Carolyn invited Stephanie Pinto on to talk about raising emotionally intelligent children. The conversation kept turning back to the mothers.
Because emotional intelligence is straightforward enough to explain and almost impossible to practise when you're the one coming apart. When you're making decisions you don't fully understand, at a pace you didn't choose, with children who need you steady.
Stephanie is an emotional intelligence coach and paediatric anxiety therapist. Here she unpicks why kindness without boundaries helps nobody, what happens in the seconds before you send a message you'll regret, and how to buy those seconds back.
Carolyn shares the small administrative habit that changed the tone of her entire separation. And near the end, something about grief she hasn't said on this podcast before.
Key takeaways
- Emotional intelligence has two halves – knowing what you're feeling, and recognising the other person has their own state going on. Empathy on its own isn't the whole skill.
- You can validate what someone feels without agreeing with them and without dropping the boundary. Those aren't in conflict.
- A limited emotional vocabulary costs more than it sounds like it should. "Mad" and "sad" don't tell you what's actually happening, in a child or in yourself.
- Solutions offered too early don't land. Not because the solution is wrong, but because the person isn't ready to hear it.
- The gap between reacting and responding is a skill rather than a personality trait. It can be built.
- Nothing you write down stays yours. Emails and texts can be read out in court, forwarded, or found by your children years later.
- Relief and grief turn up together. You can be certain you did the right thing and still be flattened by what you lost.
Links
Stephanie Pinto
- Website: stephaniepinto.com
- Her book, From Chaos to Connection: How parenting with emotional intelligence raises kind, confident, resilient kids
- Her podcast, Emotionally Intelligent Parenting
- Her Facebook group, Let's Raise Emotionally Intelligent Kids
- Instagram: @emotionally.intelligent.parent
Mentioned in this episode
- The Separated Mother's Toolkit – family lawyer interviews on parenting plans and binding agreements, a child support fact sheet, a Centrelink guide, a parenting schedule tracker and co-parenting scripts. A$49. There's also a parenting plan template you can add at the checkout, so you're filling in a document rather than starting with a blank page.
Send Carolyn a text
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