We all want the best for our kids, we want them to be happy, healthy and to achieve their full potential but do we really know what contributes to achieving those things?

We’ve been taught that it’s about achieving good grades in school so we can get a good job, buy a house, find a loving partner and have 2.4 kids, then we can live happily ever after, but let’s be honest, most of us are living that proverbial dream and are you really as happy and healthy as you can be? Do you think you have excelled yourself and are living a deeply fulfilled life? Do you jump out of bed every morning ready to greet the day and dive into your passion filled life as the very best version of you?

Nah, me neither, so why do we think it will be any different for our kids?

If we want our children to be happy, and I'm pretty sure we all do, then one of the greatest gifts we can give them is Emotional Intelligence (EI). 

Daniel Goleman in his book, Emotional Intelligence, describes emotional intelligence as a person's ability to manage his feelings so that those feelings are expressed appropriately and effectively. He outlines the four main components of EI as; self- awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. 

People with higher levels of emotional intelligence are able to handle stress better, communicate effectively with others, empathise with others, handle conflict and overcome their challenges. That’s quite a toolkit to have!

With mental health issues at an all time high, for adults and children, it’s really important that we help our children (and ourselves) to handle their emotions in a positive way which will reduce issues such as anxiety and depression. To be happy and healthy we need to be mentally, physically and emotionally strong, and it’s the emotional side that underpins all of this.

You know when you feel good you think better thoughts and are physically more productive and active, so we want to work on feeling better more often (notice I say more often, not all the time) but here’s the catch, if you want to feel more of the positive emotions such as love, joy and happiness, you must also allow yourself to feel the lower emotions such as fear, sadness and anger, however we’ve been taught to suppress these emotions, perceiving them as ‘negative’. 

Society has taught us (wrongly) that girls shouldn’t get angry and boys mustn't cry, from an early age we are taught to ignore these emotions. We see children cry and hear adults proclaim “just ignore her she’s just trying to get attention”. We learn that our anger is wrong and so we try not to show it, we are led to believe our sadness is weak so we try to hide it, but emotions are energy, they are literally energy-in-motion (e-motion) and that energy has to go somewhere, if it isn’t expressed it’s repressed.

Have you ever noticed your child, or yourself, suddenly ‘blow their top’ over something really simple? Perhaps they drop their raisins and have a massive, totally out of proportion meltdown over it, or you ‘lose your shit’ cause someone left a wet towel on the floor or accidently cut you up in traffic. It’s not about the raisins or the towel, it’s about all the other things you kept in, all those feelings of anger, sadness, frustration, all those things you never said or those times you held back your tears, all that emotion is still in there, swirling around looking for somewhere to go. Like a brewing volcano, inevitably it’s going to explode one day! 

If we want our children to be happy they need to be able to navigate their emotions, all of them. They need to understand that it’s ok to feel sad or angry and that there are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ emotions, they’re just energy moving through their body and it’s important to allow that energy to move out so it doesn't get stuck inside of us and explode like a volcano at an inappropriate time. If they repress their anger they won’t get to fully experience their joy. 

So what’s the best way to help them with this? How can you raise emotionally healthy kids who experience and express their emotions?

But here’s the problem, and this isn’t meant as a criticism, most adults aren’t very good at expressing their emotions in a healthy way, many have shut them down altogether. The vast majority of people were raised with the Power Over parenting pattern, where a parents main aim is to control a child’s behaviour and emotions were seen as manipulative. If you cried you were seen as just trying to get attention, sadly, that’s exactly what children are trying to do, they’re trying to get a need met, and often that need is for connection or attention but they don’t have the communication skills to articulate that need. Their emotions are big and strong and they overwhelm them, like they can for us too, so they cry or act out in an attempt to get attention, even if it’s negative. 

Raising an emotionally healthy child isn't just about asking how they’re feeling and listening to them as they share their worldly woes, it’s about sharing your own feelings too and being a positive role model for healthy emotional expression, which is easier said than done if you weren’t able to express your big emotions growing up or you experienced any kind of emotional neglect. 

When we were kids if our emotions weren’t allowed to be expressed then we repressed them, we learnt that emotions weren’t ok and that we can only show the ‘good’ ones, so when we’re feeling anything other than happy we hide it, which leads us to the first step of raising emotionally healthy kids;