happens as the male partner loses his role as the sole breadwinner brings added stresses. At the same time, employers are demanding more of workers’ time. According to Harvard economics professor Juliet Schor,
the typical American family
now works one thousand more hours each year
than it did twenty-five years ago.
One survey showed
that Americans have a third less free time than they did in the 1970s. As a result, people say they are spending less time on basics like sleeping, eating, and playing with their kids. Between 1960 and 1986, the time parents had available to spend with their children fell by more than ten hours a week. Short on time, Americans are participating less in community and religious activities that uphold the family structure. And as our society becomes more mobile, moving from city to city for economic reasons, an increasing number of families live without the support of nearby family and lifelong friends.

The net effect of all these social changes is that our children face increased risks to their health and well-being. Meanwhile, the support systems that aid families in protecting kids are getting weaker.

Still, as this book shows, we as parents are far from helpless. My research tells me that the answer to keeping our children safe from many risks lies in building stronger emotional bonds with them, thus helping them to develop a higher level of emotional intelligence. Evidence is mounting that kids who can feel their parents’ love and support are better protected from the threats of youth violence, antisocial behavior, drug addiction, premature sexual activity, adolescent suicide, and other social ills. Studies reveal that children who feel respected and valued in their families do better in school, have more friendships, and live healthier, more successful lives.

Now, with more in-depth research into the dynamics of families’ emotional relationships, we are beginning to understand how this buffering effect happens.

E
MOTION
C
OACHING AS AN
E
VOLUTIONARY
S
TEP

A
S PART OF OUR
research into the emotional lives of families, we ask parents to tell us about their responses to their preschoolers’ negative feelings. Like many fathers, Mike tells us that he finds his four-year-old daughter, Becky, comical when she’s angry. “She says, ‘Gosh darn it!’ And then she walks away like some little midget human,” he says. “It’s just so funny!”

And indeed, on at least one level, the contrast of this tiny girl expressing such a big emotion would make many people smile. But just imagine for a moment what would happen if Mike reacted this way to his wife’s anger. Or, what if Mike’s boss responded to him this way when he was mad? It probably wouldn’t amuse Mike at all. Yet, many adults think nothing of laughing in the face of a raging preschooler. Many well-meaning parents dismiss children’s fears and upsets as though they didn’t matter. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” we tell a five-year-old who wakes up crying from a nightmare. “Then you obviously didn’t see what I saw,” might be an appropriate reply. Instead, the child in such situations begins to accept the adult’s estimation of the event and learns to doubt her own judgment. With adults constantly invalidating her feelings, she loses confidence in herself.

Thus, we have inherited a tradition of discounting children’s feelings simply because children are smaller, less rational, less experienced, and less powerful than the adults around them. Taking children’s emotions seriously requires empathy, keen listening skills, and a willingness to see things from their perspective. It also takes a certain selflessness. Behavioral psychologists have observed that
preschoolers typically demand
that their caretakers deal with some kind of need or desire at an average rate of
three times a minute
. Under ideal circumstances, a mom or dad might respond cheerfully. But when a parent is stressed or otherwise distracted, a child’s incessant, and sometimes irrational demands can drive that parent wild.

And so it has been for centuries. While I believe parents have always loved their children, historical evidence shows that, unfortunately, past generations did not necessarily recognize the need for patience, restraint, and kindness in dealing with kids.
Psychiatrist Lloyd deMause
, in his 1974 essay “The Evolution of Childhood,” paints a horrifying picture of neglect and cruelty that children of the Western world have endured through the ages. His work shows, however, that throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the plight of children gradually improved. With each generation, parents generally became better than the last at meeting the physical, psychological, and emotional needs of children. As deMause describes it, raising a child “became less a process of conquering
a child’s will than training it, guiding it into proper paths, teaching it to conform, and socializing it.”

Although Sigmund Freud would promote theories in the early 1900s that children were highly sexualized, aggressive creatures, observational research later in the century would prove otherwise.
Social psychologist Lois Murphy
, for example, who conducted extensive observations and experiments with toddlers and preschoolers in the 1930s, showed that most small children are, by nature, primarily altruistic and empathetic toward one another, particularly toward another child in distress.

With this growing belief in the intrinsic goodness of children, our society has been evolving since mid-century into another new era of parenting, one that deMause described as “the helping mode.” It is a period in which many parents are letting go of strict, authoritarian models by which they themselves may have been raised. Instead, more parents now believe their role is to assist children to develop according to their own interests, needs, and desires. To do this, parents are adopting what psychological theorist Diana Baumrind first referred to as
an “authoritative” style of parenting
. While
authoritarian
parents characteristically impose many limits and expect strict obedience without giving children explanations,
authoritative
parents set limits but are considerably more flexible, providing their children with explanations and lots of warmth. Baumrind also describes a third style of parenting she calls
permissive
, whereby parents are warm and communicative toward their children, but exert few limits on behavior. In studies of preschool children in the 1970s, Baumrind found that children of
authoritarian
parents tended to be conflicted and irritable, while children of
permissive
parents were often impulsive, aggressive, low in self-reliance, and low in achievement. But children of
authoritative
parents were most consistently cooperative, self-reliant, energetic, friendly, and achievement-oriented.

Movement toward this less authoritarian, more responsive mode of parenting has been fueled by tremendous growth in our understanding of child psychology and the social behavior of families in the past twenty-five years. Social scientists have discovered, for example, that infants have an amazing ability to learn social and emotional cues from their parents, beginning at birth. We now
know that when caregivers respond sensitively to babies’ cues—engaging in eye contact, taking turns at “baby talk,” and allowing babies to rest when they seem overstimulated—the babies learn early how to regulate their own emotions. These babies still get excited when that’s called for, but they are able to calm themselves down afterward.

Studies have also shown that when infants have caretakers who don’t pay attention to these cues—say, a depressed mom who doesn’t talk to her baby, or an anxious dad who plays with the baby too hard and too long—the baby doesn’t develop the same knack for regulating his emotions. The baby may not learn that babbling gets attention, so he becomes quiet and passive, socially disengaged. Or, because he’s constantly stimulated, he may not get the chance to learn that sucking his thumb and stroking his blanket are good ways to calm down.

Learning to calm down and focus attention become increasingly important as the baby matures. For one, these skills allow a child to be attentive to social cues from parents, caregivers, and others in their environment. Learning to be calm also helps the child to concentrate in learning situations and to focus on the achievement of specific tasks. And, as a child grows, it’s extremely helpful for learning how to share toys, pretend, and otherwise get along with playmates. Eventually, this so-called self-regulation skill can make a big difference in a child’s ability to enter new play groups, make new friends, and handle rejection when peers turn away.

Awareness of this link between parents’ responsiveness and children’s emotional intelligence has grown in the past two or three decades. Countless books have been written for parents telling them how crucial it is that they provide distressed infants with affection and comfort. Parents are urged to practice positive forms of discipline as their children grow; to praise their kids more than they criticize them; to reward rather than punish; to encourage rather than discourage. Such theories have taken us a long way, thankfully, from the days when parents were told that sparing the rod would spoil the child. We now know that kindness, warmth, optimism, and patience are far better tools than the hickory stick for raising well-behaved, emotionally healthy children.

And yet, I believe we can go even further in this evolutionary
process. Through our work in family psychology labs, we can now see and measure the benefits of healthy emotional communication between parent and child. We are beginning to understand that parents’ interactions with their infants can affect children’s nervous systems and emotional health throughout life. We now know that the strength of a couple’s marriage affects the well-being of their children and we can see tremendous potential when fathers become more emotionally involved with their children. And finally, we are able to document that parents’ awareness of their own feelings is at the heart of improving children’s emotional intelligence as well. Our program of Emotion Coaching—outlined in detail in
Chapter 3
—is our blueprint for parenting based on this research.

M
UCH OF TODAY’S
popular literature on parenting seems to sidestep the dimension of emotional intelligence, but it was not always so. That’s why I must acknowledge an influential psychologist, teacher, and author who has contributed much to our understanding of the emotional lives of families. He is
Haim Ginott
, who wrote three popular books in the 1960s, including
Between Parent and Child
, before his premature death from cancer in 1973.

Writing long before the words “emotional” and “intelligence” were ever fused, Ginott believed that one of our most important responsibilities as parents is to listen to our children, hearing not only their words, but the feelings behind their words. He also taught that communication about emotions can serve as a way for parents to teach their children values.

But for this to happen, parents must show genuine respect for their children’s feelings, Ginott taught. They must attempt to empathize with their kids—that is, feel what their children are feeling. Communication between parent and child must always preserve both parties’ self-respect. Statements of understanding should precede statements of advice. Ginott discouraged parents from telling children what they ought to feel, because that simply makes children distrust their feelings. He said kids’ emotions do not disappear when parents say, “Don’t feel that way,” or when parents tell kids there is no justification for their emotions. Ginott believed that while not all behavior is acceptable, all feelings and wishes are acceptable.
Therefore, parents should set limits on acts, but not emotions and desires.