Raising Emotionally Intelligent Child

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Date
2015-03
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The British University in Dubai (BUiD)
Abstract
The most famous model for testing the emotional intelligence of a child is “self-awareness, assertiveness, self-regard, self-actualization, independence, empathy, interpersonal relationships, social responsibility, problem-solving, reality testing, flexibility, stress management, stress tolerance, impulse control, happiness and optimism.” Therefore, parents, guardians and teachers should do more than showing concern and appreciation of the child’s activities and engage their emotions as well. We adopted a mixed methodology to gather and analyze data from 270 children with the permission and assistance of 8 teachers and atleast 270 parents. The teachers and parents were served with emotion logs and questionnaires to fill at the end of the week. Overall, 14 hypotheses were supported while others 1 was rejected. Our research shows that children with higher emotional intelligence are good at consoling themselves, overcome challenges faster, are healthier, attentive, are very sociable and perform well in academic endeavors. As discussed in this study, the best way for raising an emotionally intelligent child is emotional coaching which above all covers empathy as a powerful process of relating with their situations. This study concludes that emotional coaching is effective for children up teenage or adolescent ages. Emotional coaching should be a home philosophy and school policy. The parents, guardians and teachers should handle emotions as natural events. These caregivers must always listen to a child who is angry, moody, sad and showing all sorts of behaviour. This study concludes that the caregivers must establish a network of support where they communicate with each other about the children’s behaviour so that a standard handling procedure is in place. Often an angry child’s treatment at home is different from school and this causes all sorts of problems to their overall emotional intelligence. The caregivers need to explain to the child that it is okay to be angry but there are limits of behaviour that will be tolerated. Finally, whatever the action preferred by the caregivers, dismissing, disapproving and laissez-faire response to children’s behaviour must be avoided at all cost.
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emotional intelligence
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