Top 10 Books for Developing Your Parental Emotional Intelligence
Parents are essential in nurturing the emotional intelligence of their children. As a parent, you can develop your child’s emotional intelligence by understanding different emotions and teaching them how to manage their emotions. This task can be challenging without self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation, and social skills. Therefore, improving your parental emotional intelligence is crucial in raising an emotionally intelligent child.
The following are the top ten books that can aid in developing your parental emotional intelligence:
1. Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child – John Gottman
This best-selling book offers practical and effective ways for parents to support their children’s emotional development. Gottman emphasizes five critical building blocks of emotional intelligence, such as emotion coaching, empathy, emotional labeling, eyeing, and repair. He provides strategies and tools for parents to use when their children have emotional outbursts, show empathy, and respond positively to their kids’ feelings, and techniques for repairing conflicts in relationships.
2. The Whole Brain Child – Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson
This groundbreaking book explains how the brain works and translates recent neuroscience findings into actionable steps that parents can use to nurture their children’s minds. The book covers a comprehensive guide to managing your children’s thoughts and feelings, such as developing a healthy mind balance through integrating the left and right brain, boosting your child’s emotional development, dealing with tantrums, and cultivating empathy and kindness.
3. Unselfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World – Michele Borba
This game-changing guide empowers parents to nurture empathy in their children. Borba provides an extensive guide on how to nurture empathy, identify emotions, cultivate gratitude, and create meaningful relationships. She presents strategies and techniques that parents can use to develop empathy skills and behaviors in their children and the relevance of those skills in shaping their children’s future. This book is an excellent guide for parents who want to raise empathetic children.
4. Parenting With Emotional Intelligence – Isaac Peña
This in-depth guide focuses on the development of the parent more than the child. Peña emphasizes the importance of self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-care for parents to improve their emotional skills and raise emotionally intelligent children. The book offers practical exercises and tools for parents to develop self-awareness, manage stress, promote self-care, and bring empathy and positivity to their interactions with their children.
5. Parenting From The Inside Out – Daniel J. Siegel and Mary Hartzell
This book integrates cutting-edge research from the field of interpersonal neurobiology with effective strategies for parents. The book focuses on developing secure attachment and how children’s relationships with their parents affect their emotional lives, particularly their long-term mental health. It covers tasks such as integrating self-discipline and empathy, exploring your history as a parent, overcoming stressful situations, and creating a caregiving history that helps children thrive.
6. How To Raise An Adult – Julie Lythcott-Haims
This book urges parents to focus on cultivating resilience, self-control, independence, competence, and confidence instead of pressuring children to conform and focus on extracurricular activities, accolades, and test scores. It is a practical guide for parents on how to help their children become critical thinkers, develop their sense of purpose, solve problems, and make contributions to society.
7. Mindful Parenting – Kristen Race
This book provides a comprehensive guide on how to use mindfulness practice to support responsive parenting. It teaches parents how to balance their attention between their outside surroundings and their inner world, be present with their emotions, tune in to their child’s needs, and provide effective emotional support. The book presents research-validated strategies that improve mood, increase focus, develop mindful interactions with kids, and raising an emotionally intelligent child.
8. No Drama Discipline – Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson
This book provides practical solutions to common disciplinary problems, such as responding to tantrums, defiance, and meltdowns. Parents learn innovative discipline methods that boost their children’s emotional wellbeing, connecting before correcting, understanding brain development, creating meaningful consequences, and repairing conflicts. No Drama Discipline provides an empathetic approach to discipline, promoting a child’s capacity to become self-directed, self-regulated, and empathetic.
9. Emotional Agility – Susan David
This pioneering guide explores the idea of emotional agility. Based on emotional intelligence, the book teaches parents how to be more authentic, mindful, committed, and compassionate in their day-to-day interactions with their children. It offers insights on how to recognize emotions, realize values, and then act accordingly to become emotionally agile, providing a foundation for modeling healthy emotional regulation with your children.
10. The Power Of Showing Up – Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson
This book emphasizes the power of parental involvement, support, and presence in enhancing a child’s emotional wellbeing. The authors provide an overview of the science behind secure attachment, and how parents can use this knowledge to create a nurturing environment for their children to thrive. The book includes practical strategies and exercises on how you can show up for your kids, and foster trust, empathy, and confidence.
In conclusion, the ten books highlighted above can help parents develop the skills and strategies needed to raise emotionally intelligent children. By evolving emotionally, parents can have stronger connections with their children, teaching them how to regulate their emotions and become emotionally literate.