Nurture a Child's Emotional Growth

Parents, often talk of child development as it pertains to intellectual growth. There are certain things parents can do to help give children the best possible opportunities for increased IQ and to further learning capabilities. But what about emotional growth?

Once a child is able to relax and focus, she is then in the best frame of mind to proceed with the other two areas of growth most critical to reaching his or her full potential: emotional and intellectual development.

Emotional and intellectual skills go hand in hand.

A child cannot achieve anywhere near her full cognitive capacity without healthy emotional maturity. Emotional intelligence affects moral development as well. Emotionally mature children can make better use of their brains than immature children of the same age. It's that simple.

Maturity enables a child to sit, concentrate, learn, and so much more. It is the foundation of self-motivation, self-confidence, and a sense of competence. All of those qualities are essential to making use of a child's talents and knowledge in order to interact in a productive way with other people in the world.

Educators have realized how important emotions are to cognitive, moral, and all other areas of proficiency. Howard Gardner was one of the first to point out that there are "multiple intelligences" beyond intellectual intelligence. Though it is intellectual intelligence, as measured by IQ, that Western cultures pay the most attention to, Gardner identified seven intelligences.

The first five include:

1. linguistic,

2. logical-mathematical,

3. spatial,

4. musical, and

5. bodily-kinesthetic.

The remaining two deal even more directly with emotional growth:

6. interpersonal, and

7. intrapersonal intelligences.

Since Gardner presented his work in the early 1980s, he has added additional forms of intelligence to his list.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman furthered this understanding of how interdependent our various forms of intelligence are with his book Emotional Intelligence (1995). Goleman writes: "One of psychology's open secrets is the relative inability of grades, IQ, or SAT scores, despite their popular mystiques, to predict unerringly who will succeed in life….At best, IQ contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success, which leaves 80 percent to other forces."

Goleman, along with the majority of educators, now believes that it is emotional intelligence that enables a child to make the most of his or her cognitive skills and knowledge. Goleman presented a summary of neuroscientific research to demonstrate that the brain's prefrontal lobes, which control emotional impulses, also participate in establishing leaning and memory. If a child is emotionally immature and, therefore, more likely to be emotionally volatile, the child's frequent feelings of anger, upset, and anxiety get in the way of his ability to learn and remember what he has learned.

Thus, guiding a child in developing emotionally and engaging socially in a calm and relaxed way is important to establishing self-confidence and self-esteem. It is also key to helping a child feel motivated to make the best use of his or her talents and other forms of intelligence.

So how do you begin to help a child develop his or her emotional intelligence?

Healthy emotional growth begins with successful bonding between parent and child. A child masters the social skills critical to emotional maturity by watching parents' behavior and modeling their behavior on yours.

Being there to observe and get to know a child is key. Your presence does even more. When a child learns through experience that she can toddle out of the room to explore and still find you there when she comes back, she develops trust. First, learning to trust her parents and then herself is the foundation upon which a child builds self-esteem and moves toward self-actualization.

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What parents provide is something psychologists and educators call "scaffolding," which supports a child's learning in the early years. It consists of several parts. Of course, one of the most important things you can do is create a loving and accepting atmosphere in the house.

A child who feels loved without being judged can overcome many obstacles—poverty, physical handicaps, learning disabilities. By paying attention to a child—by knowing her childbirth history (was she premature, was it a difficult or easy birth) and childhood history (her burgeoning likes, dislikes, moods, and attitudes)—you create a bridge between a child's past and present. That connection is necessary to give her the sense of security to go out and investigate the world. You also need to add to that mix a structured, orderly, consistent, and safe environment. When a child knows what is expected and what is acceptable, she will be well on her way to healthy emotional maturity.

Conversations with a child, which build on the natural give and take of talking and listening, provide the first lessons in social skills. The best parents are those who talk to their children about everything. Keeping these conversations going throughout childhood and adolescence provides more than social skills— it solidifies the parent-child bond. A child needs to know they can talk to you and trust you, even through the emotionally turbulent teen years.

As a child gets older, it becomes important to model the behavior you want her to adopt. You show her how to give voice to her feelings, how to deal with anger and hurt in ways that are not aggressive, how to show regard for others. All of these behaviors help set the stage for emotional growth. She can learn these lessons best by interacting with parents first. Then she can apply those same skills to her friends, schoolmates, and the rest of the world at school and beyond.

Timing is everything—in parenting, as in most of life. If you expose a child to the right tools, the right kinds of play, and the right loving feedback at the right age, your child will develop successfully— and joyously, too.

The goal of healthy emotional blossoming is to cultivate children who can find their center and stay calm even when facing family tensions, peer pressures, and school difficulties. If a child is emotionally well-adjusted, she will have a secure sense of herself and self-worth. She won't have to wear the right jeans or a nose ring to get peer approval. She will also have developed an understanding of right and wrong, "good” and “bad" behavior, ethical and unethical choices, which enables her to develop morally.

A child will be motivated to take her meaningful place in adult society because she has the scaffolding in place to support her. It is you, the parent, who has helped put that scaffolding there.

In the future, as we continue to shift from an industrial to a service-based and technological economy, the importance of mastering social skills, especially interpersonal intelligence, will only increase. "People skills" are at the heart of "service" jobs. Furthermore, it is very difficult for a child to integrate and implement intellectual advances and adjust to the world without healthy emotional maturity. With emotional security, the sky is the limit.