Emotional Intelligence in Parenting

Our emotions are full of information for us. But often we don't have capacity to feel and interpret them, so we avoid them. This inhibits our children's ability to learn to feel and interpret their feelings. It's one of the places they learn more through our modeling of the behavior than from us telling them what to do. So our ability to be with our own feelings translates directly into the skills our children have for navigating their emotional world.
If one of our goals in parenting is for our children to have this kind of emotional intelligence, it is best gained through creating more and more capacity within ourselves to be with, name, and make meaning of our emotional world as well as theirs.
Jill Doneen Clifton
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www.LandscapeOfMothers.com