The phrase "emotional intelligence" has been used so broadly in popular culture that it has almost lost meaning. But the underlying research is solid: children who can identify and name their emotions, who understand that emotions pass, and who develop basic strategies for managing emotional discomfort fare better across nearly every measure that matters — friendships, academic engagement, mental health, and relationship satisfaction — than children with equivalent cognitive ability who lack these skills.
The early years are the prime time for this development. Not because children can be taught emotional intelligence in any formal sense, but because the brain architecture being built through daily interactions with responsive caregivers in the first five years creates the neural foundation for emotional awareness and regulation that persists throughout life.
Healthbooq (healthbooq.com) covers emotional development through the toddler and preschool years.
What Emotional Intelligence Involves in Early Childhood
In practical early childhood terms, emotional intelligence involves: recognising emotions in oneself and others (emotional recognition), attaching words to those states (emotional vocabulary), understanding that emotions have causes and contexts (emotional understanding), tolerating difficult emotions without being overwhelmed (emotional regulation), and showing concern for others' emotional states (empathy).
None of these happen automatically. They develop through thousands of small interactions in which adults model, reflect, name, and respond to emotions — the child's and their own.
Gottman's Emotion Coaching Research
John Gottman and colleagues at the University of Washington, in research published in Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child (1997), observed parents and children across several years and identified distinct parenting styles in relation to emotion.
"Emotion dismissing" parents minimise or distract from negative emotions: "you're fine, don't cry," "it's nothing to be upset about," "you're tired, that's all." The implicit message is that negative emotions are unimportant, inappropriate, or to be quickly replaced with positive ones.
"Emotion disapproving" parents are more critical: "stop being so dramatic," "there's nothing to cry about," "big girls don't act like that." The message is that the emotion is wrong and should be suppressed.
"Emotion coaching" parents acknowledge emotions even when they are inconvenient, name them, validate their logic ("of course you're angry — you didn't want to stop playing"), and when appropriate, help the child problem-solve while keeping limits clear.
Gottman found that children of emotion-coaching parents had better peer relationships, higher academic achievement, fewer behavioural problems, better physical health indicators, and stronger emotional resilience. The effects were measured across years, not just in the immediate aftermath of interactions.
Building Emotional Vocabulary
The simplest high-leverage tool available to parents is narrating emotional experience in real time — their own and the child's. "I'm feeling frustrated right now because I can't find my keys." "You look disappointed that we can't go to the park." "I can see that made you really happy."
Precision matters gradually: moving from the four basic labels (happy, sad, angry, scared) toward more nuanced vocabulary (disappointed, nervous, proud, embarrassed, frustrated, jealous, surprised) as language develops. Books are excellent for this — stories provide emotional situations with enough distance from the child's own experience to allow exploration.
The Zones of Regulation curriculum (Leah Kuypers, 2011) uses colour zones to help children identify arousal and emotional states (blue = low/tired, green = calm/ready, yellow = heightened/anxious, red = overwhelmed) and is widely used in early years settings.
Modelling
Children learn emotional regulation by observing regulated adults — and emotional dysregulation by observing the opposite. A parent who expresses frustration and then uses a visible strategy to calm down ("I'm feeling really annoyed. I'm going to take a few deep breaths and then we'll sort this out") gives the child a direct model of regulatory behaviour.
This does not require perfection. A parent who loses their temper and then says "I'm sorry I shouted — I was very stressed and I didn't handle it well" is teaching repair, accountability, and the normality of imperfect emotion management. These are valuable lessons.
Empathy Development
Empathy begins developing before language. Infants at twelve months show distress responses to others' distress. By eighteen months, many children attempt to comfort a distressed person. By three to four years, theory of mind (the understanding that others have minds, feelings, and perspectives different from one's own) is sufficiently developed for genuine perspective-taking.
Empathy is cultivated by directing the child's attention to others' emotional states: "Look at your friend's face — how do you think he's feeling? He dropped his lunch and he looks really sad." This is not moralising; it is drawing the child's attention to information they have the capacity to process and respond to.
Key Takeaways
Emotional intelligence — the ability to identify, understand, and manage emotions in oneself and others — develops throughout childhood and is significantly influenced by early caregiving. John Gottman's research identified 'emotion coaching' (naming emotions, accepting them, helping the child problem-solve) as more effective than 'emotion dismissing' (minimising) or 'emotion disapproving' (punishing emotions) in predicting children's social, academic, and health outcomes. Building emotional vocabulary, modelling emotional expression and regulation, and using everyday interactions as teaching moments are practical strategies that parents can begin in the toddler years.
