How to Teach Your Child Emotional Intelligence

Four moves that work at any age

1. Notice the feeling early, before it is a full storm, if you can. Clenched fists, a sudden quiet, a whine that goes up half a tone.
2. Name it out loud, with a guess they can correct: “You look really disappointed.”
3. Accept the feeling, limit the behavior. Any feeling is allowed; not every action is. “You can be angry. You can’t throw the remote.”
4. Solve it together once the storm has passed: what could we do next time, or what would help right now?

Researchers call this pattern emotion coaching, and it has been tested as a parenting program:

That is one trial with young children, so it does not tell you exactly how much a given family will change. (Havighurst and colleagues, 2010) It does show that these are learnable habits for parents, not personality traits you either have or lack.

Ages two to four: the meltdown in aisle seven

Mia, three, wanted the cereal with the cartoon fox. You said no. She is now lying on the supermarket floor, and a man with a basket is pretending not to watch. At this age the feeling is far bigger than the child’s ability to manage it, and reasoning bounces off. What she needs is your steadiness and a few simple words.

You are lending her your calm until she can borrow less of it, which is what the glossary means by co-regulation. Giving in to end the scene teaches that the floor works. Shouting teaches that big feelings make adults scary. Waiting it out with a few kind words teaches that feelings pass and the rules stay.

Ages five to nine: when your child hits a sibling

Theo, seven, has just shoved his little brother off the couch because the brother knocked over his Lego tower. Older children can learn more feeling words and start connecting a feeling to what caused it. This is the age to separate the feeling, which you accept, from the action, which you stop.

The consequence for pushing can still happen. What changes is that Theo hears his anger was understood, so the conversation can be about the push instead of about whether he is a bad kid. Kids this age often enjoy finding the exact word; a feelings chart on the fridge, or the emotion wheel on a tablet, turns “mad” into “frustrated,” “jealous” or “embarrassed.”

Ages ten to fourteen: the slammed door

Ava, thirteen, came home from school, said “nothing” when asked what was wrong, and slammed her bedroom door. Interrogating her through the door will usually get you a louder “nothing.” Preteens and young teens still need the same four moves, delivered with more space and less eye contact.

Side-by-side moments work better than face-to-face ones at this age: the drive to practice, cooking together, a walk with the dog. And when she does open up, resist the urge to fix it immediately. Asking whether she wants advice tells her the feeling is hers to have, and it makes her much more likely to come back next time.

Four ways parents respond to a child’s feelings

Most parents use all four in a given week. The cheerful version at the top is especially easy to slip into because it comes from love; the guide on toxic positivity covers why it so often backfires with adults too.

After you yell

You will lose it sometimes. The kids are fighting, you are late, and you shout something you regret. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises against yelling and shaming as discipline, judging them ineffective over the long term and linked to worse outcomes for children. (Sege and colleagues, 2018) That guidance is about patterns of discipline, not a single bad morning. What counts after a bad morning is the repair.

A repair also shows your child what fixing a mistake looks like, which is the skill you want them to have one day. For the adult version of the same skill, see repairing a conversation that went wrong.

What your arguments with each other teach

Children also learn from watching their parents disagree. In two studies where children watched videotaped arguments between adults, their distress dropped when the argument was resolved, even when the making-up happened out of sight and they were only told about it afterward. (Cummings and colleagues, 1993) Those were brief videos of unfamiliar adults, not real families, but the practical point is easy to use: if the kids heard the fight, let them hear that it was sorted out too. The Relationship Center’s page on disagreeing in front of the kids covers what to say, and the parenting as partners hub collects the rest.

Building feeling words into an ordinary week

• At dinner or bedtime, each person names one good part and one hard part of the day, adults included.
• While reading, pause on a picture: “How do you think the bear feels? What makes you think so?”
• Narrate your own feelings in small doses: “I’m nervous about my meeting tomorrow, so I’m laying out my clothes tonight.”
• Give credit for the skill, not just the result: “You were really angry and you used words instead of your hands.”

If your child’s school talks about social and emotional learning, it is usually working from frameworks like CASEL’s, which organize the skills into five areas: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making. (CASEL, 2020) You can ask the teacher which of those they are working on this term and use the same words at home. The guide to building emotional vocabulary has more ways to grow the word list, written for adults but easy to adapt. Teachers who want the classroom side of this, from a student’s outburst to the parent email that follows, can read emotional intelligence for teachers.

Your own habits are part of the lesson

The hardest part of teaching this is that it asks you to handle your own feelings while your child is having theirs. If you want to look at your own patterns, such as what you tend to do with frustration at 7:40 on a school morning, the free EQTiger assessment for adults is one way to start. It takes about nine minutes, and the habits it asks about are the ones your kids are watching.