SERIES: IN FAVOR OF THE HUMAN RIGHTS OF CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

(September 2021)

RELATIONAL INTELLIGENCE WITH CHILDREN

(Systematization: Quito, 2002-2021)

Diego Tapia Figueroa, Ph.D. and Maritza Crespo Balderrama, M.A.

What is emotional-relational intelligence? Emotional-relational intelligence translates into the ability to be with others, to connect in meaningful ways, not to be dominated and oppressed by adversity; to take responsibility for one’s life, and to build relationships based on relational ethics with others. It is not enough to enhance the IQ of the child; we must commit ourselves to contribute in creative and loving ways with their relational being, and even more, if we consider that numerous intellectual and school difficulties have their origin in emotional blocks and in the culture of bad treatment (everything that does not put dialogue first means abuse and exclusion). Parents should listen to this: stop worrying about being “a good mother” or “a good father”, and try to be attentive to the needs of your children (and the teachers of their students). 

Emotional-relational intelligence is recognized immediately because it puts in touch with what is fully human in a person. He who is inhabited by it goes beyond the surface of things, listens to deep motivations. To respond to the challenge of our time, a person must re-establish contact with emotions from which education has distanced him, and be truly himself, an individual different from all others.

The IQ does not measure intelligence, but social conformism. The grade of a single exam does not have to be representative of the permanent qualities of the individual. This paradigm obeys the ideal of a reason freed from the pressure of emotion. The invitation is to build congruence and consistency, to accept uncertainty, and embrace complexity.

“You are not just what you are used to being; you can transform yourself and become whoever you want to be.”

Respecting the emotions of a boy and a girl means allowing them to feel who they are, to become aware of themselves here and now. It means placing you in the position of the subject, authorizing you to show yourself different from us. To consider them as a person and not as an object, to give them the possibility to answer in their particular way to the question: who am I? It also means helping them to achieve wellbeing, allowing them to perceive their “today” in relation to “yesterday” and “tomorrow”; being aware of their resources and strengths, of their strengths and his shortcomings, and feeling themselves as they are advancing along a path, which is a path of their own. The boy and the girl learn mainly from their parents. The attitude of love and respect, of acceptance towards the child, is decisive in the development of their relational becoming. We build our emotional habits based on the emotions that are accepted or forbidden by parents, consciously and above all unconsciously, from taboos and family secrets, as well as from the culture of respectful, loving, sincere, honest, and continuous dialogue (or, failing that, their absence) that has been experienced in the family and other relational contexts.

Parents who are insensitive to themselves because others have been insensitive to them, cannot be sensitive to their child’s emotional needs. They tend to deny them, to minimize them. They can inflict deep wounds on them with “the best will in the world,” just as their parents hurt them “for their own sake”. The greater the inner helplessness is the more need for power over others one has. When one does not feel comfortable with oneself, one cannot confess weaknesses that are unbecoming of one’s role or function. You terrorize others to be less afraid of yourself. (Watch out for the sense of “jokes” and “gossip” and going around talking – especially badly – about others as a strategy not to speak, authentically, of themselves)

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Crimes that go unpunished: for example, sexual abuse of children and adolescents. These are crimes that go unpunished by the complicity of an oppressive system structured to silence, cover-up, deny and mock, without shame, the pain of children and adolescents. Real pain from the abuse, the violence, the abandonment, the neglect, the disqualification of adults, towards everything important to children. The ability to truly listen to the needs of children would seem to move away from adults locked in their dogmas of education; blocked in their comfort and selfishness, ignoring their history of abuse and abused children, convinced that the bond of love, trust, security and respect demanded by children and adolescents is a threat to their power and privileges as adults.

In reality, adults fear creating a consistent relational bond with children, because they would have to open their eyes to do so, leave blindness, choose to see, and recognize the truth of their shortcomings; (as Alice Miller explains) cover up the crimes of adults, in the absence of the fathers and mothers they needed: loving, respectful, understanding, empathetic, authentic, patient, sincere, congruent, reasonable, thoughtful, fulfilled, consistent, who loved to be with their children, who were not cruel and unjust. Fathers and mothers like that, they did not and will never have them.

Trauma from sexual abuse and neglect does not irretrievably harm; what harms the child or adolescent that has been disrespected, abused, mistreated is the lack of affection in the daily family treatment; the lack of tenderness, understanding, respect, and trust. Neglect is the most serious and frequent form of physical, emotional, psychological, and existential abuse. The key lies in affections, in solidarity, and these in the context of good real human relations.

Alice Miller proposes these liberating questions:

1) What tormented me during my childhood?

2) What was it that I was not allowed to feel?

Adults refuse to pay attention to their children’s feelings because they have had to forget their sufferings. The more they have suffered, the more they will refuse to identify with the discomfort of the situation of vulnerability and will not want to get in touch with the pain. By denying their pain, they deny that of the child and adolescent. They compulsively repeat abusive behaviors as if to prove that they are not wrong. As long as a parent is unwilling to question their parents, they will not want to remember what they have experienced. Some people do not know their true needs because they have not had the right to have them. They have never said no to their mother or father. They don’t quite know who they are or if they have the right to be different.

Many times, to access and to experience the relevant emotions, is to get out of the norms; it is to perceive things that others do not perceive, that they do not want to see for fear of having to question them. When frustrations and needs are not expressed as they arise, resentment is born. Unsaid things and small grudges accumulate, and one day it turns out that the glass is full. The challenge is to become yourself. It is also to become increasingly sensitive to injustice, more reflective and creative; sensitive to the suffering of the world, not to be complicit in cruel and unjust relationships, to perpetuate and multiply a culture of relational mistreatment and social injustice; to be more and more alive.

Making sense of relationships

Irrational beliefs abound that sow our daily lives. Stereotyped and conventional beliefs about education (understood as obedience without reflection, abusive discipline, submission to oppressive hierarchy, homologation and lack of differences, ideological mastering) of children are the most dramatic because they perpetuate suffering. Generations and generations that will never dare to say no to a hierarchical superior, trained in the idolatry of hierarchies; and that will only allow themselves to oppose and criticize (and in such cases perhaps abusing) if they are in a position to exercise their power over others.

One emotion can hide another. In each family, some emotions are accepted and others are not. Educated to hide our true selves, we discharge tensions by disguising emotions. In addition, we may be tempted to show certain feelings if we obtain relational benefits. The only way not to convey to others our terrors, frustrations, anger, or despair is to share them. Sharing (with children) does not mean liberating to receive comfort from them. No, that’s not their role. To share with children is simply to show them our inner life (with modesty, sincerely and respecting their condition as children, who are not and will not be or should be friends, or substitutes for couples) so that they place themselves in it so that they learn to establish the difference between their own emotions and ours (without carrying those that aren´t theirs). It implies having criteria: being aware of the context, it matters how to express and manifest what you feel and think, respect in the treatment of children and adolescents; trust in children, relationships, and permanent and flexible openness to genuine dialogue with children.

In the same way that people pass a hot potato from hand to hand so as not to burn, it also transmits emotions from one generation to another. But the next generation is unable to handle emotions that are not their own. Consequently, it becomes a prisoner of them until it identifies their real origin. Many times, under the pretext of protecting children, we do not tell them anything about the worries, concerns, or fears we harbor. But the children perceive them and -faced with the impossibility of naming them- they assume them. To your great surprise, you will see that your children reproduce their hidden feelings, both the emotions they experience daily and those they keep inside them since their earliest childhood. They show you your back, what you don’t want to show or see about yourself. And if they don’t do it when they’re young, they’ll do it when they become adults. Thus, you will see them acquire the same habits as you as if they were repeating your life when perhaps, you have tried to do with them the opposite of what your parents did with you. The alternative is to face the wound to heal it, remove all the emotions that were not heard, and go through the pain by putting words to that experience, making sense of what happened.

Accompanying growth means growing ourselves with others

The child takes his parents as models and tends to spontaneously follow this example rather than advice. Unconscious messages are as powerful -if not more so- than conscious acts or words. Accompanying our children to develop their emotional-relational coefficient forces us to develop our own. Accompanying a child to grow means growing ourselves with them. Our children -mirrors of our inner reality- confront us with our limits and teach us to love; they are excellent spiritual guides, no matter how little we listen to them. To possess emotional-relational intelligence is to know how to love and build oneself through the difficult and complex experiences of life.

Emotions subtly but inevitably permeate our mental life. The emotional life, conscious or unconscious, acts as a filter between the outside and the inside, directs our choices, can alter our relationship with reality, and cause both successes and failures. Emotions are our common language. Understanding others better, reacting with empathy to their needs and feelings allows us to be less afraid of them, feel closer, more supportive, and reinforce cooperation.

The more conscious your emotions are, the more freedom you enjoy in your existence. Emotions need to be released (in the right context). If we keep them inside us, they oppress us. Denying emotions favors passivity, lack of responsibility, and the maintenance of the status quo. Emotions scare us because they confront us with a reality that we would prefer not to see, they force us to face the truth. Emotional life is closely linked to relational life. Sharing emotions allows us to feel close to each other.

The price paid for hiding affections includes a huge internal tension. Silence is more traumatizing than shared pain. Emotions that cannot be expressed dig a trench between people who love each other. The fact that suffering is not seen does not prevent it from existing, and it can hurt for a long time when it does not have space to express itself. The cause of most discomfort is a blocked emotion. Pain does less harm when we can identify it, name it, know its origin, dialogue reflexively with others about it. 

Whoever says, “I have no problems”, “everything is fine”, “I take care of my business alone”, is saying the equivalent of “I don’t want to ask myself questions”. 

However, that is not the best way to find new possibilities. Despite the ideas commonly admitted (and extended through the cinema) those who come out better off are not those who shield themselves, but those who pay attention to their affections. Existential anxieties can be silenced for a while by working hard or by comforting them in distractions, but sooner or later they will trap us to embed ourselves in the body or oppress our offspring. The children then become symptoms of their parents’ “illness”. They become bearers of the difficulties that their parents refuse to consider and try to answer the questions that remained unanswered in the previous generation.

We use judgment or criticism to protect ourselves from feelings; we place ourselves in the position of a poor powerless victim or savior of humanity. To regain your deep sense, beyond any ideal, you should always remain attentive to your sensations, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Anything that tries to build on a foundation that falters from mere appearance will be precarious. To lay a solid foundation, we must patiently illuminate the past, understand it, name the unmentionable and the terrifying. It is necessary to authorize the person to proclaim its suffering, to grant them to be heard so that the wounded child inside them does not believe that the fault is theirs; that they´re is inadequate, that there is something “wrong” in their being, that it is not what their parents expected, that they´re silly or ugly, or that they´re crazy.

By following the principles of intelligent and responsible love, you can help your child regain the innate right to inner happiness that does not stagger from the inevitable disappointments and misfortunes of life. This goal is possible if you establish a pleasurable relationship with your child rather than neglecting their needs by depriving them of their attention. The inner well-being of the child or adolescent is based on the certainty that they have made you feel love while caring for them. Of all the gifts, this is the most important, for it forms the basis of all happiness and goodness and the protective shield against self-inflicted unhappiness. One of the reasons you can rely on this approach to make daily decisions judiciously, is that intelligent love considers childhood from the point of view of the boy, the girl, the adolescent. This position builds with intelligence and relational ethics, the difference and better possible futures.