Smart parenting

The summer sun was beating down on the small patch of cement, heating up the already heated stand off between me and my three-year-old. She wanted to stay and play. I wanted to get in the car and go home. She looks at me defiantly as she grabs the pink, tassled handlebars of the three-wheeler trike in her nursery playground. “No,” I say reaching for the gate. “We are going home. I have to go home now because it’s nearly dinner time. Are you coming with me?” She darts to the gate, holding it closed, screaming the sky down as if I have just robbed her of her last chance to play, ever. Does she not realise its brain-boiling hot? Does she not realise it’s dinner time? Does she not realise that I just said, “No”? From experience I see the next 30 minutes mapped out in front of me — 15 minutes of torrential crying all the way home, followed by 15 minutes of red-faced, wounded sulk. Great.

This is the hard part of parenting. The bit you can’t find in any baby manual or parenting guide. The part that your parents seem to master instinctively in their role as grandparents. It’s the part you agonise over and repeatedly reflect on at the end of the day. It’s the easiest to get wrong and probably most important to get right – it’s the emotional part. Unfortunately, one of the major downsides to being an expatriate parent is that our parental role models and their trustworthy guidance are often entire continents away. Joshua Freedman is a parent, a teacher and the founder of Six Seconds, one of the world’s most renowned emotional intelligence organisations, which offers knowledge on how to recognise and understand emotions, and how to use them fluently. He says, “In Dubai, people are often far from their social networks who understand how difficult and absorbing it is being a parent. Away from close family and friends, parents need support and advice on how to deal with tough parenting situations, which are usually hinged on emotions.”

Before you start fretting about your emotional incapacity as a parent, or chastising yourself for the way you dealt with the “I don’t want breakfast” drama this morning, the good news is that, according to Freedman, emotional intelligence (EQ) is just like any other skill, in that it is learnable. “EQ can be taught,” says Freedman. “Some elements of personality are fixed, but I am 100 per cent convinced that we each have choices about how we think, feel, and act.” According to the Six Seconds wisdom, by boosting your emotional intelligence and helping your child to develop their own emotional skills, you can improve the relationship you have with your child, be a better parent, and learn a little something for yourself along the way.

Emotions into actions

Improving your family’s emotional literacy doesn’t mean you have to get a brown leather chaise longue and make like Oprah Winfrey every time you and your child are at loggerheads. Instead, try instigating subtle, yet effective, changes into your daily communication, which your child might not even notice. Interested? Take a look through the following parenting tips for creating a healthier, positive, emotionally-balanced home life, and try putting them into action in your home.

Damage control

When your child is having an emotional moment — also known as a meltdown — Freedman advises us not to give in to the automatic rational responses, such as, “You’re fine.” Or, “Stop crying.” Or, “What’s all this fuss about? You can play with her again tomorrow.” Instead, swallow your own negative feelings, and initiate the VIE (Validate, Inventory, Expand) action response. VIE works on the priniciple that by empathising with your child’s emotion, you will enable them to deal with it. “Facts are not relevant to the emotional brain.” says Freedman.

“When I say, ‘You know Mama’s going to be home soon, right?’ I’m also saying, ‘You should not feel sad.’ While my impulse may be kind, it’s actually dismissive. Feelings are real, even when the causes don’t make sense to another person. And when people are sad, understanding is infinitely more precious than facts.” Once you have made your child’s emotions feel heard by saying things like, “I guess you’re feeling pretty angry right now”, the next step is to encourage your child to work out which choices (if any) brought them to this situation, for example, “Why did Sam say he didn’t want to be friends with you any more?” — that’s the inventory part. Finally, expand — encourage your child to think of a few different options of what to do next, such as, “Why don’t you make Sam a card?” or, “How about you go and play with Tom today instead?” In this way, you can help your child learn that for every situation, there are a multitude of ways to deal with it.

Press pause

Emotions are chemical reactions, occurring in the brain in response to something. When you experience a strong emotion, these chemicals wash through your body in a matter of seconds. It takes about six seconds for these chemicals to be absorbed into the body, after which you will be in a much more controlled, stable state and better able to make decisions. Interestingly, it also takes six seconds for the brain to recognise the feeling of compassion — hence the name of Freedman’s organisation. By taking a six second hiatus from a sticky situation, your anger and frustration will have dissipated, compassion will have sunk in, and you will be better equipped emotionally to deal with it.

The right words

Help your child express their emotions by teaching them a wide variety of emotional words. “There are about 5,000 words for feelings in the English language,” says Freedman. “And most people use about four. If your are only ever ‘fine’ or ‘bad’, that’s all your child will be too.” Freedman advises capitalising on reading time and TV watching as opportunities to talk about the different emotions characters might be feeling and why. “Explaining emotions to a five-year-old — for example, what is excitement, what is loneliness — is an extremely powerful exercise for you as an adult. The best way to learn something is to teach it.”

Decision maker

“One of the big starting points,” says Freedman, “is to enable your children to recognise that they are making their own decisions, that there are many options to choose from, and that their decisions have consequences.” Freedman advises waiting for your child to cool down and then talking to them about the choices they made which led up the drama. Then, ask them to list a few different ways they could react to it, and what the outcome of these options would be. As a parent, by evaluating the situation and trying out different reactions and approaches to your child’s behaviour, not only are you learning about what parenting methods work best with your child, but you are also modelling the behaviour to her. “For example, if your child throws her doll on the ground,” says Freedman, “you could say to her, ‘Oh, you must be feeling very sad right now’; or you could give her a hug; or do nothing; or pick up the toy, cradle it in your arms like a baby and say, ‘Poor thing!’” Instead of just dishing out punishment immediately, by choosing to use the situation as an opportunity to teach your child about choices, options and consequences, you are encouraging her to take responsibility for her actions, which is an important life lesson. Freedman explains, “The more control we take as parents, the less ownership they take over their own lives.”

Best for last

In the late 1960s, psychologist Walter Mischel conducted the famous marshmallow experiment with children, whereby he offered them a marshmallow and said that if they could wait a few minutes before eating it while he left the room, he would give them a reward. Years later he cross-referenced these results with the same children’s SAT scores, achievement, ability to make decisions, self-control and other measures of adult success, and found that being able to delay gratification was strongly linked to success later in life. Freedman believes that learning to work hard now and wait for your reward is an important lesson. “Children will manipulate situations saying that if they play football now, they promise they will study twice as hard later, but parents should encourage them to study now, play later.”

Caring ways

Empathy is a hard trait to teach, but it is possible to encourage it, says Freedman. “Ask you child, ‘How is your choice affecting others?’ ‘Is that the effect you really want to have?’ According to Freedman, children below the age of about 14 will struggle with this kind of evaluative thinking, but you can start encouraging the thought processes from the age of about five or six. Sibling interaction poses useful opportunities to suggest empathetic thoughts, such as, “If we go swimming now while your brother is sleeping, how will that affect him?”

Family on a mission

“In this part of the world, there are lots of different people from different parts of the globe, with different values and norms” says Freedman. “As a parent, you have to be really clear about the values you want to give to your child. If you start with it when they are about five-years-old, by the time they are a teenager they will have internalised it.” Freedman suggests sitting with your partner and creating a Family Mission Statement — an ethos which embodies the attitude you want to pass on to your little human beings, such as, “We respect” or “We protect” or “We accept”. You can also can create family ‘rules’ or norms, such as, “In our family, we say thank you if someone cooks us dinner/we take our shoes off before we step inside/don’t hurt animals. Maybe that’s not how they do it in other families, but this is how we do it in ours.”

Does it actually work?

A study from the Six Seconds office in Singapore found that parents who studied EQ skills enjoyed improved relations with their children, less reaction, more choice, better communication and conversation, better understanding of their children as a whole, and positive change in their family dynamics.That’s all well and good, but what happens when an EQ newby starts to use emotionally intelligent parenting methods with their child?

Rewind back to the drama at the school gate. As I plug my wailing child into her carseat, I realise this is a perfect opportunity to try out some of Freedman’s tactics.

I wait for a few seconds to release my frustration (pause, tick) and then say, “Are you feeling frustrated?” A shocked, suspicious eye peers at me in the rear view mirror, but the wailing doesn’t abate. “I know you must be feeling frustrated right now — frustrated means a bit sad and a bit angry at the same time.” (Validate, tick; language, tick.) I have her attention and the wail is more of a half-hearted whimper. “Are you feeling sad and angry?” She nods. “Ah, it’s not nice to feel frustrated is it? You must be really upset.” She looks at me and stops crying — I’ve got her. I ask her, “Why are you sad and angry?” She responds, “Because I wanted to open the gate and you didn’t let me and you just opened it and I had to get in the car.” This answer was a surprise to me, as I thought the drama was about wanting to stay and play. I respond, “Why didn’t I let you open the gate?” She says, “Because I was crying and holding the gate because I wanted to play.” (Inventory, tick.) I swoop in for the ‘Expand’ — “Well how about instead of playing at school, we go home and play there. Or go to the park after dinner? And how about tomorrow, when I pick you up from school, when I say we have to leave, you can open the gate yourself?” (Expand, tick.) “OK,” she says smiling. Meltdown averted.

EQ and teens

Jayne Morrison is regional director for Six Seconds Middle East. She explains how learning about emotional intelligence has helped her be a better parent to her three teenagers.

“Teenagers are at a very important point in their lives when they are asking themselves, ‘Who am I?’ They are finding out about their place in the world and breaking away from the warm safety of their parents’ arms. They often come across as aggressive, angry and cold, as they struggle with their identity and their emotions.

“The benefits of EQ in this situation is that it helps them become emotionally literate, converse, assess and recognise their feelings. By posing questions, you can encourage them to start asking themselves those questions — ‘What’s the result when you behave or interact like that?’ These questions bring the discussion of emotions into the open. It helps them realise that their lives don’t have to be a long line of knee jerk reactions. They can stop and think about it — they have options. For example, I’ll say to my older daughter, “I know you feel frustrated. I know it upsets you when your sister takes your clothes. You can run upstairs now and start screaming and shouting, but what else could you do? What would the consequences of that be?’

“Thinking about consequences, optimism and intrinsic motivation are all important, but instead of using the terminology I will hide it in normal conversation. For example, when my son did well on his exams recently, I said to him, ‘Wow, you did really well! How did it make you feel to do so well? Isn’t it motivating to know that you got good results because of your hard work?’ Through these questions, I was underlining the fact that his life is a result of his choices.

“Teenagers are not usually open to deep meaningful discussion. It is at this point in our lives as parents that we really have to exercise our own EQ. By using these skills we can help them recognise their decisions and their options, and help them be themselves. By using searching, deep questions, we can help them find the answers for themselves. Parents are very good at telling, but teens don’t actually need or want to be told. I asked my 17-year-old son what time he thought he should come home the other night. He looked at me in shock and then said he was quite tired so he would be home early. Usually, no matter what time I suggest, it’s not late enough and I get a moody response. There are children his age who are out there on their own and supporting families, so I will respect his age and give him responsibilities for his own life. By giving them choices, I have realised how mature and responsible they can be.

“I am discovering that by having discussions and asking questions that they don’t even have to answer, my teenagers are thinking about who they are, who they want to be and their choices in life. Sometimes they will say something, or do something, and I will realise that they actually thought about what I said and maybe even took it on board.”

Six Seconds

Six Seconds Middle East offers EQ assessments for adults and children, parenting EQ consultations and workshops. Visit www.6seconds-me.com, or call 04-3754102.