Just finished reading this book and I am impressed. This book feels like the continuation of Between Parent and Child and fills in the missing pieces in Between Parent and Child. Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child focuses on using five key steps for Emotion Coaching. 1. Being aware of the child's emotion. 2. Recognizing the emotion as an opportunity for intimacy and teaching. 3. Listening empathetically and validating the child's feelings. 4. Helping the child verbally label emotions. 5. Setting limits while helping the child problem-solve. I learned about how to be empathetic to a child's feelings through all my previous readings, however, I have always felt a little permissive as a result, but this book fills in that gap with step 5. It teaches you how to be empathetic and understanding and yet still set limit and gives example of how to, setting limits is very important. Just being empathetic and not setting limits or helping your child to move on, is not going to help the child's emotions any better. I also love how the book does consider practicality, and list times that emotional coaching is not appropriate and how it can be delayed, like example when you are in a rush.
The book categorizes Parents into four types: 1. The dismissing parents, who disregard, ignore, or trivialize children's negative emotions. 2. The disapproving parents, who are critical of their children's displays of negative feelings and may reprimand or punish them for emotional expression. 3. The Laissez-Faire parents, who accept their children's emotions and empathize with them, but fail to offer guidance or set limits on their children's behavior. And of course the ultimate goal for me, 4. the Emotion Coach that follows the mentioned five steps above.
Another interesting point mentioned in this book is the strong influence of the father to a child. Even though for reasons unknown, their studies show that the father actually has a stronger influence on the child's emotional intelligent than the mother. So it is actually very important for the dad to get involve with emotion coaching too.
