Handling your children with Emotional Intelligence
Children learn about life mostly from the parents, then grand parents and other influential figures at early age like school teacher, relatives, etc. The influence of each person plays a vital role in the child’s life and growth across mental, physical, emotional and spiritual matters.
Nowadays, very small children- just at primary school are talking about stress, we never knew such words till we entered an office environment. But how come things have changed? The children are learning not only the word stress but also our practices that lead to stress from us. As parents we need to widen our awareness to see how we are having an influence on our child. Are we being the best role model in every action? You might humbly give advice to a child as how it needs to wake up early, be happy, enjoy school but more than the best advice, what’s more important is what you do! Children learn not by hearing but by seeing what you do. If you sleep late in the night and you keep advising your child to sleep early, you watch TV and expect the child to reduce watching TV, you are late every day to office but expect the child to be on time for school- the child is watching all of this and they just copy what we do. The child also learns it is okay to say something and do something else because that is what happens in my family too.
When a child is born it is not a time to teach but to learn, because in most scenarios the child will be reflecting your behaviour, we tend to get a taste of our own medicine and it is an opportunity for us to correct ourselves and become the best we can, so that as we change the child will also change.
It is important to understand where the child has learned their behaviours from and help to provide awareness to the child why we did what we did. As in some instances the intention of Why we do What we do is not communicated, it is important that we do so. Many a times we focus only on the fact the child made a mistake and therefore I need to punish the child instead of communicating the intention behind punishing the child. If your blindly shout and punish the child, the child believes/ assumes that you don’t love the child. Unconsciously this thought of not being loved starts developing in the child’s mind and over a period of time it starts believing that thought. No matter what you do, it does not help later because the child has built a firm mind filter which does not pick in any amount of love that you send to the child. Even if you normally react with love, the child would think –‘what do they want from me now and why are they reacting to me like they love me today?’
Are you able to understand how much of an impact this one small step of not explaining the intention behind our actions and also not demonstrating the right behaviour can lead to?
From now on every opportunity you get try and be a role model to your child in the behaviours you want them to adapt or change. Punishments or Negative strokes are required for them to change behaviour but always ensure that you communicate the intention behind the punishment. Whenever you feel they have realised the mistake or once they have completed the punishment or you have finished scolding them ensure that your give them a hug, communicate to them how much you love them and how much they mean to you. It is doesn’t matter if they know it already, or you just said it last week, every single time after you have completed the session of changing their behaviour give them a good dose of your love and affection to reinforce it. This ensures that the message is very strong and their self esteem, there emotional bank account is filled.
Look forward to hear your comments, feedback or questions about the blog. Do share it as it might make a huge difference in parents’ life.
Ganesh Kumar S
EQ Ignitor | Emotional Intelligence Trainer | Entrepreneur | Life Coach | Author
Excellent sir. Its true our childs are too fast so v are the role models. V do our best thanks
Great message in vivid words. Thanks for sharing. It ignites a spark in me on how to act and react in my home.
Very nice Gatesh.
Though we know this it very difficult to implement.
It’s good feed back to me. I will check on my child’s behaviour and try to relate to mine. Intention of punishments are not explained now as there is a hatred developed in the course of punishments..
Excellent n crispy. Everyone should read n follow in their life.
Thank you for Sharing Ganesh 🙂
Very Nice 🙂
True .. We need to do the same we expect from our child .. They learn from what they see happening around them. So better to look oneself before expecting a change.
Thanks for the Awosome info