Raising emotional intelligence is about making friends with our feelings, and allowing ourselves to experience the full gamut of our emotions. It is about becoming comfortable with expressing our feelings outwardly as well as feeling them inwardly.

It is about realizing that almost all that we need to help us forward in life is already contained within us - carefully filed away in the filing system of our thoughts and our emotions. 

Raising children can bring us astonishing happiness, enormous responsibility, incredible anxiety, and the stress of constant challenges.

It isn't too difficult to lose sight of what we as parents really want; happy and well adjusted children within a happy and well adjusted family.

To love and to be loved is the foundation on which all our feeling-life is based.

So, what if we were raised by toxic parents who struggled with showing love?

It does makes it infinitely more difficult to begin with, however, we can learn how to grow and learn how to know and share our feelings with others.

Just as we develop and mature physically and intellectually, we can mature emotionally.

Raising emotional intelligence is part of gaining maturity as adults and as parents too. As we grow, develop and change within ourselves, we reflect to our children all the valuable lessons we learn, enabling them towards greater emotional maturity just as we enable ourselves.

Building, Developing and Raising
Emotional Intelligence :

Read more in the series about building and developing emotional intelligence as adults, as parents, and as children, by clicking on the links below.

• Emotional Intelligence - what is it?

Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive and understand both your own personal feelings as well as those of others.
Having emotional intelligence means not only recognising your emotions but acting on them reflectively and rationally. It involves self awareness, empathetic understanding, self control and restraint.

• Building Emotional Intelligence and Resilience

We need to be able to step back, allow ourselves the time to feel our feelings and to look for the messages they convey to us. We need to understand why we feel in particular ways and what these feelings mean for us. Then we are able to change negative emotions into positive ones.

• Working with Emotional Intelligence

Here are some useful steps to take in working with emotional intelligence. If this is new to you, be kind, gentle and patient with yourself as you open to different and more vigorous ways of thinking and being.

• Social Competence - developing social intelligence

Social competence is learned by children through observation and participation. Children learn social competence from how their parents treat them, and how their parents treat themselves and others. Then they put it into practice on each other.

• 
  Happy Child - helping our children to express their feelings

There is a great deal we as parents can do to help our children to acknowledge and express their feelings, to become a happy child.

• How to express emotions through talking

Talking about how we feel is really one of the most adequate ways of expressing feelings. It takes courage, timing, opportunity and a good listener. This is important.

• Releasing emotions through crying

Crying is a natural way of releasing emotions from our bodies. Those, for whom crying comes easily, often remark about how much better they feel after a good cry. But for many, there is much fear associated with appearing vulnerable and letting go, shame about being seen to cry, or a life time of suppressed tears that just will not come.