Four Keys to Emotional Intelligence – Helping Your Student Understand Her Emotions
The college years can be an emotional time. As a college parent, you may hear about your student’s highs and lows daily, or you may be unaware of the range of feelings. You may feel that your student needs help coping, and you may find yourself offering advice or recommending that he get some help from someone such as a counselor.
How your student handles his emotions may be one indicator of his potential success in college. Some research in Emotional Intelligence suggests that students who recognize and manage their moods, feelings and attitudes well may do better academically.
As a parent, you may not be able to help prevent your student’s emotional swings, but you may be able to help her work with her emotions productively. Here are four ways students can work with their emotions.
- Monitoring – Suggest that your student pay attention to how he feels at various times. Suggest that he notice when his moods change in positive or negative directions.
- Labeling – Identifying and putting a name to an emotion is a good first step to dealing with it. Naming something may give her more control over it. It may take some work for your student to be able to recognize the difference between worry and fear or sadness and exhaustion, but it will help.
- Determining – Once your student has noticed how he is feeling and given it a label, suggest that he try to figure out what has caused the emotion. Did a particular event cause the emotional change? Is it related to a class or activity or person? Just knowing why he experiences an emotion may help your student cope with it.
- Managing – If your student can notice a mood, label it, and determine its cause, she is in a better position to try to manage that emotion. It is possible that she may simply need to let it run its course, but she may also be able work to change the way that she feels. Suggest that she talk to friends, her residence assistant, advisor or counselor. Ask her to think about what she might do differently to change her mood or to prevent the problem in the future. Let your student know that you realize this isn’t simple, but working at it and taking control will help.
Helping your student learn to manage her emotions may be difficult. Your student may or may not be willing to share her moods with you. The more that she works at understanding and managing her moods and emotions, the better that she will become at it. The better she becomes, the more Emotionally Intelligent she becomes, the more in control of her life she will feel.
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