Emotion coaching: helping kids handle big feelings without squashing them
John Gottman's research found that how parents respond to sadness and anger shapes children's later skills. Here are the five steps he identified, with real examples.
Big feelings in a small kid. You've got two basic moves. Make them stop, or help your child ride it out. Both come from love, honestly, and most of us flip between the two depending on how the day's gone.
Back in the 1990s, John Gottman and his team at the University of Washington sat down with parents and asked how they felt about emotions. Their own, their kids'. Then they kept tabs on those families for years. Some parents (he called them "emotion dismissing") treated sadness and anger like a leak to patch fast, or ignore. Others, the "emotion coaching" crowd, saw a meltdown as a chance to connect and teach. Their kids? Better at calming down. Better with friends. Better at school, too.
Other people ran with it. In Australia, Sophie Havighurst and colleagues built Tuning in to Kids, a course that teaches this to parents of preschoolers. In a 2010 trial, parents who did it got more responsive to feelings, and their kids' behavior problems went down.
The five steps
Gottman boiled emotion coaching down to five steps. They sound obvious written down. They are much harder at 5:30 p.m. with dinner burning.
1. Notice the emotion, ideally while it's still small. Grumpiness, a slammed backpack, an unusually quiet car ride. It is much easier to coach a feeling at level three than at level nine.
2. See it as a chance to connect. This is the mental shift. The meltdown is not an interruption to your evening. It is, for these few minutes, the actual work of parenting.
3. Listen and validate. "You're really disappointed that Sam couldn't come over." Validation is not agreement with the behavior. It is accurate description of the feeling.
4. Help them name it. Brain imaging research from Matthew Lieberman's lab at UCLA found that putting feelings into words, which researchers call affect labeling, reduced activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in threat responses. The popular phrase for this is "name it to tame it."
5. Set limits while you problem-solve. All feelings are allowed, but not all behaviors. "It's okay to be furious with your brother. It's not okay to hit him. What could you do next time he knocks over your tower?"
A real example
Your eight-year-old walks in, drops her bag, and says she's quitting soccer. She's terrible, apparently.
A dismissing response: "Don't be silly, you're great. You're not quitting."
A coaching response: "Something happened at practice." (She nods.) "You sound really discouraged." (She tells you the coach moved her to defense, and two girls laughed when she missed a pass.) "Ugh. That's embarrassing. I'd feel awful too." Only after that, and maybe not until the next day: "What do you want to do about it? Do you want to talk to the coach, or try a few more weeks and see?"
Maybe both versions end the same way, with her still on the team. Only one of them teaches her that embarrassment won't kill her, and that you're someone she can bring it to.
When it's your feelings that are big
It is very hard to coach a child's emotions when your own are spilling over. If you notice that your child's anger reliably sets off yours, that's worth some attention for its own sake. Mental Health Love has accessible pieces on stress, anxiety, and emotional regulation for adults. For the specific case of a child whose worry has started to run the household, see our guide to childhood anxiety.
Frequently asked questions
Isn't validating feelings the same as giving in?
No. You can say "You're really mad you can't have the tablet" and still keep the tablet on the shelf. Validation is describing the feeling, not agreeing with the behavior.
What age can I start emotion coaching?
From toddlerhood on. With little ones it's mostly naming feelings for them. Older kids can do more of the problem-solving.
What if I didn't grow up talking about feelings?
Plenty of parents didn't. It'll feel clunky at first. Start with naming one feeling a day and it gets easier.
Sources
- Gottman, J. M., Katz, L. F., & Hooven, C. (1996). Parental meta-emotion philosophy and the emotional life of families. Journal of Family Psychology, 10(3), 243-268.
- Gottman, J. (1997). Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child. Simon & Schuster.
- Lieberman, M. D., et al. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428.
- Havighurst, S. S., et al. (2010). Tuning in to Kids: Improving emotion socialization practices in parents of preschool children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51(12), 1342-1350.
