Parent with Emotional Intelligence and See the Benefits

As a mother of two boys aged 11 and 13 years old, I sometimes wish I knew what I know now when they were two years old - as most parents in general do I think, once our children continue to grow in and out of all their weird and wonderful phases.

I must say that as a single parent and sole income earner for nearly ten years that there have been many challenging moments and some just outright scary times. However, throughout all these times the one thing that I always found stable to manage was my boys. Now I am not saying they are perfection personified, far from it - but they are pretty good.

The reason I never found raising the boys as two little personalities so difficult is because I was constantly studying and then implementing the emotional and intuitive intelligence tools I was exposed to and seeking. Most of all, I decided to set a charter of trust within myself to action these tools without concern about how they would be publicly viewed or judged.

I have learned through both my psychic and intuitive profiling work and life experience that child-raising is by far the most difficult and influential position a human being can ever have. As a person who has witnessed first-hand the outcome of what parenting can let loose into and onto society, I have learned a rock solid fundamental fact that would easily be backed up by those who work within both the judicial and policing arenas: we as parents will determine and shape our children's futures until they are of an age to determine and shape their own.

Bringing children into our world should be thought about well before it occurs. Once it has occurred, at the very least, we should be questioning what kind of person we would like them to become so that we can encourage and develop in those arenas ourselves so that we are ultimately able to guide them into this.

We especially need to think about emotional intelligence when additional children come into the mix, or we will continue bad habits and problems that we seek to improve. You see ultimately, our children will model not only what we do, but also what we do not do. If we are loud our children learn this is okay, if we are quiet they also learn this is okay. They use an innate sense of intuitive savvy to tune into our emotions and our precursors, which are the motions, movements, breathing, eye movement, verbal pitches and general body sensations we subconsciously exhibit prior to our actioned behavior. This is what children then behave from.

To be emotionally intelligent is to reduce the risks that we can indirectly place on our children and to firm up the only real long-term influence we can have on them, which is to teach them to be emotionally stable, flexible and socially conscious.

So how do you do this?

1. Be aware of the stress levels you bring into your interactions with your children. I am not saying to pretend that all is perfect in your world, just to remember that this is your world, your choices and they must live with them through no choice of their own. Remember that if you are stressed and harassed that they will either feed off this or pull away from it. So you end up with a child who plays up or simply finds you too stressing, with their environment too unstable and they become insecure as a consequence of it.

2. Understand that you are human and that you were here before your children. This may be a selfish concept, but it's very important. You must remember that as a human being you are entitled to feel that you need a bit of space and time and that whether or not you are in a relationship with your children's partner that they are equally responsible to them. Children are amazingly resilient and "know" the truth as they live it. They know which parent they can rely on and the one they cannot. They rely on the reliable and consistent one...simple. If you both are reliable and consistent, then that's even better.

3. Emotional intelligence begins with parents knowing what their expectations of each other's physical and emotional commitments to their children are, so that this limits variable styles of parenting within the family structure. Defining this will restrict, if not stop, parents warring over the children and enable you to focus on healthy relationships.

4. If you are on your own, understand that you are not a super parent and you can only do what you can, when you can. Guilt has no room in the growth of emotional intelligence. I also recommend that you create little rituals for the children and yourself. This is important because it allows you to share and express away from the outside world.

The risks for children are so wide and sweeping in the world as it is now. We need to remember that we as parents do not have the right to inflict our day on our children or anyone else for that matter. We need to show some respect to our children. And we need to know the agenda we wish to parent from. Discuss and agree, seek professional assistance and structure if you need to, about your parenting styles so your children are raised with a unified, strong and disciplined format.

The little things done on a daily and weekly scale are the things our children remember; these are the things that create stable, capable and emotionally intelligent children whom we unleash into our world - a world that so desperately needs their emotional intelligence.