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Empathy
Empathy has been called the foundation of healthy parenting.
As a sense of trust is the foundation of all healthy relationships, empathy helps promote and build that trust. In order to be open to a parent's guidance and influence, a child must trust that his or her feelings (like sadness, disappointment, fear, etc.) are being received in a warm nurturing way. Empathy allows a parent to see the world from a child's point of view.
When a child experiences a difficult situation, it helps a parent to consider what the child is feeling before deciding how best to react to the situation. It's effective to listen for a child's "cues," or those behaviors that indicate how a child may be feeling in a certain situation. How does a child tell a parent that he or she is tired, frustrated, or hungry? Can a parent "feel" a child's emotions?
According to Daniel Goleman, in his book, Emotional Intelligence, "empathy builds on self-awareness; the more open we are to our own emotions, the more skilled we will be at reading feelings." The goal is to become attuned to a child's emotional tapestry, letting a child know his or her emotions are understood and accepted. The absence of this attunement eventually will take an emotional toll on a child.
High IQ is no guarantee of success, happiness, or virtue, and until Emotional Intelligence, we could only guess why. Daniel Goleman's brilliant report from the frontiers of psychology and neuroscience offers startling new insight into our "two minds" — the rational and the emotional — and how they together shape our destiny.
Through vivid examples, Goleman delineates the five crucial skills of emotional intelligence, and shows how they determine our success in relationships, work, and even our physical well-being. What emerges is an entirely new way to talk about being smart.
The best news is that "emotional literacy" is not fixed early in life. Every parent, every teacher, every business leader, and everyone interested in a more civil society, has a stake in this compelling vision of human possibility.
