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by Michele Ranard, M.Ed.
770 words
“Childhood and adolescence are critical windows of opportunity for
setting down the essential emotional habits that will govern our lives.”
--Daniel Goleman
Clearly, there is good reason for parents to turn their attention toward nurturing the emotional health of their families. According to the CDC, two-thirds of doctor’s visits in the United States today are for stress-related illness. We consume 5 billion tranquilizers every year to control stress. Emotional fitness impacts the future for our kids.
Improve Emotional Fitness
Daniel Goleman reminds us in Emotional Intelligence (2006) “the emotional lessons we learn as children at home and at school shape the emotional circuits, making us more adept—or inept.” Deficiencies in emotional intelligence put us and our kids at risk for depression, a life of violence, eating disorders, and drug abuse.
In Building Emotional Intelligence (2008) Linda Lantieri says kids need adults “To be steady anchors who never give up on them. They also need to learn concrete social and emotional skills that are taught both in the home.”
She outlines these goals of improving emotional fitness:
2. Honor the extraordinary experiences of their inner lives as part of their reality.
3. Help children understand they can know things intuitively and feel deep compassion even though they are young.
7 Ideas to Manage Stress
Lantieri says stress management can be taught by building in daily opportunities for silence and stillness that won’t otherwise happen. She suggests;
1. Create a peace corner. Not to be confused with timeout! A calm-down spot to retreat at times of feeling out of control emotionally. It should be spacious enough to lie down with comfy pillows and include a cd player.
2. “Keep Calm” activity. When your child is upset and self-control is needed, teach these 4 steps: (1) Tell yourself “Stop and take a look around.” (2) Tell yourself “keep calm.” (3) Take a deep breath through your nose while counting to five, hold it while counting to two, and then breathe out through mouth while counting to five. (4) Repeat steps until calm.
3. Silence and stillness away from home. Have a few minutes of quiet at the beginning and end of a car ride instead of listening to the radio. Silent moments help to keep us in touch with our inner lives.
4. Address violent or disturbing events. If your child is exposed to something disturbing (on TV or otherwise), pause for a moment and send positive thoughts or healing to those in need.
5. Honor nature and provide opportunity to be outdoors. “Looking at a far away horizon or sky can help us gain needed perspective. “Sometimes all it takes is a new perspective to shift us out of the bad habits.”
6. Help check into her body cues. For kids to release stress they first need to be aware they ARE stressed. Is my heart racing? Is my breathing becoming shallow?
7. Story time. “There can be lots of unplanned moments where the story can take either of you to a deeper place.” Reading a book out loud also “helps to strengthen a set of neural pathways in the brain that stores this memory for future use.”
Show empathy and understand others’ points of view. “Empathy is the capacity to share in another’s feelings” and when you know another’s feelings you develop sensitivity toward them. Empathy involves careful listening and reading nonverbal cues.
Regulate and cope positively with emotional and behavioral impulses. Delay of gratification is key so it’s important that you be caught modeling it.
Be positive goal- and plan-oriented. Acknowledge the power of optimism and hope “through self-monitoring and feedback, through keeping track of what we have tried, how well it has worked, and what we can do to improve.”
Use positive social skills in handling relationships. “Learning to listen to others carefully and accurately, to take turns, to harmonize feelings, to compromise, to create consensus, and to state one’s ideas clearly…help us work better in groups.”
- Nurturing emotional fitness may be as important to our children as nurturing cognitive development. As Goleman articulates: “When it comes to shaping our decisions and our actions, feeling counts every bit as much—and often more—than thought.”
Elias, Marice J., Steven E. Tobias, and Brian S. Friedlander. Emotionally Intelligent Parenting: How to Raise a Self-Disciplined, Responsible, Socially Skilled Child. Three Rivers, 2000.
