How to Use Emotion Coaching With Your Kids

Emotion coaching is one of the five main types of discipline that is based largely on Washington state's psychology researcher John Gottman. According to Gottman’s research, when parents give kids the skills they need to deal with emotions, they’ll have more self-confidence, do better in school, and experience healthier relationships.

Gottman spent years studying how parents can best help children learn how to effectively manage their positive and negative emotions. He broke down the process into five steps that focus on teaching kids about feelings so they can learn how to make better choices.

Be Aware of Emotions

Emotion coaching requires parents to become aware of their child’s emotions as well as their own emotions. Allowing yourself and your child the freedom to feel any emotion is the heart of emotion coaching. Feelings are okay and no one should be judged or criticized for feeling a certain way.

Observe your child so you can become in tune with how they express various feelings. This will help you identify the link between their feelings and their behavior.

Connect With Your Child

Gottman recommends parents connect with their children through highly emotional experiences. Instead of turning away when a child has a tantrum to ignore the behavior—like is recommended in behavior modification—emotion coaching recommends direct instruction.

Encourage your child to recognize their emotions. Help them verbalize their feelings.

Intervene when you notice they are becoming upset so you can offer guidance and prevent misbehavior. Don’t try to fix your child’s negative emotions but show them that it is normal to have lots of different kinds of feelings.

Listen to Your Child

Listening to a child is an essential part of emotion coaching. Validate your child’s feelings and show them that you accept their feelings.

Also, show that you take your child’s emotions seriously. Avoid saying things like, "Quit worrying. It's not a big deal," because your child's challenges are a big deal to them.

Name Emotions

Help your child learn how to recognize and verbalize their feelings. Don’t try to tell them what they should be feeling.

So instead of saying, "Don't be scared," point out how they appear to be feeling to validate to them that their feelings are okay. Say something like, "It's normal to be nervous before getting on stage."

Find Solutions

Emotion coaching focuses on preventing misbehavior when possible. When a child is entering into a situation where they're likely to become easily frustrated, help them identify ways to manage their frustration ahead of time.

Say, “I know going to the grocery store is hard because it takes a long time and sometimes you feel impatient. Today, when you start to feel frustrated, tell me and we’ll take a break for a few minutes to help you calm down.”

When your child misbehaves, encourage them to identify that feeling that led to the behavior. Then, teach problem-solving skills and work together on finding creative solutions.

When possible, let kids develop their own creative solutions. So if your child throws things when they get angry, sit down together and create a list of other things he could do when they're mad.

They might decide to do 10 jumping jacks, draw pictures, or blow bubbles to help them deal with their anger. Then, the next time they're angry, encourage them to try using one of their ideas to calm down.

Provide negative consequences when your child misbehaves. Just make it clear that you are correcting your child's behavior, not their feelings. So while it's OK to feel angry, it's not OK to hit.