Coaching Your Child’s Emotions

Emotional intelligence is an important part of your child’s development and can impact how well they do socially and academically. Parents play a vital role in helping young children become emotionally intelligent by setting the first example for how to understand and respond to emotions.

By using an emotion coaching style of parenting, families can foster emotional understanding and regulation from an early age. These strategies also help children feel closer to their parents and build trust and self-confidence.

Emotion Coaching Style of Parenting

• Pays attention to child’s emotions
• Responds to child’s emotions with non-judgment
  • “All feelings are okay, but some behaviors are not okay or helpful.”
• Helps child identify, understand, and express their emotions
• Is supportive and focused on guiding rather than controlling

When Is the Right Time to Talk to Kids About Emotions?

• When you and your child are still calm enough to think through the situation.
• Practice your observation skills and catch the feeling when it is still small.
  • Try to pay attention to the early warning signs.
  • This also helps children become more aware of the smaller feeling.
    • Teaches them to practice emotion regulation skills in response to these cues.
• If emotions are running too high already:
  • Use your typical calm-down strategies.
  • Wait until you and your child are both calmed down enough to talk about what happened.

Goals of Emotion Coaching

• Help children build greater awareness of their own emotional experience.
• Help children learn how to communicate about emotions.
• Help children connect their emotions to events around them.
• Practice empathy and understanding towards your child’s emotions.
• Help parents feel emotionally connected to their children and build trust and security.

Emotion Coaching Is NOT Meant To

• Make children feel shame or guilt when they’ve misbehaved.
• Get children to admit they’re at fault for something.
• Convince children that their emotions are unreasonable or not a big deal.

Steps to Emotion Coaching

1. Notice what emotion your child is experiencing

   • Pay attention to their posture, tone of voice, gestures, and facial expressions.
   • If helpful, think of how you might feel in a similar situation.

2. Help your child put a verbal label on the feeling with specific words

   • “It looks like you’re angry.”
   • “It seems like you’re scared.”
   • “I wonder if you’re frustrated.”

3. You could also ask where the child feels the emotion in their body

   • “Where in your body do you feel angry?”
   • “I wonder if your tummy feels a bit anxious?”
   • “It looks like you might feel your sadness in your shoulders.”

4. Sincerely communicate your understanding and acceptance of their feelings
   

   • Use your body language, facial expression, sounds, gestures, or words.
     • “Oh, that’s sad.”
     • “Yeah, I’d be annoyed too!”
     • “That looks really hard.”
     • “I’d be angry too if I got left out.”

5. You can follow this up with another question or comment to find out more about the situation or explore other emotional reactions
   

   • “Did you feel frustrated because the coach benched you?”
   • “I wonder if the sad feeling is because we didn’t get to go to your friend’s house.”

6. If necessary, support your child in solving the problem

   • Brainstorm different options together, asking for their input.
     • “What do you think could help?”
     • “What else could work?”
     • “What could you say/do first?”
     • “What would (name of friend/special person/hero) do/say?”