Parenting Archives - Sarah Wiesendanger

Parenting: How to be an Emotional Coach

Teaching your children to master their emotions is one of the best gifts you can give them. Emotional intelligence is a far more reliable predictor of fulfilling achievement, balance, and contentment in life than either intellectual intelligence or material advantage.

Of course, one of the best ways of teaching, and one of the hardest, is by example. If you’re able to show your child how you use your emotions – the pleasant and unpleasant ones – to inform your life, but how you are also able to choose how you respond to them, giving yourself space to consider both the long and the short-term effects of a possible reaction, you will be providing a wonderful behavioural model.

However, sometimes you may need to go one step further, and put in some active teaching as well. After all, there are going to be times when your role-modeling is less than perfect! And, most children need help learning how to identify the nuances of their emotions. Talking through your own feelings, and how they serve to guide you in your life choices, when you’ve had to rein them in so as to give yourself time for contemplation, when it’s helped to share them with others, will be invaluable to your children. Also talking through your children’s emotions; empathising and accepting how they feel, pinpointing exactly why they feel the way they do, working out strategies to cope better next time in a similar situation.

Because the one thing that we can rely on in life is change – in our work and home environments, in our social lives – and, because the rate of change is increasing, our children need to be able to find their own sense of inner security, when the world around them may feel unstable. And, the most reliable way for them to do this, is to have a real mastery over their emotions.

Parenting: financial rewards to children?

We all understand reward motivation, don’t we? People get bonuses at work, win trophies in sport, get presents when they’re nice. And it seems to work. Doesn’t it? Well, no not always or, indeed, often. Research has shown that extrinsic motivation is apt to: encourage short-term thinking, become addictive (meaning that we come to rely on being rewarded by other people), increase cheating and bad behaviour, lower performance, and diminish creative response [Daniel Pink, Drive].

And yet we keep doing it. More and more, it would seem, with our children as well as in the workplace. It seems almost standard practice these days to pay teenagers to do well in the GCSEs and A levels. But what is the message we are sending in this supposedly generous and motivational act?

Research conducted by Alfie Kohn shows that providing financial reward is likely to de-motivate students. If compensation is necessary for studying, it implies, then learning can have no intrinsic reward of itself. And yet personal, internal drive is fundamental to high performance.

Bribing our children to achieve suggests that we can’t trust them to do it on their own. Also, in this respect it denies their access to two basic human needs: that of interest (doing something for the thing itself), and autonomy (being in charge of one’s own life). Whilst it may work in the short-term (the first round of exams may go well), it will build resentment, lack of interest, and defiance in the longer-term. It will also create a belief that they shouldn’t have to exert themselves unless someone is going to reward them. This is setting our children up to lose interest in their own education and striving for excellence, and to lose their ability to self-direct.

Harder, but more beneficial to our children – and society as a whole – would be to encourage them to develop a sense of meaning and purpose in whatever they choose to do, to look to the long-term for their own personal goal-setting, and to strive for excellence for its own intrinsic rewards.

Taking away the bribes and financial rewards within parenting, means trusting our children to take responsibility for their lives, showing them respect, and believing in their innate resources to excel on their own terms.