Raising Emotionally Intelligent Children in an Age of Emotional Suppression The paradox is hard to miss once you see it. We live in a cultural moment that talks about emotional intelligence more than any previous era — the term is everywhere, from preschool curricula to corporate leadership training. And yet the ambient conditions of contemporary childhood are in many ways organized around emotional suppression: screens that provide distraction from feeling, schedules that eliminate the unstructured time in which emotions can surface and be processed, and an adult culture that is, despite the vocabulary, frequently discomforted by the actual expression of difficult feeling in children.

What Emotional Intelligence Actually Is

The concept was developed in a technical sense by researchers John Mayer and Peter Salovey in the early 1990s and later popularized — sometimes beyond what the research supports — by Daniel Goleman. Its core components are specific enough to be practically useful: the ability to perceive emotions accurately in oneself and others, the ability to use emotions to facilitate thought, the ability to understand how emotions work and how they change, and the ability to manage emotions in service of goals. The key word in that last item is manage. Emotional intelligence is not the absence of difficult emotions or the rapid resolution of them. It is the capacity to experience them without being overwhelmed, to understand them without being controlled by them, and to use them as information rather than noise. This is very different from the version of emotional management that most children receive: feel bad, quickly do something to feel better, move on.

How Suppression Happens Without Anyone Intending It

Very few parents intend to raise emotionally suppressed children. The suppression happens through small, well-intentioned moves. The child who is upset receives a screen or a snack rather than the experience of sitting with the upset long enough for it to resolve naturally. The child who cries is hurried through the crying toward being okay. The child who is anxious is reassured that everything is fine — which communicates, without words, that the anxiety was unreasonable and should be dismissed rather than understood. Research from the University of Washington studying parenting styles and child emotional development found that what distinguished emotionally intelligent children was not that their parents were more permissive or more expressive, but that their parents engaged in what the researchers called emotion coaching: acknowledging the emotion, labeling it, and treating it as an opportunity for connection and learning rather than a problem to be solved or a behavior to be managed.

A Tangent on Boredom

There is an emotion that contemporary childhood is especially designed to eliminate: boredom. The scheduling, the screens, the activities — all of it functions to ensure that a child is never left in the state of having nothing to engage with. This is presented as enrichment, but boredom has developmental functions. It is the state from which children generate their own engagement, develop intrinsic motivation, and discover what they actually care about. It is also the state in which quieter, more uncomfortable emotions that were being outrun by stimulation finally catch up. The child who is never bored is, in this sense, being systematically denied access to part of their own inner life.

What Emotion Coaching Looks Like in Practice

The parent who wants to raise an emotionally intelligent child does not need a curriculum or a program. They need a shift in orientation: toward treating emotional moments as the primary learning opportunities they are rather than as interruptions of the schedule. This means, when a child is upset, pausing before problem-solving and asking what happened and what they are feeling. It means naming emotions specifically — not just "sad" but "disappointed" or "left out" or "embarrassed" — because the vocabulary for emotion is not trivial. Research from the University of Pittsburgh found that people who can name their emotional states more precisely show better regulatory outcomes, suggesting the labeling itself is part of the mechanism, not merely its description. It also means tolerating, without immediate rescue, the experience of the child being in a difficult feeling long enough to learn something from it. This is hard for parents because a child's distress activates parental distress. The capacity to stay present with a child who is struggling — without fixing, distracting, or minimizing — is itself an act of emotional intelligence that models exactly what we are hoping to develop.