When you think of child development, you may often think immediately of physical growth. But what about self-control, cooperation, relationship building, and empathy? These skills are all considered part of a child’s social-emotional development.
An important piece of this development is emotional intelligence (often referred to as EQ). At its most basic definition, emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage emotions. It means being smart about feelings; noticing, understanding, and acting on emotions in an effective way. Emotional intelligence covers five main areas: self-awareness, emotional control, self-motivation, empathy and relationship skills.
7 Ways to Improve Emotional Intelligence in Children
Emotional intelligence is an extremely important part of your child’s development, and has been studied and proven to be a predictor of future success- in relationships, effectiveness, health, and quality of life.
Studies show that children with higher emotional intelligence scores do better in school and make healthier choices (ie, choosing not to smoke). In short- this is an area that you do not want to ignore! Luckily, there are countless ways to help build your child’s EQ.
Here are seven things to try at home to improve emotional intelligence in children :
Validate Emotions
This is something simple that you can do day to day as you notice your child experiencing emotions. This is important even for babies or young children who may not fully understand what you are saying.
For example, when your child cries when you have to leave the park, simply stating: “You are sad because you don’t want to leave the park. I understand.” This gives your child a word for their big emotions and validates their feelings.
Encourage Role Play
This can be a fun way to engage in character play with your child. Using puppets or character toys, act out some scenarios involving day to day emotions and have your characters express these emotions.
Model Healthy Emotional Regulation
It’s really important for your child to see you have emotions and deal with them in a healthy way! This helps improve emotional intelligence in children. Telling your child how you are feeling and how you are dealing with it is a great way to model for them how to properly manage emotions.
For example, if you are in a situation where you are feeling frustrated by your child, you can say something like: “I am feeling very frustrated because you are not listening to me. I’m going to walk away for a few minutes to calm down.”
It can be tempting to try to cover up negative or big emotions, but modeling how to deal with them is a great way to teach your children what to do when THEY are feeling that way!
Read Books and Discuss
Almost every children’s book out there deals with characters feeling emotions and reacting to them. Discuss with your child how the characters are feeling and what they are doing in response to those feelings.
A few book recommendations to improve emotional intelligence in children are:
*The links below are affiliate links, meaning that, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase.
- My Mouth is a Volcano by Julia Cook
- You are a Social Detective by Michelle Garcia Winner
- Various Social Skills Book List
Encourage Free Play with Other Children
Letting your child have opportunities to play freely with other children is a great way for them to practice dealing with emotions in a real life setting. Playing with children who are of different ages, genders, and abilities can be very beneficial to building their emotional intelligence.
Play a Game
There are a lot of commercially available games on the market that help improve emotional intelligence in children. I recommend the following as a good place to start:
*The links below are affiliate links, meaning that, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase.
Peaceable Kingdom Friends and Neighbors Game
Guess the Emotion
This is an easy and fun game to play with your child at home. Start by making (or printing) a stack of emotion cards- draw a simple face and write the corresponding emotion underneath.
For example, draw a smiling face and write happy, or draw a frowning face with a tear and write sad. Once you have your cards, go through them with your child, then place them face down in a pile.
Take turns drawing a card and describing it to the other person without naming the emotion. For example, if you drew the happy card, you could say “You might feel this way when I take you out for ice cream.”
I hope that you enjoy playing and learning with your child! Helping improve emotional intelligence in children can be a fun and rewarding experience. I would love to hear about your experiences playing any of these games!
Please join us in our FREE Facebook community to share. As always, if you have concerns about your child’s development and would like to set up a free consultation to discuss your concerns, please reach out! I would love to help you determine your child’s individual needs.
We are here to support you as you help your child blossom!
