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As parents, we often talk of child development as it pertains to intellectual growth. As discussed in past blog posts, there are certain things parents can do to help give their children the best possible opportunities for increased IQ and to further learning capabilities. But what about emotional growth?

Once your child can relax and focus, she is in the best frame of mind to proceed with the other two areas of growth most critical to reaching their full potential: emotional and intellectual development.

Emotional and intellectual skills go hand-in-hand. Without healthy emotional maturity, your child cannot achieve anywhere near her total cognitive capacity. Emotional intelligence affects moral development as well. Emotionally mature children can make better use of their brains than immature children of the same age. It’s that simple.

Maturity enables a child to sit, concentrate, learn, and so much more. It is the foundation of self-motivation, self-confidence, and a sense of competence. Those qualities are essential to using your child’s talents and knowledge to interact productively with others worldwide.

The study of emotional development in infants and children is a relatively new science. Only in the last few decades have educators come to realize how important emotions are to cognitive, moral, and all other areas of proficiency.

Howard Gardner was one of the first to point out that “multiple intelligences” exist beyond intellectual intelligence. Though it is intellectual intelligence measured by IQ that western cultures pay the most attention to, Gardner identified seven intelligences.

The first five include:

1. linguistic,
2. logical-mathematical,
3. spatial,
4. musical, and
5. bodily-kinesthetic.

The remaining two deal even more directly with emotional growth:

1. interpersonal, and
2. intrapersonal intelligences.

Since Gardner presented his work in the early 1980s, he has added additional forms of intelligence to his list.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman furthered this understanding of how interdependent our various forms of intelligence are with his book Emotional Intelligence (1995). Goleman writes: “One of psychology’s open secrets is the relative inability of grades, IQ, or SAT scores, despite their popular mystiques, to predict unerringly who will succeed in life….At best, IQ contributes about 20 percent to the factors determining life success, which leaves 80 percent to other forces.”

Goleman, along with the majority of educators, now believes that it is emotional intelligence that enables a child to make the most of their cognitive skills and knowledge. Goleman presented a summary of neuroscientific research to demonstrate that the brain’s prefrontal lobes, which control emotional impulses, are also where memory is established, and learning takes place. He showed that if a child is emotionally immature and, therefore, more likely to be emotionally volatile, the child’s frequent feelings of anger, upset, and anxiety get in the way of his ability to learn and remember what he has learned.

Thus, guiding your child to develop emotionally and engage socially in a calm and relaxed way is important to establishing self-confidence and self-esteem. It is also crucial to help your child feel motivated to make the best use of their talents and other forms of intelligence.

So how do you begin to help your child develop her emotional intelligence?  Stay tuned for the next post to find out.