If you struggle to respond to your child’s emotions in a way that reduces the intensity of their struggle but also leads to the eventual adoption of these strategies and the development of resilience, you are in the right place! We have compiled information and resources on emotion coaching to enable you to respond more constructively.
Before we get into the details and reasoning backing emotion coaching, let’s establish a basic understanding of what we are talking about.
What is Emotion Coaching? A Definition
Emotion coaching is based on research by John Gottman, an American psychologist, in the late 1990s. It is designed to help children become more aware of their emotions, as well as learn how to manage and respond to intense emotions in effective and appropriate ways. These skills are developed with the help of parental empathy, the recognition, acknowledgement, and validation of feelings, and the creation of a safe space for children to feel emotions.
Why Use Emotion Coaching?
Repeated emotion coaching helps children develop skills and language to identify emotions and tools to feel and respond to strong emotions. It aids in the formation of self-regulation skills and directs negative responses (eg. temper tantrums) into more appropriate, productive ones (eg. feeling an emotion, followed by problem-solving). Furthermore, learning how to utilize emotion coaching with your child will also help you build skills to cope with emotions.
What is Involved In Emotion Coaching?
Although emotion coaching looks different for everyone, there are some key elements that remain present:
- Listening-More specifically, listening with empathy and without judgement to the emotions your child is feeling.
- Connection– Moments of intense emotion create space for connection with your child, a chance to develop a deeper relationship, and for positive teaching and redirecting behaviours.
- Awareness of Emotions-This involves an awareness of both your emotions and your child’s, as well as how you respond to them. (How does your body respond? What behaviours is your child exhibiting in response to their emotions?)
- Identifying Emotions-By naming the emotions that your child is experiencing, you are building vocabulary, showing your child that their emotions are seen, and helping them to give words to what they are feeling. You can also try modelling this by naming your own emotions.
- Shifting to Problem Solving-Potentially the most important part of emotion coaching is shifting unhelpful and negative responses into problem-solving. This can be done effectively by setting boundaries around acceptable and unacceptable behaviours, then working through potential solutions. Remember that this is a learned skill and will take time to develop.
Still wanting more information? Here are some additional sources you may want to check out.
“The Train Analogy That Will Completely Change How You See Your Crying Child” This great article discusses the science of emotion processing in children using a simple analogy, and is a great tool that can be shared with your co-parent or child as well.
“Emotion Coaching for Caregivers: Tips and Tricks” This document is a quick way to get all of the information you need about emotion coaching and is well worth the time to look through it.
https://www.emotioncoachinguk.com/what-is-emotion-coaching This website outlines what emotion coaching is, as well as outlining other resources and information that can he useful to know.
If you are serious about getting started, click here for some shortcuts and sentence starters that will help you get started with utilizing emotion coaching.