Emotion Coaching Parents

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Stressful events are inevitable in family life. However, research shows that children can respond to stress through appropriate, flexible and balanced way if they have the capacity to understand emotions, communicate and regulate themselves. They can express their emotions such as sadness, anger, frustration, sorrow or loss and find ways to regulate them instead of suppressing them or reacting with violence. Emotional literacy enable children to respond to stressful situations in a more flexible way.

Dr. John Gottman defined three types of parents in his papers he published after his interviews with parents and longitudinal studies. These are parents who are emotion coaches, parents who ignore emotions and parents who disregard emotions. 

Emotion Coaching is a natural parenting style, thus, most of the parents already possess this parenting style.  

The studies conducted by Gottman et al. provided detailed information about how some of these different parenting styles affected the way children regulated their emotions and other aspects of their development. 

They concluded based on the thorough interviews that parents had a personal judgement about emotions, which is described as meta-emotion, and that judgement was influenced by their experience at home where they were raised and continued to develop on the basis of their experience. Meta emotion was understood to affect an individual’s belief and reactions towards her/his own and others’ emotions. 

The research conducted by Gottman shows that children whose parents are emotion coaches 

• have higher academic      achievement
• have more easy-going      relationships with their peers, are better at relieving themselves when      they are sad 
• can calm down quicker.
• display fewer behavioural      problems and are less prone to violent acts 
• are emotionally healthier

Experimental studies demonstrated that there was a decline in the responses of parents participating in emotion coaching courses that ignored or criticized children’s emotions. A significant reduction was observed in their behaviours that ignore emotions, while their emotion coaching behaviours increased significantly.

Moreover, parents reported that the misbehaviours of their children decreased.