Looking to nurture emotional intelligence (EQ) in your child? Learn high-EQ parenting strategies that will help you build their empathy and emotional awareness—and set them up for lifelong success.

Why is emotional intelligence important for children?

Establishing respect for emotion is the most important childrearing task you have as a parent. If you and your partner treat each other and the kids with emotional awareness and empathy, your children are much more likely to enjoy strong mental health, stable, satisfying relationships, and rewarding work life. Here are a few fundamental parenting practices that will help build your child’s emotional intelligence (EQ):

Remember that you can’t convey what you don’t exemplify. Your children learn from you— through your actions, much more than your words. If you can’t communicate your emotions through your behavior, they won’t respect their own emotions.

Try to learn from your children. Children haven’t unlearned EQ as you may have. They make friends easily and retain their capacity for joy because they’re naturally empathic and instinctively ready to feel their emotions fully and then let them go. So, learn and listen; you will raise your own EQ and establish flexibility and mutual respect into the family.

Be on the lookout for repeating history. It’s a lot easier to instill fear of feelings in children than you think, even if you try hard not to. Write a list of things your parent told you as a child—you might even jot them on a piece of paper and put it in your wallet as a way of symbolically keeping them in your memory. When you’re tired and irritable, pull out that list and notice your own feelings as you read it. This reminder should keep you from shrugging off the warning feelings that arise when you start to utter these refrains yourself. Also, whenever you get a physical signal that you’re dismissing your child’s feelings, do what you can to observe your tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language—run to a mirror if you can. If what you find hurts you, it’s also hurting your child. Periodically recall how you felt being the object of those words and expressions. Invoking those painful experiences is a strong discouragement to repeating history.

Remember that unhappy parents raise unhappy children. If you’re exhausted and depressed by the demands of parenthood, your children will be depressed, too. You can’t sacrifice yourself and do anyone else any good, so keep yourself healthy if you hope to raise healthy children.

Be quick to apologize when you make mistakes. Let’s be realistic; you will let your guard down from time to time—we all do. Fortunately, you have a simple tool for ensuring that your errors don’t do permanent damage. It’s called an apology, and it comes in pretty handy throughout parenthood.

Using your own EQ to raise high-EQ children

No one can reduce the complexities of raising children, each one unique, to a list of simple rules. Through emotional awareness and empathy, you’ll find the correct things to say and do with your child at any given moment. That said, there are situations that arise in virtually every childhood, from infancy to puberty, that challenge parents’ ability to acknowledge the worthiness of children’s feelings, without being manipulated by them. And there are ways to incorporate emotional intelligence into your responses to these situations.

The following are a few examples of how you can apply high-EQ approaches to the unique challenges that arise in your own parenting adventures.

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