Emotional intelligence is one of those terms that gets used
constantly in parenting conversations and defined almost never.
Most parents have a general sense that it is something they
want for their children — the ability to understand and manage
feelings, to connect with others, to navigate the social world
with some degree of skill and grace — without a clear picture
of what it actually is, how it develops, or what specifically
builds it.
The science is more specific and more actionable than most
parenting books suggest. This article covers what emotional
intelligence actually is, what the research says about how
it develops, and the specific daily practices that make the
biggest difference.
What Emotional Intelligence Actually Is
The term emotional intelligence was introduced by
psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer in 1990
and popularized by Daniel Goleman in his 1995 book
of the same name. The concept describes a set of
related abilities:
The ability to perceive emotions accurately — in
oneself and in others.
The ability to use emotions to facilitate thinking
and problem-solving.
The ability to understand emotional language and
the way emotions evolve and combine.
The ability to manage emotions — in oneself and
in relationships with others.
Research on emotional intelligence across decades
finds that it predicts important life outcomes
independently of general intelligence — including
academic achievement, quality of relationships,
mental health, and professional success. A child
who understands and manages emotions well has
genuine advantages that persist across their
lifetime.
The good news for parents: emotional intelligence
is not fixed at birth. It is developed — through
experience, relationship, and specific practices
that research has now documented in enough detail
to be genuinely useful.
How Emotional Intelligence Develops
Emotional intelligence does not develop in a vacuum.
Research consistently finds that it develops primarily
through relationship — specifically through the
quality of the early parent-child relationship and
through the specific ways parents respond to
children’s emotional experiences.
The foundational research here is John Gottman’s
work on emotion coaching — a specific parenting
approach that Gottman and colleagues documented
in a landmark longitudinal study tracking families
from early childhood through adolescence.
Gottman identified two broad parenting styles in
relation to children’s emotions:
Emotion dismissing parents — who minimize,
redirect, or dismiss children’s negative emotions.
“You’re fine.” “Stop crying.” “There’s nothing
to be upset about.” “Think about something happy.”
Emotion coaching parents — who notice,
acknowledge, and help children understand and
navigate their emotional experiences. Who treat
negative emotions as opportunities for connection
and teaching rather than problems to be eliminated.
The longitudinal outcomes were striking. Children
of emotion-coaching parents showed significantly
better academic achievement, stronger friendships,
fewer behavioral problems, better physical health,
and higher emotional intelligence than children
of emotion-dismissing parents — even after
controlling for general intelligence and
socioeconomic factors.
The Five Steps of Emotion Coaching
Gottman’s research identified five specific steps
that characterize emotion-coaching parenting:
Step 1 — Be aware of the child’s emotion.
Notice what the child is feeling, even when
it is not expressed loudly or clearly. The
child who has gone quiet after school may
be just as much in need of emotional support
as the child who is crying.
Step 2 — Recognize the emotion as an
opportunity. Rather than treating a child’s
negative emotion as a problem to be
eliminated as quickly as possible, see it
as a moment for connection and teaching.
The child who is angry or sad or scared
is a child who needs you — and who has
something to learn about their own
emotional life.
Step 3 — Listen and validate. Before
doing anything else — before problem-solving,
before redirecting, before teaching —
listen to the child’s experience and
acknowledge it genuinely. “It sounds like
you’re really hurt about what happened.”
“That makes sense that you’d feel that way.”
Validation is not agreement with the child’s
behavior. It is acknowledgment of the
child’s feeling.
Step 4 — Help the child label the emotion.
Research on affect labeling — putting feelings
into words — finds that naming an emotion
reduces its intensity by activating the
prefrontal cortex and modulating amygdala
activity. In plain language: naming a feeling
makes it smaller and more manageable. Help
children build a rich emotional vocabulary
that goes beyond “happy,” “sad,” and “mad”
— to include frustrated, disappointed,
nervous, embarrassed, jealous, proud,
overwhelmed.
Step 5 — Set limits while problem-solving.
Emotion coaching does not mean accepting
all behavior. It means acknowledging the
feeling while setting limits on the behavior:
“I understand you’re angry. It’s okay to
be angry. It’s not okay to hit. Let’s
figure out what else you can do when you
feel this way.”
Daily Practices That Build Emotional Intelligence
Beyond the emotion-coaching framework, research
identifies several specific daily practices that
consistently build emotional intelligence in
children.
Name your own emotions out loud. Children learn
emotional intelligence primarily through
observation — watching how the adults around
them experience, express, and manage feelings.
A parent who says “I’m feeling frustrated right
now — I’m going to take a few deep breaths
before I respond” is teaching emotional
intelligence more effectively than any direct
lesson could.
Read emotionally rich books together. Research
on bibliotherapy and social-emotional learning
finds that reading fiction — particularly fiction
that explores characters’ inner emotional lives —
significantly builds children’s theory of mind
and emotional understanding. Discussing
characters’ feelings during and after reading
amplifies this effect.
Ask about feelings, not just events. The
habitual question “what did you do at school
today?” invites a report of events. “What was
the best part of your day? What was the
hardest?” invites emotional reflection. Research
on parent-child conversation finds that regular
emotion-focused conversations predict children’s
emotional understanding and regulation capacity
more strongly than many formal interventions.
Validate before redirecting — always. The
sequence matters: acknowledge the feeling
first, redirect or problem-solve second.
Reversing this sequence — redirecting before
acknowledging — communicates that the feeling
itself is the problem, which teaches children
to suppress rather than manage their emotions.
Teach repair explicitly. Emotional intelligence
includes the ability to repair relationships
after conflict. When you lose your temper,
miss something your child needed, or handle
a situation badly — repair it explicitly:
“I lost my patience earlier and I shouldn’t
have. I’m sorry.” This models one of the
most important emotional competencies there
is — the capacity to acknowledge a mistake
and reconnect.
What Emotional Intelligence Is Not
It is worth being clear about what emotional
intelligence is not, because popular versions
of the concept sometimes miss this.
Emotional intelligence is not emotional
permissiveness. An emotionally intelligent
child is not a child who is never told no,
never experiences frustration, or is never
expected to manage difficult feelings.
Quite the opposite — the capacity to
tolerate frustration, delay gratification,
and manage disappointment are core
components of emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is not the absence
of negative emotions. It is the capacity
to experience negative emotions without
being overwhelmed by them — and to
use emotional information effectively
rather than being controlled by it.
Emotional intelligence is not something
that can be taught in a single conversation
or through a specific program. It is built
gradually, through thousands of ordinary
interactions across childhood, in the
context of a warm and emotionally attuned
relationship.
The Role of the Parent’s Own Emotional Intelligence
One of the most consistent findings in the
emotional intelligence research is that
parental emotional intelligence significantly
predicts children’s emotional intelligence —
more strongly than almost any specific
practice or program.
A parent who is aware of their own emotions,
who can manage their emotional responses
under pressure, and who models the repair
of relationships after conflict is providing
the most powerful emotional intelligence
curriculum available.
This is not a counsel of perfection. No
parent manages their emotions perfectly
all the time. What the research shows is
that it is the pattern — the general
orientation toward emotional awareness
and responsiveness — that matters, not
the absence of difficult moments.
The repair after the difficult moment is
itself one of the most important lessons.
The Bottom Line
Emotional intelligence is not a fixed trait
children either have or don’t have. It is
a set of capacities that develops gradually,
through experience and relationship, across
childhood and into adulthood.
The research is clear about what builds it:
a parent who notices and acknowledges
feelings rather than dismissing them, who
helps children find words for their emotional
experience, who models emotional awareness
in their own life, and who repairs the
relationship after conflict rather than
pretending the conflict did not happen.
None of this requires a program, a curriculum,
or a special approach. It requires showing
up, paying attention, and treating your
child’s emotional life as something that
matters — because the research shows,
clearly and consistently, that it does.
Sources
Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990).
Emotional intelligence. Imagination,
Cognition, and Personality, 9(3), 185–211.
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence.
Bantam Books.
Gottman, J. M., Katz, L. F., & Hooven, C.
(1996). Parental meta-emotion philosophy
and the emotional life of families.
Journal of Family Psychology, 10(3),
243–268.
Brackett, M. A., Rivers, S. E., & Salovey,
P. (2011). Emotional intelligence:
Implications for personal, social,
academic, and workplace success.
Social and Personality Psychology
Compass, 5(1), 88–103.
Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I.,
Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer,
J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting
feelings into words. Psychological
Science, 18(5), 421–428.
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