Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child (5 page)

Unlike many parent educators, Ginott did not disapprove of getting angry with children. Indeed, he believed that parents should honestly express their anger, provided that it is directed at a specific problem and does not attack the child’s personality or character. Used judiciously, he believed parental anger can be part of a system of effective discipline.

Ginott’s regard for emotional communication with children has been an important influence for others, including
Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish
, who were his students and who wrote important, practical books for parents based on his work, including
Liberated Parents/Liberated Children, Siblings Without Rivalry, How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk, and How to Talk so Kids Can Learn
.

Despite these contributions, however, Ginott’s theories had never been proven using empirically sound, scientific methods. But I am proud to say that with the help of my research associates, I can provide the first quantifiable evidence to suggest that Ginott’s ideas were essentially correct. Empathy not only matters; it is the foundation of effective parenting.

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E BEGAN OUR
studies in 1986 with fifty-six married couples in Champaign, Illinois. Each couple had a child age four or five at the time. Members of our research team spent fourteen hours with each family, administering questionnaires, conducting interviews, and observing behavior. We gathered a rich, deep pool of information about each couple’s marriage, their children’s peer relationships, and the family’s ideas about emotion.

In one audiotaped session, for example, couples talked about their experiences with negative emotion, their philosophies of emotional expression and control, and their feelings about their children’s anger and sadness. These interviews were then coded for the parents’ awareness and regulation of emotions, and their ability to
recognize and coach their children’s negative feelings. We determined whether or not these parents showed respect for their children’s feelings, and how they talked to their kids about emotions when the kids were upset. Did they try to teach their children rules for appropriate expression of emotion? Did they share strategies children can use to soothe themselves?

To get information about the children’s social competence, audiotapes were made of each child during a thirty-minute play period at home with a best friend. Researchers coded these interactions for the amount of negative emotion the child expressed during the session as well as the overall quality of the child’s play.

In another audiotaped interview, each couple spent up to three hours answering open-ended questions about the history of their marriage. How did they meet? What was their dating period like? How did they decide to get married? How had their relationship changed over the years? Couples were encouraged to talk about their philosophy of marriage and what it takes to make marriage work. These tapes were then coded for several factors including how much fondness or negativity the couple expressed toward each other, how much they talked in terms of togetherness or separateness, and how much they glorified the struggles they’ve faced together.

While such interviews and observations are important to our understanding of these families, the unique aspects of our research involved collecting data about the participants’ physiological responses to emotion. Our aim was to measure the way our participants’ autonomic, or involuntary, nervous systems responded to emotion. For example, we asked each family to collect urine samples from their children over a twenty-four-hour period of time. These samples were then analyzed for traces of stress-related hormones. Other measures of the autonomic nervous system were taken in our labs where we could monitor participants’ heart rates, respiration, blood flow, motor activity, and how much their hands sweat.

Studying these physiological processes and observing families provides more objective data than relying solely on questionnaires, interviews, and observation. It’s difficult, for obvious reasons, to get parents to honestly answer questions like, “How often do you harshly criticize your child?” And even when social scientists observe
their subjects’ habits using “candid camera” methods such as two-way mirrors, it’s hard to determine how much one person’s behavior touches another’s feelings. Keeping track of autonomic responses to stress is much easier. Stethoscope-like electrodes hooked up to the chest can monitor heart rate; electrodes can also track how much hands sweat by measuring the electricity conducted via salt in perspiration.

Such technology is considered reliable. Indeed, law enforcement officials routinely use it to conduct lie detector tests. Police have an advantage over family researchers, however—their study subjects can be intimidated into sitting still. Working with four- and five-year-olds requires craftier measures. That’s why we built a mock space capsule for children participating in one of our major experiments. The kids donned space suits and crawled inside the contraption, where they were hooked up to various electrodes so we could measure their physiological responses to activities designed to elicit emotion. We showed them film clips like the flying monkey scene from
The Wizard of Oz
, for example. We also invited their parents to stand nearby and teach their children a new video game. Having such captive participants allowed us to record the research sessions on videotape so we could systematically observe and code each family member’s words, actions, and facial expressions, considering factors such as content of the spoken word, tone of voice, and gesture.

We used this same type of monitoring equipment (minus the space motif) for another set of sessions that measured the physiological and behavioral responses of the children’s parents as they discussed high-conflict topics like money, religion, in-laws, and child-rearing. These marital interaction sessions were coded for both positive expressions (humor, affection, validation, interest, joy) and negative expressions (anger, disgust, contempt, sadness, stonewalling).

To find out how different styles of parenting serve children over time, we revisited the families from our 1986 study three years later. We were able to reach 95 percent of the study participants at a time when their children were seven to eight years old. Once again, we audiotaped a play session between each child and his or her best friend. Teachers were asked to complete questionnaires regarding the children’s levels of aggression, withdrawal, and social competence
in the classroom. In addition, teachers and mothers filled out surveys regarding the children’s academic performance and behavior. Each mother provided information about her child’s health, as well as monitoring and reporting the total number of negative emotions expressed by her child over the course of one week.

We gathered information about the couples’ marriages as well. Parents told us in telephone interviews whether they had separated or divorced during the intervening three-year period or seriously considered separation or divorce. In individually administered questionnaires, each parent also told us about his or her current satisfaction with the marriage.

Results of this follow-up study showed us that, indeed, children with Emotion-Coaching parents were better off in areas of academic performance, social competence, emotional well-being, and physical health. Even controlling for IQ, their math and reading scores were better. They were getting along better with their friends, they had stronger social skills, and their mothers reported these children had fewer negative and more positive emotions. Several measures also indicated that the Emotion-Coached kids were experiencing less stress in their lives. For example, they had lower levels of stress-related hormones in their urine. They had a lower resting heart rate. And, according to their mothers’ reports, they were getting fewer infectious illnesses, such as colds and flu.

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ANY OF THE
positive outcomes we found in these emotionally intelligent, Emotion-Coached children at age seven and eight are the result of a characteristic we refer to as “high vagal tone.” The term comes from the vagus nerve, which is a large nerve originating in the brain and supplying impulses for functions throughout the upper body such as heart rate, respiration, and digestion. The vagus nerve is responsible for many functions of the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. While the sympathetic branch accelerates functions such as heart rate and breathing when a person is under stress, the parasympathetic branch acts as a regulator,
putting the brakes on these involuntary functions, keeping the body from speeding its systems out of control.

We use the term “vagal tone” to describe a person’s ability to regulate the involuntary physiological processes of the autonomic nervous system. Just as kids with good muscle tone excel at sports, kids with high vagal tone excel at responding to and recovering from emotional stress. The heart rates of such autonomic athletes will temporarily accelerate in response to some alarm or excitement, for example. But as soon as the emergency is over, their bodies are able to recover quickly. These children are good at soothing themselves, focusing their attention, and inhibiting action when that’s what’s called for.

First-graders with high vagal tone would have no problem during a fire drill, for instance. They’d be able drop everything and get out of the school in an orderly, efficient manner. Once the fire drill was over, these kids would be able to settle down and focus on their math lessons in fairly short order. Kids with low vagal tone, on the other hand, would be more likely to get confused during the drill. (“What? Leave now? It’s not even time for recess.”) Then, upon returning to the classroom, they’d have a hard time getting over all the excitement and getting back to work.

In our video game experiment, kids with Emotion-Coaching parents demonstrated that they were indeed the autonomic athletes in our sample. When compared to kids whose parents were not Emotion Coaching, they showed more physiological responsiveness to stress, followed by quicker recovery. Ironically, the events that usually induced stress in these kids were criticism or mockery from their fathers, behavior that doesn’t happen that often in these Emotion-Coaching families. Perhaps that’s why the children reacted so strongly. Still, the Emotion-Coached kids recovered from stress more quickly than others in our sample, despite the fact that they had much stronger physiological responses to stress in the first place.

This ability to respond and bounce back from stress can serve kids well throughout childhood and beyond. It’s a dimension of emotional intelligence that allows them to focus their attention and concentrate on schoolwork. And because it gives kids the emotional
responsiveness and self-control needed to relate to other children, it’s also useful in forming and maintaining friendships. Kids with high vagal tone are quick on the uptake, noticing and reacting to emotional cues from other kids. They can also control their own negative responses in high-conflict situations.

These qualities were evident in one of the thirty-minute play sessions we recorded between two four-year-olds as part of our research. The two children—a boy and a girl—got into an argument because the boy wanted to play Superman and the girl wanted to play house. After shouting their wishes back and forth a few times, however, the boy calmed down and suggested a simple compromise: They would pretend they were at Superman’s house. The girl thought this was a great idea and the two moved forward to enjoy a creative period of pretend play for the next half hour.

Such creative compromise between two four-year-olds takes a lot of social skill, including the ability to listen to each other, to empathize with each other’s position, and to solve problems together. But what children learn from Emotion Coaching goes far beyond such social skills to encompass a broader definition of emotional intelligence. This is demonstrated later in middle childhood (ages eight to twelve), when peer acceptance is often measured by a child’s ability to be “cool” and emotionally unflappable among friends. Psychologists have observed that expressing feelings, as parents and children do in Emotion Coaching, can actually be a social liability for children in this age group. What matters instead is the child’s ability to observe, to pick up on social cues that will allow the child to assimilate without drawing too much attention to himself. What we found in our research was that children who are Emotion-Coached in early childhood do indeed develop this sort of social skill later on, which helps them to be accepted by peers and form friendships.

Children’s emotional intelligence is determined to some degree by temperament—that is, the personality traits with which a child is born—but it’s also shaped by the child’s interactions with his parents. This influence begins in the earliest days of infancy, when a child’s immature nervous system is being formed. The experience children have with emotion while their parasympathetic nervous systems are still under construction may play a big part in the development
of their vagal tone—and consequently their emotional well-being—later in life.

Parents have a tremendous opportunity, therefore, to influence their kids’ emotional intelligence by helping them learn self-soothing behaviors from infancy on. As helpless as babies are, they can learn from our response to their discomfort that emotion has a direction; that it is possible to go from feelings of intense distress, anger, and fear, to feelings of comfort and recovery. Babies whose emotional needs are neglected, on the other hand, don’t get the chance to learn this lesson. When they cry out of fear, sadness, or anger, they experience only more fear, more sadness, more anger. As a result, they may become passive and nonexpressive much of the time. But when they do get upset, they lack any sense of control. They’ve never had a guide to take them from distress to comfort, so they can’t self-soothe. Instead, they experience negative emotion as a black hole of anxiety and fear.