Emotional Intelligence

I know that the nine-year-old can be difficult and moody, but when mine wrote “2008—another year to live through” in his journal, it got me to thinking: those teenage years are going to be bad, bad, bad. Sure, there’s no way to guarantee your kid isn’t going to be miserable or get into trouble, but there’s got to be some way to help inoculate them against the troubles of life.

And so I found The Optimistic Child: A Proven Program to Safeguard Children Against Depression and Build Lifelong Resilience, by Martine E. P. Seligman, Ph.D. It gives tools for teaching kids how to develop self-awareness and think critically about their emotions. The gist of the book is that while you can’t control what happens to you, you can recognize and control your thoughts and understand how your feelings arise from these thoughts.

For example, if your friends are whispering to each other at your birthday party, you could respond in several ways. First, you might think “They’re making fun of me and I hate them, I should never have had a party!” Feeling bad yet? Or, you could think “Oh, I’ll bet they’re telling each other about what they got me for presents!” Why feel miserable if the feeling is unfounded? I know which one my son would pick.

As wonderful as all the ideas sounded, the rub was that in order to teach them to your kids, you have to practice them yourself first (and catch yourself if you’re thinking “Oh darn, I’m awful at this, I’ll never be able to do it!”). So after attempting to get enough sleep, meditate in the morning, and have several cups of coffee before my kids woke up, I shut the Mommy Monster in the closet and rolled up my sleeves.

Mid-morning, my son was trying to copy over a story he’d written, and kept forgetting to skip lines. “I’m lousy at writing!” he said, almost in tears. “I can’t do anything right.”

“Aha!” I said (probably a little overenthusiastically, and I’ll blame the coffee). “Give yourself a break—is that really true?” I pointed out that he’d written a really good story, and that his handwriting was even fairly decent. It seemed to me, I said, that the only real problem he was having was remembering to skip lines. “What do you think we could do to help you remember?” I asked. We made little dashes down the page to remind him to skip lines, and he got back to work without any further trauma.

It remains to be seen whether either of us is more emotionally intelligent yet, but I’d argue that averting just that one meltdown was worth the price of the book. If I’m lucky, my son will be able to provide me the same service the next time I lose my keys.