Teaching Our Kids HOW to Use Emotional Intelligence

Kiva Schuler • January 18, 2024

Emotions are powerful tools of discernment. Giving our children the ability to feel them will enrich their lives, and help them assert boundaries, and have deeper, more fulfilling relationships.

But they are terrible guides for our decisions and actions. Emotions are erratic, reactive, and fleeting.

Living a life guided by our emotions is a path to inconsistency, lack of follow-through, and an unwillingness to take risks or navigate long-term relationships. Acting from emotion can cause harm to our relationships and sabotage our goals. The goal is to develop the skills of Emotional Intelligence and foster positive habits, decision-making skills, and persistence through challenging times.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to feel, express, and communicate our feelings and to resist the urge to allow them to rule the roost.

There’s a trap here for Peaceful Parents… A myth. The idea, perpetuated by soundbites on social media, that our role is to keep our children in a positive mental state sets them up to miss out on the development of a vital life skill. Because the truth is that a successful life requires discipline, consistency, and follow-through. So in an interesting way, parenting with emotional intelligence means that we need to model and teach our children how to live life and make decisions beyond their emotions.

If we unintentionally start to guide our parenting choices by what will make our children feel good, instead of what is best for their long-term growth and potential, we (gasp… I’m going to say it!) coddle them.

We raise a generation of young adults who are ill-prepared to navigate a fundamental truth in life: It’s hard. We’re going to have to do things that we don’t like. We’re going to have to work with people who trigger us. We are going to fight with the people we love the most.

And if we teach our children that feeling negative emotions means that they should retreat to emotional safety, then their future stands on shaky ground. Adults need to build the capacity to transcend their emotions and make decisions that are rooted in their values and move them toward their goals. Emotions can be felt, but they can’t be feared.

Making good decisions doesn’t always feel good. In fact, it often doesn’t feel great.

When I was in my early 20s, I worked for a company in Boston that sponsored the Boston Marathon. Pretty much the whole company signed up to run the race, starting a training program in January (brrrr…) at 5:30 in the morning (ummm…). Let me cut to the chase: I did not kid myself. I signed up to hand out cups along the route.

But my friend Karen was a champ. She was at the meeting spot each morning. I asked, “How the heck?” she was being so disciplined. “Don’t you ever feel like sleeping in?”

“Of course,” she said. But then she said something that changed my life.

“If I only do things when I feel like it, I’ll never accomplish anything.” She told me she put her running shoes across the room next to her alarm and had a rule that she couldn’t turn the blaring alarm off until she had her shoes on. Once the shoes were on, she was going.

This is a lesson that our children need to learn. It’s the path to grit, follow-through, resilience, and success.

“The biggest flex is to train your mind to be stronger than your feelings.” ~A quote I saw on Twitter.

So how do we support our children to do this as Peaceful Parents?

1. Develop YOUR ability to feel your feelings and decide from your intentions

This means, dear reader, that you get to become comfortable with your emotions and hone your ability to feel your feelings but not react to them. When we learn to just feel without taking any action, we will start to notice massive shifts in our lives.

I recently had a fight with my beloved. It was a bit of a doozy around a tender topic, and I was pretty furious. My mind started to spin in an imagined conversation full of righteousness and right-ness, and I reached for my phone. But I was heated. So I put it down and grabbed my journal. I wrote eight bullet points about my righteousness and right-ness. In my mind, I was going to use this for the conversation I would have with him. But I was still feeling the burn, so I went to the gym.

And on my way home, conversation still spinning in my head, I suddenly felt a deep sense of calm. In a moment, I understood his perspective. I wasn’t exactly right, after all. In fact, he was trying to protect me (a trigger for me as a fiercely independent woman), and I couldn’t see it through my rage.

What was going to be a disaster turned into an understanding.

(Just one from about eight million examples in my life. And I’d be lying if I said my emotions didn’t often get the best of me. I’m still learning too!)

2. Get comfortable with the idea that your kids aren’t always going to be comfortable

Instead of responding in ways to alleviate their emotional discomfort, grow your capacity to be with all of their emotions, resisting the urge to “fix them.” Their negative emotions are happening FOR them, not TO them. So give them the opportunity to let their feelings do their work.

Let’s say your child has a rough day at soccer practice. Or a rough month. And they want to quit. But your family has a value of participating in sports. And you’ve seen their joy in playing soccer in the past. You might say: “Let’s not quit when things are going badly. I’ll make you a deal: The next time you have an awesome practice or an awesome game, if you still want to quit, then let’s talk about it.

“And remember… In this family, we have a value of being on a team. So you can start to think about what sport you might try instead.”

Chances are high that the challenge will pass and that someday, the fact that your child didn’t quit is going to teach them that they can persevere through hard times to reach their goals.

3. Ground the lessons to build their identity

Identity is ultimately what guides our behavior. When we define ourselves as a “person who reads a book a month,” we are far more likely to read a book a month than if we say something like, “I’m going to try to read more.”

So when our children go through a challenging time and persevere, make good decisions, or follow through on their commitments even when it was hard to do so, we can embrace our role as their mentor and guide. Rather than telling them what we noticed or are proud of them for, we can ask questions like:

“What did you learn about yourself?”
“How will you handle this the next time something like this happens?”

“What lessons do you want to take away from this?”

Let them form their own conclusions, and then, of course, tell them what you noticed about their effort, response, or choice. I’m going to poke a pin in the balloon of the “don’t compliment your kids crowd” here, too.

There’s nothing more fulfilling to a child than YOU telling them that you’re proud of them when they’ve earned it.

The Most Vital Aspect of Emotional Intelligence… Is NOT Giving Too Much Power to Emotions

Remember, we’re parenting the child, but we’re raising the adult. Some of the most important characteristics adults can have are tenacity, persistence, resilience, grit, and integrity. It’s hard to develop these skills without being given the opportunity to do so.

Give your child the gift of preventing them from acting out from their emotional reactivity, and you’ll give them the keys to a better, more fulfilled, and satisfying life. As a parent, there is nothing more pride-inducing than seeing your child operate in the world as they mature, with a deep sense of responsibility, courage, and discernment. But this doesn’t happen magically. We must do our best to foster these qualities as we raise them. Which means we have to teach them to live beyond their feelings.

Important Note: For clarity’s sake, a child won’t have the emotional regulation capacity necessary to start practicing these skills until they are 5-8 years old… so don’t set yourself up for failure by thinking this article applies to toddlers. You can bookmark it for later if you have young children.

Meet Your Author, Kiva Schuler
Jai Founder and CEO

Kiva’s passion for parenting stemmed from her own childhood experiences of neglect and trauma. Like many of her generation, she had a front row seat to witnessing what she did not want for her own children. And in many ways, Jai is the fulfillment of a promise that she made to herself when she was 16 years old… that when she had children of her own, she would learn to parent them with compassion, consistency and communication.

Kiva is a serial entrepreneur, and has been the marketer behind many transformational brands. Passionate about bringing authenticity and integrity to marketing and sales, she’s a sought after mentor, speaker and coach.

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What’s Actually Happening Inside Your Child’s Developing Brain

By Maggie Pouplis • June 3, 2026

Almost every parent experiences this more than once. Your child changes, and suddenly, you feel like you no longer fully understand them. The toddler who melts down over the “wrong” cup. The once easygoing school-aged child who suddenly becomes more sensitive, withdrawn, or reactive. The teenager who pulls away just when you feel the strongest urge to protect them. And somewhere in those moments, most parents begin searching for explanations. “Something changed.” “Someone is influencing them.” “They’ve become difficult.” “Social media is ruining this generation.” As parents, we naturally try to make sense of behavior. We look for causes because uncertainty feels uncomfortable, especially when it involves someone we love so deeply. But many times, what changes first is not the child’s character. It is the child’s developing brain. One of the most important things I learned during my training with the Jai Institute for Parenting was that behavior cannot be fully understood outside the context of relationship, nervous system development, and emotional safety. That perspective stayed with me and eventually led me to dive even deeper into developmental neuroscience and brain development. Because once you begin to understand how the brain develops, it stops looking like defiance, manipulation, laziness, or attitude. The behavior begins to look like development. In the early years of life, especially between ages two and four, children experience emotions intensely while still lacking the neurological maturity to regulate them independently. The areas of the brain responsible for impulse control, emotional regulation, planning, and perspective taking are still under construction. In other words, young children often feel enormous emotions inside very small nervous systems. This is why a toddler can completely fall apart because their banana broke in half or because you gave them the “wrong” spoon. To the adult brain, the reaction may seem dramatic. To the child’s nervous system, however, the distress is real. This does not mean children should grow up without boundaries . It means that in moments of emotional flooding, connection and regulation often need to come before teaching. As Dr. Daniel Siegel often explains, an overwhelmed brain cannot effectively access logic, learning, or problem-solving. The nervous system must first return to a state of safety before true learning can happen. This is where co-regulation becomes incredibly important. Children borrow our nervous systems long before they can consistently regulate themselves. They learn emotional regulation through repeated relational experiences with calm, connected adults. Of course, this does not mean parents must remain perfectly calm all the time. Parents are human beings with limits, stress, exhaustion, responsibilities, and their own nervous systems. What matters most is not perfection but repair, awareness, and the overall emotional climate of the relationship. As children move into the school-age years, something else begins to happen. Around ages five to seven, the social brain expands significantly. Children become increasingly aware of how others see them. Acceptance, belonging, comparison, fairness, and peer relationships begin carrying much more emotional weight. This is often the age when parents say things like: “They suddenly became more sensitive.” “They take everything personally now.” “They worry more than before.” And they are usually right. At this stage, children are not simply reacting emotionally. They are beginning to build a deeper social identity. Their brains are becoming more aware of social evaluation and emotional meaning within relationships. Then comes a stage I personally believe is one of the most misunderstood of all: roughly ages eight to ten. Many parents expect things to stabilize by this point. Instead, some children become quieter, more introspective, more emotionally reactive, or seemingly disconnected. Others become easily bored, frustrated, or emotionally overwhelmed. And naturally, adults begin creating narratives around those changes. “They’re lazy.” “They’ve changed.” “They don’t care anymore.” But very often, what we are witnessing is neurological reorganization rather than deterioration. During this period, the brain begins a major process called synaptic pruning. Neural connections that are not frequently used begin to weaken, while frequently used pathways become stronger and more efficient. At the same time, children develop more complex emotional awareness, deeper thinking, and a richer internal world. Many children at this age begin asking bigger questions about themselves, relationships, fairness, identity, and belonging, even if they cannot fully articulate those thoughts yet. Sometimes what adults interpret as withdrawal is actually cognitive and emotional expansion happening internally. And then adolescence arrives, perhaps the stage that activates the most fear in parents. Teenagers begin separating psychologically from their parents as part of healthy development. Their need for autonomy increases while the emotional and reward systems of the brain become highly sensitive. Peer relationships become deeply important, emotions intensify, and risk-taking often increases. To many parents, this can feel frightening or even personal. But adolescence is not a broken relationship. It is a developmental transition. Teenagers still need boundaries, guidance, and emotional safety. Perhaps more than ever. But they also need space to develop identity, autonomy, and a sense of self outside the parent-child dynamic. And maybe this is one of the biggest challenges of parenting today: learning how to remain emotionally available without trying to control every stage of development out of fear. Modern parenting often places enormous pressure on parents to react perfectly at every moment. But children do not need perfect parents. They need regulated enough adults who are willing to stay curious about what behavior may actually be communicating. Because many times, children are not trying to give us a hard time. They are trying to organize a developing brain and nervous system inside a very overstimulating world. And perhaps the question we need to ask more often is not “How do I stop this behavior?” , but “What might this developing brain be trying to communicate through it?”