Emotional intelligence may not be as prominent as its physical counterpart, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Teaching emotional intelligence to your teens may not only benefit their social lives, but also contribute to their academic performance and overall success. If developed properly, it can prove to be far more useful for them than a high IQ.

Name the emotions

Emotions are something that can be best described as complex, making it tough for even the adults to ace the emotional intelligence test. Limiting their description to “happy” and “sad” can keep children from fully realizing their complexity. Therefore, whenever you’re feeling a certain emotion, be it happiness, anger, sorrow, fear, regret, etc describe it out loud using a rich vocabulary. This would help your teen become familiar with the variety of emotions and learn how to identify them.

Model empathy and effective communications

Learning to be compassionate towards others and understanding feelings is extremely important to get through life and navigate through the daily-life situations. Help your teen develop these skills by modeling it in your interactions with others to influence them into adopting a similar attitude. Combining compassion with effective communication can make them even more emotionally appropriate. The latter in particular is bound to prove extremely useful for them at every step of life. There’s no better way to teach effective communication than through modeling it.

Give a nod to free play

Free play has long been recognized as an extremely effective way of teaching kids emotional intelligence. It doesn’t just sharpen their physical skills, but also helps them develop emotional skills for dealing with different situations. Teens’ strong attraction to thrill, a mixture of fun and fear, is no secret, though it’s probably something that you completely disapprove of because of safety concerns. If it’s not something too dangerous, giving them the freedom to engage in such activities can help them tame their fears rather than become slaves to it. Anger is another emotion that often surfaces during free play sessions. If there’s ever a good time for a child to get angry and learn to manage it, it’s while playing. Realizing that their anger may interfere with their play and may even end it, they’re likely to try and overcome the emotion on their own, or let others cool them off. After blowing off some steam through further play, they may even realize their mistake and apologize. This lesson can help them remain calm in various other situations where they’re tempted to vent their anger.

Developing high levels of emotional intelligence can indeed make life much simpler and more enjoyable for teens. Even more importantly, it doesn’t lose even the slightest bit of its usefulness as the child exits adolescence and enters adulthood.