ROOTED THERAPY AND WELLNESS 409 FAMILY EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE MENTAL HEALTH

Raising Emotionally Intelligent Children

How Your Mental Health Plays
a Huge Role in Your Child’s Development

409 family rooted therapy and wellness emotional intelligence

So, what exactly is emotional intelligence?

Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to perceive, regulate, and manage emotions. This includes our ability to express and control our own emotions, as well as to understand and appropriately respond to the emotions of others. Emotional intelligence plays a huge part in our mental health, our memory, our ability to attend and learn, how we navigate life’s challenges, and our ability to build relationships with others.  

Our social and emotional skills actually start to develop in the womb. A growing fetus can be soothed just by hearing their mother’s voice and through her movements. Babies and children continue to develop their social and emotional skills as their basic needs are met over time. Experiencing safety, security, and stability early in life are foundational to having strong, healthy emotional intelligence.

Children also learn how to utilize healthy social and emotional skills by watching those around them. Modeling strong social and emotional skills, showing empathy, and responding to your child’s needs are the top ways to cultivate emotional intelligence, but you can also support their development through stories, games, and helping them to verbally process difficult situations and big emotions while problem solving for solutions.

Our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are all interconnected.

When we are overwhelmed with intense feelings, the body experiences stress. When this happens, the logical, rational part of the brain is actually turned down. Often times, when littles experience a highly charged emotional event, we tend to think they are overreacting, but in reality, they just don’t understand how they are feeling in their body at the moment or know what to do with it.

Showing empathy and helping them to talk through the situation and what they are experiencing will help them learn how to respond more appropriately in the future. As we get older and continue to mature, we are better able to recognize our feelings and respond more fittingly. In turn, as our emotional intelligence increases, we learn to respond rather than react to situations.   

Using real time situations to talk about emotions is optimal for learning and growth. This will allow you to help your child identify how they are feeling, how their response may or may not have been appropriate, and how they can better respond the next time something similar happens. The RULER Method is an evidence-based tool that is commonly used to teach children emotional intelligence. This is also a great tool for adults who may have experienced trauma earlier in life and don’t fully understand their own emotions and behaviors.

The RULER Method:

Recognize: How am I feeling? Being aware of our bodily cues, like heart rate, breathing pattern, tension, posture, energy, etc. help us to better understand how we are feeling. We also learn how to recognize how others are feeling based on their bodily cues like facial expression, tone of voice, posture, etc.

Understand: What exactly happened to cause me to feel this way? Being able to identify the thoughts, events, and people that cause our emotions to change can help with managing our emotions appropriately, anticipate fluctuations if those things occur again, and respond more effectively the next time.  

Label: Name it to tame it. Being able to identify the actual emotion we’re experiencing allows us to better communicate our feelings, as well as determine the best way to regulate.

Express: There are numerous ways to express our emotions, so knowing how to effectively express our emotions in different contexts and times is very important. For example, the way we express our emotions at home with our family is different from how we express our emotions in public. The best way to show your child how to express their feelings is by modeling these skills yourself.

Regulate: This is how we determine what we need to keep experiencing the emotion or make a shift if we don’t want to continue feeling that way.

Research shows that children with healthy social and emotional skills are more likely to be successful in school, work, and life in general.

Having strong social and emotional skills helps children to manage their own stress and emotions, recognize how others are feeling, make friends, resolve conflicts, learn social norms, gain confidence, overcome difficult experiences, and make appropriate decisions. Our early experiences with our parents, caregivers, and peers strongly impact our emotional intelligence, but it also continues to evolve and grow through our experiences well into adulthood.

While some of us may have had super supportive parents who modeled excellent social and emotional skills, many of us grew up with parents who were battling their own trauma and childhood experiences, which got projected on us and failed to meet our social and emotional needs. This has left many of us with some work to do in regards to our own mental health and social and emotional skills. Processing your past and working through stored emotions and trauma while establishing healthy self-care and mental health practices is crucial to helping your child develop emotional intelligence.

Managing your stress effectively and tending to your mental health can help you to stay calm and respond more appropriately when your child experiences highly charged emotions.

Coming from a place of grace allows you to dig deeper into what may be actually going on and to help your child process the situation. By staying calm, you not only have the opportunity to reframe big feelings and display empathy, patience, and compassion, but you can also use your nervous system to lower their emotional charge. This is called co-regulation.

You can think of co-regulation as your child absorbing your emotional state. You’ve probably seen this in action without realizing what was actually taking place. Think of a time when your child was struggling with a situation and you reacted with anger and yelling. More than likely, you noticed that they spiraled even more out of control and it took longer to calm the situation. On the other hand, think of a time when your child was having a difficult time and you responded calmly. It probably didn’t take long for your child to seek comfort from you and to cool down and regain their composure.

During challenging moments, take a second to ask yourself “Am I co-regulating or am I co-escalating?”

We learn to co-regulate with those around us long before we learn to self-regulate. So, in order for you to effectively co-regulate with your child, it is very important that your nervous system is regulated. This will better allow you to help your child regulate themself and come back to a state of calmness. When the nervous system is regulated the capacity for learning and growth increases. This is your opportunity to be the calm in their storm.  

409 family rooted therapy and wellness emotionally intelligent children

Here are a few examples of ways to co-regulate with your child:

  • Provide a warm, nurturing relationship
  • Recognize and respond to their cues
  • Keep a calm, genuinely empathetic tone when handling difficult issues
  • Provide comfort and empathy during highly charged emotions
  • Get down on their level
  • Explain what you’re doing and why
  • Structure the environment to create a sense of safety and reduce known stressors when possible
  • Have consistent, predictable routines in order to promote a sense of security
  • Clearly define your expectations and logical consequences for negative behaviors
  • Model appropriate self-regulation skills
  • Provide opportunities for practicing self-regulation skills
  • Reinforce the successful use of effective self-regulation skills
  • Help your child brainstorm and find constructive solutions to the problem so that they can shift gears and move forward

Research shows that emotionally intelligent adults are more like to have emotionally intelligent children. Building healthy coping skills for yourself will in turn help you to be a more effective role model for your children and foster healthy emotional development.

Here are a few healthy ways to manage stress and regulate the nervous system, for Mama and Littles both:

  • Mediation
  • Breathwork
  • Moving your body
  • Spending time in nature
  • Journaling
  • Talking it out with friends or family
  • Get adequate sleep
  • Consume whole foods
  • Recognize when you need a break and honor that
  • Be intentional with rest
  • Seek help from a mental health professional
  • Positive affirmations
  • Getting creative

For more information on how to heal from your own emotional wounds, regulate your nervous system, and manage your stress effectively so that you can break generational cycles and teach your children a better way, feel free to call Rooted Therapy and Wellness at 409-790-0014 or send an email to info@rootedtherapyandwellness.com


Amanda Adams, OTR
Occupational Therapist/ Owner of Rooted Therapy and Wellness

As an occupational therapist, my job is to help individuals function optimally and live to their fullest potential. Using my knowledge and experience as on OT along with experiences from my own healing journey, I help individuals engage in their own innate ability to heal, regain their lives, and THRIVE, rather than just survive. I believe in meeting each individual exactly where they are and establishing a relationship that facilitates growth, learning, and fulfillment. At Rooted Therapy and Wellness, my mission is to educate, empower, encourage, and equip individuals using a holistic, multisensory approach to create health and wellness in all areas of life.

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