Recap 8: Emotion Coaching

Yesterday's topic at EFCE was emotion coaching. According to our brilliant leader, Lani, this is where the real stuff of parenting happens. It's what we signed up for, and it's crazy hard.

Here are the five steps of emotion coaching (based on the work of John Gottman):

1. Awareness. We must be aware that our own emotions are separate from our child's. Often we assume that our child must feel what we would feel (or are feeling) in a particular situation, and that's simply not true.

2. Opportunity. Emotional expressions are opportunities for intimacy and learning. It's hard to look at tantrums and meltdowns this way, but we learn our most important lessons (about love, about life) in disequilibrium.

3. Listen and Validate. Telling your child that there's no reason to be upset only means he'll have to try harder to convince you that there is a reason. The feeling is real even if the reason is not. Sam often comes running from the other room saying, "Bear! Bear!" There's no bear. But he is afraid.

4. Label the emotion. Give it a name. Use simple terms.

5. Deal with the situation and set limits. This step is hard. It often requires that we say no. It also requires that we, as Lani says, "stay on the shore" while our children drown a bit in the emotion. We can't join them out there. We are the parents, after all.

As it turns out, I had the opportunity to practice these steps a number of times last night.

Sam wanted to stand on top of a tall stool we have in our kitchen, for example, and when I told him I couldn't let him do that, he lost it. I recognized that he felt pretty frustrated and seized the opportunity to validate his emotions.

"You feel mad," I said. "But I can't let you stand on anything that tall. You might fall." He cried for a while and refused a shorter stool to stand on.

"It's hard," I said. "But it's for the best." He cried more. And more. I hugged him.

"Do you want to read a book?" I asked after a while.

"Yeah," he said. I wiped his tears. We read.

And then we went through the steps again twenty minutes later when it was time to stop reading and eat dinner.