YOML 185: A toddler may not understand your words, but they will always understand your actions!
0Reflection Title: A toddler may not understand your words, but they will always understand your actions!
Book – Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child: The Heart of Parenting by Dr. John Gottman
Book Description:
Based on 20 years of research at the University of Washington studying parent-child interactions, award-winning research psychologist John Gottman and his team have developed Emotion Coaching - a technique parents can use to teach their children self-awareness and self-control and to foster good emotional development. This proven technique has demonstrated a positive effect on children's physical health, academic achievement, and emotional well-being.
Reflection:
My wife, Felicia, and I muscled through this one together. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t glamorous, but we endured and learned a little along the way. This journey is about learning, sharing, and growing together and this book was a success if that is the criteria. Did we love the book…no! Did this book profoundly change us or re-shape our minds…no! What this book did do was give us another unified step on this journey of life guided by shared values. That is all that matters at the end of the day!
I honestly was relieved to finish this one so we could get on to a more fun books together as this content was pretty dry and uninspiring. The one thought that I couldn’t get out of my mind the whole time we were going through this book was, who was this book really written for? What are the chances that a non-emotionally intelligent parent reads a book about how to raise an emotionally intelligent child in the first place? Meaning, if you care so much about raising an emotionally intelligent child that you are willing to dedicate your time and attention to a book like this, what are the odds that you don’t already highly value emotional intelligence in some capacity in your life?
This book wasn’t chosen at random by my family. We, as a family, really value emotional intelligence. Understanding who you are and why you do what you do is essential to successfully navigating this world. Emotions are our human operating system. They developed over hundreds of thousands of years to protect us, but they aren’t full proof and always right. That is why we kept evolving to somehow develop consciousness to excerpt some control over our unconscious emotions to guide them. Being able to understand your emotions, interact with them, coach them, and slowly retrain your elephant is what separates us from the rest of the animals in this world. Without emotional intelligence and emotion coaching, life would feel like going downhill in a semi-trucker with the brakes out.
It is great that I value these things, am willing to invest time into learning more about them, and excited to coach my child to harness the power of their own emotions as well. However, I struggle with the idea of how I’m supposed to take the knowledge in my mind, the years of experience, reading, experimentation, and somehow magically get an irrational toddler to understand and comprehend?
I can’t teach them about complex concepts like emotions and how to harness their power. I can’t question them into discovering for themselves. I can’t even give them a book to read, take them to a class, or watch a video together to discover for themselves. They are decades away from books like Non-Violent Communication, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, The Inner Game of Tennis, Zen Mind and the Beginners Mind, The Bhagavad Gita, The Drama of the Gifted Child, Grit, The Purpose Driven Life, How to Win Friends and Influence People, etc making an impact on them and helping them to learn and grow on their own journey.
My answer, if you can’t teach someone with words, you can always teach with your actions!
BE A ROLE MODEL! Lead by example and show Luca and my future children what it means to strive to live an emotionally intelligent life with my actions. To keep writing, sharing, learning, reflecting, enduring, challenging myself, and striving for balance. To keep talking about these things as a family. To model my behavior after what I say I value most in this world.
You can’t raise an emotionally intelligent child unless you are willing to live as an emotionally intelligent adult. In my opinion, this should apply to every aspect of your life. If you say something is important, your behavior should reflect it. When your behavior reflects what you value, it should be so obvious that even a toddler can get it. You shouldn’t need to point people to 200+ books to explain to them why you do what you do, your actions should be able to speak more than 1,000 books could ever explain. If they don’t, I’d take a good hard look at if you really value what you say you do.
Question: Would a toddler be able to easily see what you value by how you live your life?