Nurture- Emotion Coaching

    Nurturing involves helping your child grow and develop in a healthy way. Teaching your child how to understand their feelings and express them, or verbalize them, while making them feeling respected and understood is emotion coaching. A large part of emotion coaching is helping children to learn what emotions they are feeling and how to express them. "Try to feel what that child is experiencing and then put that sense of what the child is feeling into words. Secondly, validate the child's right to have those feelings. And third, treat the child with dignity" (Gottman & Gottman, 2012).

    An important part of nurturing is how you deal with conflict. If your child makes a choice and your immediate reaction is to accuse them or yell at them, you are not teaching them good practices for dealing with conflict. You are not giving them the chance to explain their feelings. This ultimately can lead to children who feel that their choices don't matter anyway because their parents don't care about their feelings or what they think. A large part of emotion coaching is that you are teaching that emotions are good and you shouldn't be judged because of them. Parents should become aware of their childrens' emotions and reactions to emotions so that they are able to identify a link between their feelings and behavior (Morin, 2020). Then, they can help their children to understand their feelings and express them in healthier ways. Common parenting guides may say that your should ignore a child when they are throwing a tantrum to teach them that this behavior is unacceptable and won't be acknowledged. Emotion coaching says that you should use direct instruction to correct this behavior by helping the child to recognize what they are feeling and verbalize it (Morin, 2020).

    A great way to involve your children in sharing their emotions and addressing issues, especially within the family, is through family meetings. As Doherty (2013) says in his article, "Family meetings can solve family conflicts and foster kids’ moral development at the same time. By giving kids a voice in and shared responsibility for creating a happy family, we also strengthen our parental authority and leadership in the family". Family meetings are a great way to help children feel involved in decisions and make them feel like their feelings and concerns are heard. Having a time for everyone to meet together and discuss what is on their mind, while feeling safe and respected, can be very helpful for a family. It is important that during this time, parents demonstrate emotional coaching and do not dismiss or get angry about anything that their children say. I think that this is one of the most common yet hypocritical parenting practices. Parents tell their children that they want them to come to them and talk to them but will often get upset when parents come to them about something that they did wrong or something the parent doesn't agree with. This just encourages children to not come talk to the parents.

 

Doherty (2013) goes on to describe 10 steps that are important in the family meeting.

1. State the goal of fairness.

2. State the goal of understanding.

3. State your view as a parent.

4. Elicit kids' feelings.

5. Restate kids' feelings. 

6. Have kids' restate your feelings.

7. Brainstorm fair solutions.

8. Make a fair plan and sign it.

9. Plan a follow-up meeting.

10. Follow-up.

    These steps are great because they really foster an "emotional coaching" environment. The parent is encouraging the children to listen to how they feel and then allows them to give their input and share their feelings. They are learning to listen to others as well as how to respectfully share their feelings. They are then able to work together to come up with a good solution to improve.

    Helping children to find solutions really helps them develop problem solving skills. It is helpful to have your children be involved in making solutions or problem solving. "When possible, let kids develop their own creative solutions. So if your child throws things when he gets angry, sit down together and create a list of other things he could do when he's mad" (Morin, 2020). Then, you can remind your child of the alternative solution that he came up with when the emotion arises again. "He might decide to do 10 jumping jacks, drawing picture, or blowing bubbles helps him deal with his anger. Then, the next time he's angry, encourage him to try using one of his ideas to calm down" (Morin, 2020). Having the children come up with solutions gets them involved and also makes them more likely to want to do the alternative since they came up with it and aren't just being forced to do something that their parent said they should. 

References: 

Doherty, W. J. (2013). Take back your kids: How to teach and get respect. Cortland.                               http://ww 2w2.cortland.edu/dotAsset/fa7bc4b5-bbad-4e13-809f-                                             c404fa13560e.pdf.

Kimochis, K. (2012, April 18). Dr. John Gottman & Dr. Julie Gottman discuss tools for parenting with emotion coaching. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=35&v=z3uPPEtyX_I&feature=emb_logo.

Morin, A. (2020, February3). How to use emotion coaching with your kids. Verywell Family. https://www.verywellfamily.com/emotion-coaching-discipline-process-1095040