Dr. Lawrence E. Shapiro - How to Raise a Child with a High EQ: A Parents Guide to Emotional Intelligence

How to Raise

a Child with

a High EQ

A Parents Guide
to Emotional
Intelligence

Lawrence E. Shapiro, Ph.D.

To my mother, Frances Shapiro, a limitless source of
emotional support

CONTENTS

In a Detroit suburb, two boys who might normally be pummeling each other on the playground are sitting at a table in the back of their classroom agreeing to have their problems resolved by a peer mediator, another classmate. All three children are seven years old. In a Florida hospital, a ten-year-old laughs hysterically while waiting for her chemotherapy, having just been caught in the middle of a water-gun battle between her nurse and an intern dressed up like an alien clown. In Los Angeles, a father plays a cooperative game of tag with his three children, a game prescribed by their school counselor. In the two weeks that they have been playing cooperative games, family squabbles have virtually been eliminated.

These children are benefiting from what some are calling a revolution in child psychology: training in emotional and social skills. Peer-mediation training is being used in hundreds of schools throughout the country, and it is measurably reducing calls to parents, suspensions, and even school violence. Clowns are regularly seen in hospital wards handing out whoopee cushions and rubber chickens, because we know that humor not only helps children cope with the stress of a hospital stay, but may actually stimulate their immune system and speed their recovery. Cooperative games, where everybody wins or everybody loses, have been shown to build family cohesiveness and significantly decrease anger and aggression between children.

This book is about teaching your children similar activities and games to improve their emotional and social skillswhat psychologists are now calling emotional intelligence or EQ. Although the term emotional intelligence is relatively new, I and other child therapists around the country have been prescribing these activities to help children solve their problems for more than twenty years. Now we are beginning to see that all children can benefit by learning the skills of emotional intelligence, not just the children referred for specific problems. We have come to believe that having a high EQ is at least as important as having a high IQ. Study after study shows that children with skills in emotional intelligence are happier, more confident, and more successful in school. Equally important, these skills become the building blocks for our children to become responsible, caring, and productive adults.

Skeptics wonder why it is necessary to teach children about emotions. They ask, Dont emotions just come naturally to children? The answer is no, not anymore.

Many scientists believe that our human emotions have evolved primarily as a survival mechanism. Fear helps protect us from harm and tells us to avoid danger. Anger helps us overcome barriers to getting what we need. We find joy and happiness in the company of others. In seeking human contact, we find protection within a group as well as the opportunity to mate and insure the survival of the species. Sadness over the loss of an important person sends signals for that person to return, or a forlorn attitude can help attract a new person who can act as a substitute for the person who left.

But while our emotions were adaptive for our primitive ancestors, modern industrial life has presented us with emotional challenges that nature did not anticipate. For example, while anger still plays an important function in our emotional makeup, nature did not anticipate that it could be so easily provoked by sitting in a traffic jam, watching television, or playing video games. Certainly, our evolutionary development could not take into account the ease in which a ten-year-old could find a handgun and shoot a classmate over a perceived insult.

Seattle-based psychiatrist Michael Norden makes a passionate argument for us to recognize how modern times have taken a toll on our emotions and to some extent thwarted their evolutionary intent. He writes:

No longer do most of us live in villages of a few hundred or less, as Stone Agers did, but rather in teeming cities that compose a global village of nearly six billion. These cumulative stresses of modern life have set off an avalanche of depression, anxiety, and insomnia. Less obvious are diverse problems such as weight gain and cancer. Most [of us] self-medicate [to keep our emotions in check] using anything from caffeine to cocaine; virtually no one remains untouched.

The emotional and social skills that are presented in this book were designed to help you take up where nature left off in raising children who are better able to handle the emotional stress of modern times. If a hectic and hurried life has made your children prone to irritability and anger, you can teach them to recognize and control these feelings. If fear of crime or frequent moves has isolated your children from the benefits of living in an open and cohesive community, you can teach them the social skills to make and keep intimate friends. If your child is upset by a divorce or remarriage, anxious when confronting new situations, or complacent about his schoolwork, you can teach him the specific EQ skills to help him cope with and overcome these normal problems of growing up.

Perhaps what is most interesting about taking a role in your childrens emotional education is that you are literally changing your childrens brain chemistry, or more accurately, teaching them ways to control their brain functioning themselves. As we shall see, emotions are not abstract ideas that psychologists help us to name, but rather they are very real. They take the form of specific biochemicals that the brain produces and to which the body then reacts.

While most of us are not prone to thinking of emotions as chemical reactions, you have only to think of what happens when you drink an alcoholic beverage or several cups of coffee. You may not realize it, but the foods you eat also interact chemically with your emotions. Feel good foods like chocolate and ice cream trigger the brain to release serotonin and endorphins, biochemicals that the brain associates with a sense of well-being. Thats why we typically crave these foods when we are blue.

But we dont have to ingest anything to produce the biochemical equivalents of emotions. The most important premise of this book is that you can teach your children ways to alter the biochemistry of their emotions, helping them to be more adaptive, more in control, and just plain happier.

Serotonin is just one of the chemicals, called neurotransmitters, that make up our emotional reactions by conveying emotional messages from the brain to various parts of the body. Serotonin has received particular attention in the last ten years because of its role in helping us deal with stress and its significance (via the drug Prozac) in the treatment of depression, obsessive compulsive disorders, and other psychiatric disorders. But psychiatrist Michael Norden argues, in his book Beyond Prozac, that we can train our brains to naturally produce serotonin by such simple means as a healthier diet, increased exercise, and getting the appropriate amount of sleep (an estimated half of American adults do not get the full eight hours of sleep required for the body to function properly).