Emotion Coaching

One thing you will often hear parents say is that no one provides you with a manual explaining how to parent. It is quite probably one of the toughest jobs going. There is often conflicting advice about how best to manage a child’s tantrums or even just how to deal with smaller issues as they arise. Many of us were raised with what could be described as “warm-strict” parenting; where boundaries are reinforced by punishments if they are transgressed. Is this the best way to teach child right from wrong though? It would seem to be counterintuitive if we are wanting to raise children who are able to self-regulate their emotions and who follow society’s unspoken codes of conduct intrinsically, rather than due to extrinsic threat or reward.  

 John Gottman is the “godfather” of parenting and relationship approaches. He and his wife still run the Gottman Institute, dedicated to marriage and relationship guidance. Gottman also created the Emotion Coaching parenting style, which has now being adopted by many schools, as an alternative to more behaviourist approaches to children’s behaviour in schools.  

 This strategy involves training parents (or school staff) and then training students to recognise their own emotions and how to manage them in different situations. We know that the ability to manage our emotions and develop emotional resilience are important factors in securing academic success, as well as ensuring our general happiness and success navigating the world around us. Emotion coaching in schools was developed from  Gottman’s work on parenting styles (published in 1997, but based on more than a decade of work and research). It is a simple 5 step approach which can be used with all ages of children and in all types of settings. It encourages the adult to move away from phrases that dismiss or disapprove of emotions, and instead encourages empathy and validation of emotions, whilst setting a limit on behaviour and problem solving. The steps are as follows:  

1. Be aware of the child’s emotions: what might they be feeling in this moment? How might they be expressing it in their words or body language? 

2. Validate their emotion: “It’s okay to feel what you are feeling right now - I think i would feel that too.” 

3. Name the emotion: “I wonder if you’re feeling angry or frustrated right now?”, “I can see you’re sad at the moment.” 

4. Show empathy and understanding: use active listening “that sounds tough, I think I would feel angry too.” 

5. Set boundaries and problem-solve together: “We cannot shout at your brother like that. So how can we fix this?” 

 Bath Spa University, in 2015, researched the impact of Emotion Coaching in both primary and secondary schools in the UK. They found that if staff felt better prepared to de-escalate incidents with children, the students were better able to regulate themselves and each other and that there was a better culture of wellbeing developed as a result of the training and implementation of the approach. Neuroscience would seem to back this up; naming our emotions and feeling validated activates our prefrontal cortex (the logical and ‘thinking’ part of the brain). It also helps to regulate our amygdala’s stress response (the emotional and ‘fight-flight’ part of the brain). When I have shared this training with staff and parents, one piece of feedback I always know I am going to get is “But this takes such a long time”. If we stop for a minute and think about how long that interaction could take in reality: maybe a minute and a half? Two minutes maximum? If we all stopped to take that time to connect and work with a child’s emotions, how many much longer, more negative conversations might we save ourselves? What a difference we might see in our children, both in and out of school, if we show them no emotion is “bad”, but how we deal with the emotion is the most important thing.