PEP Talks - A Parent Education Program
Parenting is tough, but PEP Talks is here to make it a little easier. Join Arlington Community Schools as we seek expert advice to examine issues facing school-aged children today, from anxiety and depression, bullying and social media to everything between. Want us to explore certain topics? Email us at peptalks@acsk-12.org.
Our Hosts:
Erin Williams is a Social & Transition Specialist for elementary and middle schools in Arlington Community Schools (ACS), a district located outside Memphis, Tenn. With a background in social work, Erin is a licensed school social worker and master social worker. She has also previously served as a victim advocate and child forensic interviewer in Tennessee.
Ja'Neair Johnson is a Social & Transition Specialist for high-school aged students in ACS. She has served as a mental health professional for more than 20 years and holds a Masters of Social Work and is a licensed school social worker.
Tyler Hill is the Director of Communications & Planning for ACS. As a former award-winning journalist, Tyler’s passion was rooted in storytelling that spoke to the heart, and he has carried that same mentality to School PR. He serves as the PEP Talks producer and sound engineer, with occasional hosting duties.
PEP Talks - A Parent Education Program
Emotional Intelligence: The G.O.A.T. Skill
Let us know how we're doing, or send us an idea!
Emotional Intelligence, or EQ, is the ability to monitor our own and other’s feelings and emotions and use that information to guide our thinking and action. EQ helps us express our emotions, develop and maintain relationships, cope with challenges, and make effective decisions.
Growing up, we're all made aware of the importance of having a high IQ, but as Erin and Ja'Neair discuss, EQ may be just as important in society today. They discuss how to know if someone lacks emotional intelligence and give practical strategies to help children build emotional intelligence specific to social awareness, self-awareness, and self-regulation and relationships skills.
We're peeling back the layers on children's EQ in a heartfelt conversation that promises to leave you with actionable insights.
Check out these resources:
- Improving Emotional Intelligence
- 15 TED Talks on Emotional Intelligence
- PEP Talks Callback: Setting Boundaries in the New Year (an important step for having high EQ!)
Interested in another topic? Let us know what you’d like to hear more about at peptalks@acsk-12.org
Welcome to the pep talks podcast.
Speaker 2:I'm junior Johnson and I'm Aaron Williams. Today, we are going to be talking about emotional intelligence, and I want to do something a little bit differently. I want to talk about signs of low emotional intelligence, to start off. So, does your child lack emotional control? Are they constantly interrupting you while you're in a conversation with another adult?
Speaker 1:My daughter does that. Yes, we're working on it.
Speaker 2:Does your child lack that awareness when they are feeling a certain way? They don't know how they're feeling, or maybe they have't know how they're feeling, or maybe they have these big giant outbursts that aren't appropriate to what the trigger is, so what they're upset about. So going from zero to 100, zero to 100. Maybe they jump to conclusions. Or they're easily dysregulated, easily offended. They may feel unmoved. When there's something sad that happens, they have a hard time maintaining friendships. These are all signs of emotional deficits, low emotional intelligence. So today we're actually going to be talking about emotional intelligence, what it is, and then also how parents can support their children in building that emotional intelligence how parents can support their children in building that emotional intelligence.
Speaker 1:So EI for short is the ability to kind of understand and manage our emotions overall, right? So, throughout the day we feel different emotions happiness, sadness but it's important to notice them and understand them, right? So, for me, when I'm helping students at the high school level even when I was working in elementary well, specifically elementary this was more important is to expand their vocabulary, because you want to have your child be able to say more than just I'm happy, I'm sad. There are an array of different emotions in between happy and sad and they vary according to intensity, right so, are you ecstatic, are you elated, are you angry, are you frustrated, are you disappointed? So, being able to have them and teach them different vocabulary words, different feeling words that describe how they feel, that way they can accurately tell you exactly how they're feeling, then you'll know how to respond to.
Speaker 2:Right, and that's the self-awareness component is self-awareness understanding their own emotions and then social awareness understanding the emotions of others and then using this information to make informed decisions, so responding appropriately.
Speaker 1:So how would you help Erin? You work elementary and middle how would you help those students, I guess, improve their EI?
Speaker 2:So, just like we said and you mentioned this helping them identify their feelings and not just how I'm feeling, but what does that look like when I feel that way? We've talked about somatic so how does this feel to my body? We've talked about regulation, so not just identifying our feelings, but how do we get back to where we can handle our own feelings in the moment. So coping skills and then helping them understand and recognize how others feel. So body language, Helping a child understand other body languages, verbal tone, words that they say, facial expressions, and then making an assumption on how that person may feel.
Speaker 2:Now, the only way and I teach this the only way we can know how someone feels is we ask them. But if there's a situation that happens to another student and we notice that that student responding, we can make a guess on how they're feeling. And once we teach that, we teach them how to express empathy. So that's another skill that we build, and these things really do build off of each other. So I'll start there with emotional intelligence. Those are kind of the self-awareness, self-management, empathy and social skills. So there's a lot to that, but just to begin, those are going to be those beginning steps for building that emotional intelligence for a child.
Speaker 1:Well for me on the high school level, I think, when it comes to emotional intelligence, on my end, I think I do a lot of work around relationships. Yeah, I do a lot of work around relationships. They just struggle with relationships, whether it be just a normal friendship or if they call themselves having a boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever the case may be, they just struggle and I think I've mentioned this before in a previous podcast. They give titles to people prematurely without really getting to know people and then it devalues their emotional intelligence when they hand out titles to people prematurely. And so I work with students on taking time to read the room, read the person, ask the questions, to really get to know people, develop the relationships, cultivate the relationships, before you hand out these titles of you're my friend, you're my boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever the case may be.
Speaker 1:That way you're not devalued and your feelings are usually not hurt as much once you do that, once you take the time to do that. So I work a lot with helping those students with their relationships, that's really good.
Speaker 2:And I think, adding to that, practicing active listening and reflection. And this is the easiest skill to build because you can practice active listening by saying a couple statements to your student or your child and then having them say those statements back to you Mommy gets really frustrated when I ask you to do something and you don't do it. Repeat that back to me, mom. You said you feel really frustrated when I don't do the dishes. That's right and that is reflection. And then active listening and it's getting them to summarize what you said and they may say it in a different way, they don't have to say it the exact way you said it, but that teaches empathy from there and you can build that skill from those things.
Speaker 2:And as adults we need practice with active listening and we think about emotional intelligence. We all know people in our lives who lack some emotional intelligence. So what does that look like as a teenager, as an adult? It's. You know the person that comes into the room. There's a full conversation, there's a mood in the room and that person completely come. They come in and they change the vibe in the room. Everyone's talking, they come in, they interrupt, they share intelligence. You know it's necessary to interrupt the room. There is information, but sometimes it's a person that they are wanting that connection, they are wanting that feedback, but they're not paying attention to how they come across, they're not socially aware. They're not socially aware.
Speaker 2:I'm also thinking like, as an adult, the person that has a difficult time expressing empathy, a person that and we see this as children but the one upping story and we've talked about that before where you know, my I'm not feeling good today. Oh, you're not feeling good today. Last week I felt the worst, yeah, or this is you know, this is nothing compared to how I felt and that's just tone deaf. Sometimes it's in an effort again to connect. There's that piece where we think, if we share a story that's similar, we're connecting, and that's not always the case. Sometimes it's oh, I'm sorry, you know, I'm sorry that happened to you. Or can you tell me more about that? Trying to connect, trying to so validating.
Speaker 1:Validating Absolutely. So you feel invalidated if somebody's like last week, like you said, last week, you know, hurricane came and blew my house down, you know. So it's like, well, no, that's not what I was getting at.
Speaker 2:Right, Paying attention to the other person's emotions and then responding appropriately. So what do we do when we have people like that in our lives or we're trying to teach that skill up? Is we teach our children how to set boundaries? And you can go back and listen to the January episode about setting boundaries. That's an awesome first step in teaching your child is kind of learning. What does that look like? Communicating clearly?
Speaker 1:I think you know emotional intelligence has a lot to do with teaching your child how to be resilient too, so maybe you are feeling a big emotion that's uncomfortable. It doesn't feel good. You don't want to feel it. However, is this a situation where you need to advocate for yourself? So at the high school level, I have students that don't want to talk to their teachers about whatever you know a grade or an assignment, or maybe they missed something and they're frustrated because they want to maybe turn in this assignment late and get the points, but they are too afraid to advocate for themselves, so they live in that frustration and they're stuck.
Speaker 1:So I have to work with them to dig them out of that frustration and get them to a point where they're able to verbalize to their teacher. You know, mr and Ms, so-and-so I feel really disappointed in myself that I didn't turn in this, you know essay or whatever. It is on time. Do you think I would have an opportunity to you know, turn in on tomorrow? If I get it to you tomorrow, will you accept it for whatever the points that you allow? You know whatever.
Speaker 1:And so I actually had a situation like that this past week where I helped a student you know practice, we role played the conversation and they went and they talked to the teacher and they were able to get their assignment in and so they were able to dig themselves out of that frustration. Note how they felt. We described it first and identified it first, we noted how that felt and then we worked on how to get out of that, that rut of staying there. And I think that happens a lot with students middle, middle and high probably the most because they feel defeated, they don't know how to advocate. But that again, that comes with emotional intelligence and being able to describe how you feel and then not stay there, right so, and have the skills to move on.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and that's a self-management skill. Is that advocating? But also, I want to add to that scenario teaching them when to come in and talk to that teacher is also an important aspect of emotional intelligence. When a teacher is teaching a class and advocating for yourself, you just start. You know I'm going to need this. That is not the time, not the time. That is not the time. And we've got to teach that aspect to our children to pay attention to how the other person is doing before we communicate our needs and pay attention to the timing. And we've got to teach that skill as well, because there's a time and a place to advocate for ourselves, and it's not in the middle of instruction or it's not when our teacher is talking to another adult. It's finding the right time, so it's all connected.
Speaker 2:Emotional intelligence is so important because this world is so connected and we're all connected to each other. There's a lot of skill deficits that children have where they aren't able to regulate. They aren't able to regulate and if you have a child that is emotionally intelligent, they're actually going to be modeling how to regulate that to other students. And no, that is not necessarily their responsibility, but we do want children that are emotionally intelligent that can respond with empathy for the children that do need that support as well. All right, so that's our episode today on emotional intelligence. But before we go, janir, do you have a pet thought of the week?
Speaker 1:So mine says remember, you are exactly who you are meant to be in this moment, Don't forget who you're supposed to be.
Speaker 2:That that's a really good one. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Till next time oh wait, what's yours? Sorry, so very emotionally intelligent of you didn't read the room at all, so erin, what is your pep thought for the week?
Speaker 2:all right. So my pep thought comes from a threat assessment training that jenir and I conducted last week we were talking about concerning behaviors of students, and the quote comes from Kay Bartlett a child whose behavior pushes you away is a child who needs connection before anything else. And isn't that true? The child that is having the meltdown that is displaying these behaviors that may be concerning or that a lot of people kind of push away from, that isn't seen as desirable. Those are the children that really need that adult connection and child to child connection. So making sure we see that not as a child that is mean bad kid or anything, yeah mean or bad or rude it.
Speaker 2:It's a child that desires that connection more than anything else, and how important it is for us as adults to see that need for what it is and respond appropriately. I like that Till next time the pep talks podcast is brought to you by arlington community schools in arlington, tennessee.
