A Families' Guide to Emotional Intelligence in Early Childhood

Abstract

This literature review looks over multiple research articles from researchers who investigated emotional intelligence, the different aspects of it, as well as its importance and how it can positively affect a person. Intelligence has long been considered the number one way to determine how successful someone is going to become, but plenty of research ahs been done to prove that it is far from the truth. but a different type of intelligence called emotional intelligence has been found to support success in both a person's career and social life.Emotional intelligence itself can be broken down into multiple aspects: emotions identification (identifying your emotions), emotions utilization (expressing your emotions in the right way), emotional understanding (understand your emotions as well as the emotions of others), emotions regulation (a person’s ability to respond and regulate their emotions), and empathy (understanding and being able to sense and understand the feelings of others, whether or not you yourself are feeling those same emotions or have ever felt those emotions before). The development of these skills helps support lower stress levels and better relationships with others, both in an individual’s personal life and their work life. These aspects can be taught at any point during a person’s lifetime, but the younger the individual is, the longer period of time this individual will have to develop and incorporate these skills in their lifetime. Also, although this may seem like something new to many, these skills are already being taught through practices that families utilize today such as building relationships, having open and clear communication with one another, and modeling how families themselves regulate their emotions. My work is dedicated to educating and supporting families interested in teaching their young children emotional intelligence to further build their children to success.