‘90s FAMILY : It’s Emotional Intelligence That Counts

Two decades ago, many people believed that you had better start early working on children’s brains if you wanted to help them succeed in life. It was the era of flash cards in the crib and Stravinsky under the pillow.

One acquaintance, who earnestly wanted her child to be smart, ate a lot of liver in her third month of pregnancy, the time of brain formation. The child eventually graduated from an Ivy League college and is now, of course, scrambling to find stable employment.

But now we’ve entered a new era when researchers are recognizing that in the real world, “emotional intelligence,” the ability to get along with people and make good personal decisions, is more important to life success than the academic intelligence measured in IQ tests.

At best, IQ contributes only 20% to the factors that determine life success, and most parents have been leaving the other 80% to chance, says Daniel Goleman, a Harvard-educated psychologist and behavioral reporter for the New York Times, who has just published “Emotional Intelligence” (Bantam Books).

“IQ is important, but it’s not everything by any means. Many people of high IQ work for people of much lower IQ who have higher emotional intelligence,” he says.

“How many writers do you know who don’t know how to sell what they produce?” he asks. “L.A. is full of them.”

Even among talented pools of high-IQ people, the most valued are those who can cooperate, persuade, empathize with others and build consensus. One study found that the true stars in a think tank of engineers were those who could tap into the informal communications network during a crisis and get quick responses to their e-mail questions.

Emotional intelligence is the second wave of post-IQ thinking about intelligence that began in the early 1980s when Harvard education professor Howard Gardner suggested that children possess “multiple intelligences” and should be encouraged to discover and nurture their natural, individual strengths. Kinds of intelligence: linguistic, logical mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal.

The personal intelligences were more recently detailed and labeled “emotional intelligence” by psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer of Yale University and the University of New Hampshire, respectively.

Emotional intelligence consists of five components: knowing one’s own feelings and using them in good decisions; managing feelings to keep distress from impairing one’s ability to think; motivating oneself despite persistent setbacks; staying hopeful, delaying gratification; empathizing with others and being able to have rapport with others, cooperate and handle feelings in relationships.

Such skills not only bode well for careers, relationships and health in later life, but are also correlated with lower rates of delinquency, violence and drug use in children. Interestingly, children who are helped to improve their emotional skills also perform better on achievement tests, Goleman says.

The bad news is that many parents, themselves raised in emotionally inept families, ignore feelings altogether, take a laissez faire approach to their child’s upsets, or are overtly contemptuous of their child’s feelings. (“Don’t you talk back to me.”)

The good news is that it’s not too late for children to change. Neuroscientists have discovered that the regulatory centers in the brain for emotional intelligence, unlike most others, continue to take shape and mature into adolescence. “Kids keep on learning and the brain shapes itself through repeated experience,” Goleman says.

To be their children’s emotional coaches from infancy on, parents need to model healthy emotional skills themselves, take their children’s feelings seriously (“Are you angry because Tommy hurt your feelings?”) and help them find ways to soothe themselves (“Instead of hitting him, why don’t you find a toy to play with until you feel like playing with him again?”).

Goleman says, “You can be a highly effective lifelong teacher for your child’s emotional intelligence for better or worse by how you model emotions and handle your child every day.”