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[On-screen text: Introduction to emotion coaching]
Professor Sophie Havighurst: Hello, I'm Professor Sophie Havighurst, a child clinical psychologist, and one of the program authors of the Tuning in to Teens Parenting program.
Dr. Christiane Kehoe: Hello, I'm Dr. Christiane Kehoe, an academic psychologist, and a program author of the Tuning in to Teens program.
Professor Sophie Havighurst: We're gonna give you an introduction to the ideas of emotion coaching. As parents and carers of young people we play a really important role in shaping our adolescent's emotional intelligence.
Understanding the role of emotion coaching in supporting young people's development of their skills with regulating and understanding emotions is an important part of our caregiving role.
There are a number of ways that adolescents learn about emotions.
Firstly, it's that we model how to express, manage and understand our emotions. They watch, they learn from us.
Secondly, the way that you react to your adolescent's emotions lets them know that you either accept, or alternatively disapprove of their emotions.
Thirdly, whether you coach, or guide your adolescent in understanding, and managing their emotions can really shape, and build their emotional intelligence skills.
There's a whole lot of research that has explored how the way you interact with your young person around emotions influences their emotional intelligence.
Research from the University of Washington in Seattle by John Gottman, Lynn Fainsilber Katz, and Carole Hooven, conducted back in the 1990s provided a really useful foundation for us to understand that when parents use a way of supporting children to learn about their emotions called emotion coaching, this really facilitated children learning emotional intelligence.
This is where a little bit like being a sports coach, parents use a way of communicating with their adolescent that helps build their emotional intelligence skills.
Since Gottman and colleagues initial work many researchers have found that emotion coaching is really important for helping children, young people, learn these skills with emotional intelligence.
So let's have a little bit more of a closer look at what is emotion coaching?
So emotion coaching is a way of interacting with your adolescent where you focus on their emotions before focusing on their behaviour, and helping them to understand, and work through their feelings.
So emotion coaching with adolescents includes five steps.
The first step is to become aware of your adolescent's emotions, especially if it's at a lower intensity, such as a little bit irritated, a little bit disappointed or frustrated. Often adolescents have to really escalate their emotions for us to actually notice them.
The second step is to see these emotions as a time to connect and teach or guide them so that they can learn about these emotional experiences.
The third step is to listen, and accept their emotions with empathy, but avoiding judgment.
The fourth step is to then help your adolescent to describe how they feel perhaps by naming their emotions.
And, lastly, the fifth step is if it's appropriate, help them to problem-solve, or if needed even negotiate some boundaries or set limits.
So this all sounds pretty straightforward, but it's not actually that easy to do, especially in the heat of the moment when you, or your teen are really losing it. Emotion coaching is easier to do when you are calm, and have the space to use these five steps.
If you're really mad, angry or distressed, or really sad, the best thing is to build in a pause first, to take some slow deep breaths and take a moment.
Emotion coaching is not that common. Instead in many cultures people are more emotionally dismissive. Many of us have had emotionally dismissive parents ourselves where we were told off when we were emotional, or our caregivers tried to solve our problems, or tell us there was nothing to worry about without actually acknowledging our feelings.
So it can make it very easy to dismiss your own adolescent's emotions, and shut down any attempts they make to share their emotions. If you're emotionally dismissive you might not talk about the emotion.
Instead, you might try to distract them from their feelings, or go straight to explanations, or just reassurance. You might always try and fix their problems, or give them advice, or you might be critical of your adolescent's way of expressing their emotions, and respond from your own hurt or angry feelings.
So consider the example of a teen coming into the room, and saying, I've just found out none of my friends are going to my school.
So if you're emotionally dismissive with them, you might react to their sadness by being really warm, and offering advice, but completely dismiss their emotions by saying, oh, you'll be fine. You'll make lots of new friends, or don't worry, everyone else is in the same boat, or you might say, that's not true. Sam's going to your school, or maybe instead you avoid their emotions, and you try and protect them by saying, oh no, let's see if we can change schools.
Sometimes seeing our children upset makes us want to give in so that the emotions go away, or you might react by being much more harsh with them. You get irritated or anxious yourself. Stop complaining. You're lucky to be going to such a good school.
So these emotionally dismissive responses do not allow the young person to learn to understand their emotions, and manage the ups and downs in life. Instead the research shows us that emotion coaching is a much more effective way of helping adolescents learn these skills of emotional intelligence.
Dr. Christiane Kehoe: If we're emotion coaching we'd approach this in a very different way. So if they come into the room and they say, I've just found out none of my friends are going to my school. You could use the five steps of emotion coaching. And this is where, first of all, you would become aware of your adolescent's emotions, especially if it is of lower intensity as it is in this case.
Can you try to think about the emotion that might be behind what they just told you? Maybe they're feeling sad, and worried about being the only one in the new school. They might wish that they were going to another school to be with their friends, and this might trigger feelings of resentment, and fears about being alone. They might be angry with you.
Now, step two is to view their emotions as opportunities for connecting and teaching. And this is where you might think to yourself is this an emotion coaching opportunity? How can I be present and how can I help them? You might think to yourself, maybe I could ask them to sit on the couch with me to talk about this a little bit more.
And then step three is where you actually say something that lets the young person know that you have been listening, and this is where you listen, and you accept their emotions with empathy.
So at this point, it's not about them being right or wrong. You might just provide a little more space, so that your adolescent may tell you more about what's happened.
You could just move a little closer, and you might say, oh no, that's hard. Not knowing anyone going to your new school. So you're really empathizing and you're holding space.
And then step four is where you might help your adolescent to describe how they feel by naming their emotions. So this is where you could say you seem really worried, and maybe you're a bit sad about not being with your friends. And this can help them talk about their emotions, but you may need to pause and go really slow. Adolescents often take a long time to put words to what is happening for them.
And then once you've been listening for a little while it might be appropriate that you move to step five, and this is where you might help them solve the problem. And often this begins with asking open-ended questions. Something like, it's really hard when you have to do something you don't want to do. I wonder what would help? How do you think you can keep in touch with your old friends? What would make this easier?
So emotion coaching is a really useful way of helping adolescents to go through difficult, and also really challenging life experiences, and early adolescence, and the transition to starting secondary school is particularly a time of so many changes, and many strong emotions. And you can use emotion coaching to assist your adolescent work through these experiences and reactions.
Now, you don't have to use emotion coaching all the time, but ideally you want to use the five steps at least some of the time when your adolescent experiences emotions.
Gottman and colleagues found that children and adolescents benefit from their parents using emotion coaching at least 30 to 40% of the time when they're emotional.
However, you do need to be in the right space for emotion coaching. Sometimes the timing is just not right for you to emotion coach, and you might just need to get out the door.
Also, when you're upset, it might be that you need to build in a pause, and you come back to the conversation later when you're feeling a little bit calmer.
And at other times, you might choose not to focus on the emotions in the heat of the moment because you made just need to answer some questions, or solve the problem. And in such a situation you may just need to work out what your adolescent needs, what they need to do to get to school, or how to deal with an immediate friendship crisis, but often you can come back to the issue later when the time is right for you and your adolescent when you're both a little calmer.
And then you can use the five steps of emotion coaching to help your adolescent reflect on the emotional situation that you had. And this really helps them to process the emotions that they experienced.
One of the best ways to understand emotion coaching is to see it when it's contrasted with emotion dismissing.
Have a look at the video showing a father and a daughter talking about school transition day. In the first interaction the father is emotionally dismissive. In the second interaction, he's emotion coaching.
Notice how each interaction affects the dad and the daughter, and see if you can notice the five steps of emotion coaching.
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