Emotional stability the top priority
TEACHING KIDS HOW TO UNDERSTAND THEIR EMOTIONS IS JUST AS IMPORTANT AS LEARNING THEIR ABC, WRITES MERCEDES MAGUIRE
WHEN a child graduates preschool, a good yardstick of success is knowing their ABCs, maybe counting to 20 and writing their name, right? Not always, say experts who argue emotional intelligence can be more important than the academic variety.
Emotional intelligence, or EQ, refers to a person’s ability to recognise their emotions and handle social relationships.
Little Scholars early learning centres founder and childhood educator Jae Fraser says many parents put too much importance on academic learning at the cost of emotional and social skills in the preschool years.
“Parents want their children to be able to write their last name and count to 50 but what they may not realise is Little Johnny has also learnt to share, interact and socialise with his classmates,” Fraser says.
“Everyone measures children from an academic point of view and emotional intelligence is largely ignored. And this is a poor strategy because we are coming to realise now that the emotional intelligence piece is so important.”
The five important elements for well-rounded emotional intelligence are selfawareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills.
At preschool, they are taught mostly through play, says Fraser, who has always embedded emotional intelligence in programs but is now more directly focused on it.
“If we try to ram empathy down their throats, it would go in one ear and out the other,” he says. “But if Johnny loves trucks and one of his trucks has an accident, we can talk about how that makes his truck feel.”
Daniel Tolson is one of Australia’s top business coaches and an expert on emotional intelligence. He says if EQ was taught better in preschool, he wouldn’t have to focus on it so much in the corporate world.
“There’s a saying that goes ‘We spend 50 years of our lives getting over the first five’,” he says. “Experts say everything starts with a thought and those thoughts influence 95 per cent of our feelings, which in turn affects our behaviour and outcomes in life. Daniel Goleman (who wrote 1996 book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ) says there’s a worldwide trend for the current generation to be more emotionally troubled than the one before it.
“This topic has never been more important. Think about it like this: We spend four minutes a day in conversation with our spouse and 30 seconds a
day in face-to-face conversation with our child. By comparison, we live in a country where the average Australian watches three hours and one minute of TV a day.” Tolson says emotional intelligence is not something you are either born with or without – you can teach it to kids as a skill.
SELF-AWARENESS:
Help children understand their unique strengths and weaknesses and also understand the different emotions they feel. For example, if a child is crying and lashing out, the emotion could be anger, not sadness.
SELF-REGULATION:
There are five main emotions (anger, sadness, fear, hurt and guilt) and it’s important children understand how to express them – to stamp their feet when angry or cry when sad, for instance. Don’t sweep emotions under the carpet, instead encourage children to talk about a fear, or hurt etc.
MOTIVATION:
Children need to be free of fear in order to be motivated to have a go at something. Try to avoid negative talk (by the time they’re 18, kids hear “no” 148,000 times) so stick with positive reinforcement and tell them what you want them to do, not what you don’t. Instead of saying “Don’t be scared” say “Be confident”.
EMPATHY:
Kids need to understand emotions in other people and that other people’s emotions may have nothing to do with them. You can point out when a person is feeling fear, sadness or anger and tell them that’s what emotion looks like. They will be less likely to feel guilt if they know another person’s emotion is not their fault.
SOCIAL SKILLS:
We now live in the age of communication and the best communicators will rise to the top in every field. Program your children from early on to have confidence, tell them “You are going to be a big success” and “You can do anything”.
While society praises academic achievement, experts agree there is no connection between being book smart and success in life. In fact, US corporate consultant Talent Smart, whose client base includes more than 75 per cent of Fortune 500 companies, found people with an average IQ outperform those with the highest IQ 70 per cent of the time, showing there must be another factor for success than just intelligence. Experts say a more important predictor of success is emotional intelligence.
And if you think starting your children on this path from their preschool years is a little much, consider these figures: 90 per cent of top performers have a high EQ. And emotional intelligence is responsible for 58 per cent of your job performance and people with a high EQ make about $29,000 more a year than those with a lower EQ.
“Emotional intelligence has been around forever but we used to call it charisma or charm or street smarts,” Tolson says. “In a digital age, people hide behind a text or an email. But we’re social beings, we need the face-to-face human interaction.”
In preschool, Fraser says a new focus is to educate parents to consolidate the teaching learnt in the preschool. They have started offering a masterclass to their parents to enhance their child’s EQ.
“It can be a barrier that people think this kind of skill can’t be taught,” Fraser says.
“But it’s really important for preschool educators to work together with parents because we see parents so focused on the academic and forgetting all about social development. But coming together and nurturing this at home is so important. We’re the experts and we have to guide parents on this topic.
“We all want our children to be successful, happy and wellrounded members of society.”
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE HAS BEEN AROUND FOREVER BUT WE USED TO CALL IT CHARISMA OR CHARM OR STREET SMARTS BUSINESS COACH DANIEL TOLSON