How to Identify High Emotional Intelligence in Your Child: 10 Key Signs
Does your child console a crying baby or be sad about a cartoon character’s demise? Is your child always trying to resolve arguments between their friends?
If yes! Then, you have a wide visible sign of emotional intelligence in them.
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence in children starts with self-awareness of one’s emotions, self-regulating them according to the circumstances, and being empathetic towards others emotions.
It is indeed easier said than done. However, there are some kids who are naturally born with it and show signs of high emotional intelligence right from their childhood.
Excelling in academics can make your child rich, but a high emotional intelligence can become a source of their infinite success.
How to Identify High Emotional Intelligence in a Child and Why Parents Should Recognize It?
You might often notice that sometimes your kids show different emotions in different circumstances.
Some might appear obvious, while others might be discrete, but they most certainly do show them.
Their display of emotions indicates self-awareness, which is the first step towards developing emotional intelligence.
There are various other facets, like emotional regulation, emotional resilience, emotional conflict management, and interpersonal and social awareness skills.
Acknowledgement and development of these skills require proper channeling of their emotions right from their childhood.
Although your kids understand what they might be feeling, they are completely unaware about the right process to handle them. Here is where you play your active role.
The ability to tackle various emotions in life is somehow linked to a happy and fulfilled life.
This blog is to help you catch your child’s emotional cues, reactions, and tolerance and divert their coping mechanism towards a healthy outlet. This prepares them for a smart life.
10 Signs of Identifying Emotional Intelligence in Kids
Identification of emotional intelligence begins with noticing your child’s reactions to different situations.
These subtle signs will further help your purpose of either polishing their natural skills or developing them from scratch by training them.
Here is a list of 10 most common signs on how to identify emotional intelligence in kids.
1. Strong Empathy for Others
The display of empathy begins right from infancy when you start interacting with your children. Their various reactions to your words and actions trigger their emotional intelligence.
For example, when you play pee-ka-boo with your child, your child smiles, or when you mimic crying, your child feels empathetic or sad, and so on.
Understanding Empathy in Children
Noticing your kids’ reactions while they are watching a movie or show is a huge sign to understand the intensity of empathy your child might possess.
Also, observe how your child handles their conflicts in school or their understanding of others’ emotions and needs on a daily basis.
Activity: Indulge your kids in some selfless voluntary activities like feeding the poor, caring for the street animals, helping others, etc., to help them understand empathy.
Caution: Although empathy is a good thing, ensure that your child learns to prevent being a pushover.
Signs Your Child Can Relate to Others’ Feelings
- They would showcase a caring attitude and never mind sharing their resources.
- They would easily catch onto the nonverbal cues. For example, if you are sad, they will come and ask you, “Are you okay?”.
- They would display being a good team player and healthy social skills.
- They would always be the ones who ended up inviting that one lonely classmate to their playdate or parties.
- They would be excellent listeners and communicators.
2. Ability to manage emotions
This is one of the most important signs in kids in order to receive a tag of being emotionally intelligent.
How Does Emotional Self-Regulation Work?
As a caretaker, it is essential that you focus on your child’s emotions by asking them how their day has been. What went wrong? How are they feeling and why? And so on.
By challenging them with such questions about their emotions, they learn to understand them.
Also, provide them a non-judgmental space to pour out their feelings and motivate them to label their emotions and the reason behind them.
Caution: Remember to label their emotions and not them, as that might trigger some negative emotions in them about themselves.
For example, if you constantly address your child as a cry baby, they will start accepting it despite the fact that they are not. This might later impact their self-esteem.
Teaching Children to Control Their Emotional Outbursts
Understanding one’s emotions and trying to manage them are two very different things, and this is where they might require your help.
Teach them to regulate their emotions by:
- Counting from 1 to 10 in the reverse order.
- Taking three or more deep breaths.
- Journaling
- Painting with raw hands.
- Going out for a walk or running or playing outside in nature.
- Meditation
Activity: Make a DIY emotion board with sad, happy, angry, and neutral, and tell them to put a tick below the emotion they have felt for the entire day. Do this on a weekly basis and try talking about the reason behind their emotion every day before they go to sleep.
Also, sharing your own experiences, challenges, and motivations would help them regulate their emotions according to their life circumstances.
3. Self-Awareness
This is a precursor to self-regulation. Self-awareness of emotions is very important in identifying emotional intelligence in children.
What is self-awareness?
Self-awareness refers to the ability to understand one’s emotions, perceptions, opinions, thoughts, and desires and the reason behind feeling them.
Children would only be able to comprehend others’ emotions once they learned to decode theirs. Therefore, self-awareness is an important tool.
For example, if your child is adamantly asking you to purchase a toy and you are denying it, they tend to get angry. When you acknowledge this emotion of theirs, they will in turn validate others’ anger in the future. This would help boost their emotional intelligence.
Why It’s Important for Emotional Growth
Encouraging self-awareness opens the doors to various other factors like self-regulation, self-resilience, motivation, and optimism.
Motivate the children to take a moment to think before they react. This would guide them to exactly understand the nature of their emotions.
It would not only develop patience in them but would also enhance their cognitive and social skills.
A person who can assess their real emotions is considered to have high emotional intelligence because they understand the underlying source of their feelings.
Self-awareness is also rooted in authenticity, and therefore, kids must be encouraged to remain honest and genuine towards themselves to decipher their real emotions.
Activity: Encourage your child to maintain a personal journal and write about their day in detail, or just talk to them before their bedtime, in case they are still small. Make it their routine to understand how they have been feeling. This would not only help them assess their emotions but would also make them independent.
Caution: As caretakers, notice how your child reacts when they are feeling angry, sad, or happy. Are they throwing tantrums, are quiet, or trying to cope by sitting alone, etc.? Be careful to handle them with patience and love at this moment because they are still in the learning process.
4. Expressing Emotions in Healthy Ways
We have often witnessed people choking emotional outlets in kids from a young age with words like “boys don't cry” or “girls don’t do that," or when they are not allowed to express what they feel due to strictness, etc.
These words have a huge impact on their lives as they learn to hide what they actually feel.
Communication of Feelings Through Words, Not Actions
It is very important to make them aware of healthy ways of emotional outlets.
This is important to motivate them to resolve their feelings through talking rather than throwing tantrums or having an intense emotional outburst like throwing items, shrieking, arguing, fighting, causing self-harm, etc.
Since they have never been given the opportunity to express themselves openly and properly, they tend to repeat the same with others in the future.
This would have a huge impact on their future relationships and mental health.
Importance of Healthy Expression at a Young Age
Providing kids with a comfortable space for their emotional outlet would help you regulate their emotions by quoting your examples or by talking to them.
It would hence help them to be emotionally open and aware to avoid any future conflicts.
Healthy expressions at a young age would motivate the children to remain honest towards their emotions.
It would also remove any mental anguish, irritation, depression, loneliness, low self-worth issues, etc. from them.
Activity: In case your child does not understand how to express their emotions, have a clay playdough time with them. Talk to them by shaping out the clay. This would not only help them release their stress and anxiety but would also enhance their fine motor and sensory skills.
Also, teach your kids about honest communication being an important key for a healthy relationship.
5. High Levels of Curiosity
Curiosity is like a GPS that guides you towards your desired destination. This is one of the most important signs of emotional intelligence in children.
Curiosity as a Sign of Emotional Maturity
The children who are naturally curious would always try to keep an open mind towards the things happening around them because of their already endless accommodative mental space.
Curiosity imparts in them a sense of emotional maturity, thus driving them towards understanding others.
For example, if someone is sad, you cannot decipher that until you are curious about their behavior or emotions.
Connection Between Curiosity and Emotional Intelligence
Curiosity fuels self-awareness, self-reflection, self-control, problem-solving abilities, empathy, social skills, and a growth mindset. All this together defines emotional intelligence.
For example, curiosity will encourage your kids to ask questions like “You don’t seem okay; is everything alright?” or “What made you do that?" or “Do you think that is the right way to handle it?” etc.
Your similar reaction to their behavior will become a source of inspiration for them to interrogate others with similar questions, thus imparting emotional intelligence in them.
Activity: Try asking questions to your children about the characters’ nature after they have finished reading the story or watching the show or the movie. This would help them brainstorm the reason behind others emotions, thus inculcating the same in real life.
You can also encourage them to include a habit of asking themselves, “Why do I feel this way?” and writing it in their journal to get a precise answer. It would help them to decipher their emotions more appropriately.
6. Good Social Skills
A person with high emotional intelligence would always be amazing in social skills because of their empathetic nature.
How Strong Social Interactions Reflect EI
Social skills are developed with enhanced exposure to social situations like sports, team play or activity, good family time, or interactions in day-to-day life, etc.
Notice how your kid behaves when they are around their peers or others while playing, studying, at school, etc. Keep a close eye and let them know what they could improve.
This would help them self-reflect and self-regulate their emotions on a daily basis, thus enhancing their emotional intelligence.
Activity: Plan a playdate by inviting your child’s friends and organizing various group and individual activities for them to interact with each other and work in tandem. This would enhance their social, cognitive, patience, and team-player skills.
Encouraging Your Child to Build Relationships
Sometimes, you might notice that although your kid is emotionally intelligent but, due to shyness, is unable to socialize, which might hamper their self-esteem.
Therefore, planning regular playdates or group activities and social gatherings would encourage your child to step out of their comfort zone and understand the people around them better.
Children with good social skills tend to easily adapt themselves in any circumstance with ease, and if this isn’t natural, it can be practiced with consistent exposure to social situations.
7. Problem-Solving Abilities
This skill in kids is inculcated from their empathetic nature.
Emotional Intelligence and Analytical Thinking
Children with high emotional intelligence would always think before they reacted and try to understand others feelings before coming to a conclusion. This depicts their analytical thinking.
This would not only help them prevent any conflicts but would also enhance their problem-solving skills.
For example, your child is given a group project where, due to a misunderstanding, they missed out on one important addition in the project. A kid with high emotional intelligence would prefer talking out the matter, resolving conflicts, and finding solutions rather than engaging in a mindless argument. This skill also helps them in the future by being a good team player.
How Children Approach and Resolve Conflicts
An emotionally intelligent person has a farsighted view and therefore would always place their focus upon the possible solutions rather than the problem.
They always tend to possess patience, hope, optimism, and a positive attitude towards any problem.
Activity: Engage your child in various brainstorming activities, which would always naturally align them towards finding a way out of an obstacle rather than focusing on its consequences.
8. Adaptability and Flexibility
One of the signs of high emotional intelligence is linked to negative ego. This implies reduced stubbornness to changing life situations.
How Well Does Your Child Adapt to New Situations?
Life is all about change and transformations, which require an inert desire to keep growing. This requires being adaptable and flexible to new circumstances like a new school, a new place, changes in family dynamics, etc.
Some of the key signs include:
- Curiosity to learn something new.
- Optimistic towards change.
- positive coping mechanism.
- Desire to try new things.
Some children are naturally born this way, while others have to be shaped to enhance their amalgamation into newness.
Why Flexibility Is a Key Emotional Skill?
When the child is flexible, they are emotionally resilient and know how to manage their stress and anxiety in accordance with the situations present before them.
Exposing your kid constantly to new games, activities, friends, and surroundings would help them become flexible.
Flexibility is rooted from un comfort. So, it is mandatory that you prevent your child from remaining seated in their comfort zone.
Adaptability and flexibility inculcate patience, empathy, problem solving, and teamwork in them, thus helping them throughout their lives.
Activity: Prepare your child for a positive outlook to change by introducing them to different cuisines, games, knowledge about differences of religion, culture, and lifestyle around the world, etc., through various informative TV shows, movies, activities, excursions, trips, etc.
9. Compassion for Others
Compassion, in short, means empathy in motion.
Difference Between Compassion and Empathy
The difference between compassion and empathy is just the difference in action.
Empathy refers to understanding others’ perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, whereas compassion means doing something about it in order to help them.
Children begin showing signs of empathy right from their infancy when they offer their toys or snacks to others’, console others when they feel sad, invite the lonely kid to lunch, help others in need, etc.
How compassion demonstrated emotional depth
A child showing compassion implies high emotional understanding because of their ability to get into others’ shoes and work out solutions to their problems. This helps kids develop teamwork skills, altruism, humanity, optimism, hope, etc.
Consistent practice helps them witness how their little effort could make a big difference one day.
Although their empathy and compassion increase with their life experiences, their foundation needs to be laid from infancy.
As a caregiver, it should be your responsibility to ignite a sense of empathy and compassion in your kids right from their childhood.
Also, remember, children only learn what they see. Therefore, it is important that you become their role model.
Activity: Indulge them in social service like planting trees, spreading cleanliness awareness, helping the poor or street animals, saving energy, etc. These mindful activities not only develop a sense of responsibility in them but also make them aware about the betterment of future generations.
10. Leadership Qualities
Does your child take the initiative to plan out an activity? Is your child a conflict resolver and a peacemaker? Have you witnessed your child controlling his sadness or anger and trying to understand others points of view?
Then congratulations! You have a little leader in your homespace.
High emotional intelligence in children is identified with their leadership qualities in their day-to-day lives.
Also Read: 8 Milestones and Development to Expect in Your 7-9 Month Old Baby
How Does Emotional Intelligence Make Kids Great Leaders?
Recognition of leadership qualities in their younger years can help you carve out their potential to become great leaders in the future.
This can be done by indulging them in various decision-making activities and games to enhance their confidence and personality.
Remember! A leader is always a team player, and for that one needs to have empathy and compassion.
Identifying Early Leadership Traits
There are some obvious signs that indicate budding leadership quality in them. This includes:
- Willingness to take risks and try new things with confidence.
- Stands up for a social cause or a wrong doing.
- Always eager to plan, strategize, and take lead in different situations.
- Comes up with endless solutions to resolve problems.
- Shows optimism and a sense of responsibility.
- Is a great team player with excellent communication skills.
- Has good convincing and negotiation skills.
- Portrays self-discipline and independence.
Activity: Motivate your kids to participate in various group projects, sports, activities, debate competitions, decision-making games, puzzles, etc. This would open the door for collaborative learning and thus enhance their personalities and performance.
Also Read: 5 Tips to Raise an Emotionally Intelligent Child by Ragendu K R
How to Develop Emotional Intelligence in Kids
Children with high emotional intelligence are excellent communicators, conflict resolvers, empaths, leaders, and peacemakers due to their inert ability to understand people.
However, you can also prepare them to become emotionally intelligent by indulging them in various games and activities. This includes:
Parenting Tips to Support Emotional Growth
- Ask your child what is making them sad, angry, or happy, and guide them to channel those emotions.
Benefit: This would make them comfortable to be open about their feelings, thus understanding themselves better.
- Be open about your feelings with your child to help them understand. For example, if you are anxious, you can say, I feel stressed, and I am going to take three deep breaths to relax myself.
Benefit: It would help them understand emotional regulation.
- If your child comes to you with someone's problem, ask them, “What could you do to help them?”.
Benefit: This would help them develop empathy.
- If you witness your child throwing tantrums or things around, then tell them, “I understand that you are angry, but this is no way to deal with it.”
Benefit: This would teach them emotional resilience, self-awareness, self-control, and self-regulation.
- Help your child deal with their emotions by journaling, drawing, singing, painting, reading, or other sporting activities, rather than avoiding their feelings.
Benefit: This would teach them about constructive outlets for their emotions. It will also develop in them a sense of patience, hope, and optimism.
- Teach them that crying is healthy if they are sad, but also ensure that they have a solution after their emotional outburst.
Benefit: This will prepare them for their life ahead by learning how to deal with their emotions.
Also Read: Essential Tips for Early Childhood Development
Activities to Improve EI in Children
- Encourage your kids to read various story books or movies and brainstorm about what a particular character did and why they did it.
- Motivate them to display various emotions by playing various role-model games.
- Encourage them to participate in extracurricular activities at school.
- Expose them to different situations at home to help them adapt to changing lives with ease.
- As a family, be open in your communications, negotiations, and collaborative skills to teach them about constructive actions.
Conclusion
It is a well-accepted fact that it is always the person’s behavior that makes them successful, and this is deeply rooted with a sign of high emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence provides a pathway to work with different sets of people, having different opinions, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, and giving them the comfort to work together.
This skill is usually witnessed in people of authoritative posts in government, intelligence agencies, businesses, etc.
As caretakers, it is your duty to enhance your kids emotional intelligence and prepare them to understand this complex world, thus making their lives easier.
R for Rabbit, being a caregiver has always been supportive towards children’s healthy growth and development. This is made possible with its various initiatives and informative posts on social media, the WhatsApp parenting community, and the amazing baby gear and products to give a sense of security and relief to parents.