How to Help Your Child With Big Feelings: The 5 Steps of Emotion Coaching

The big idea

Gottman, a psychologist best known for his research on couples, also studied how parents respond to their children's feelings. He found that how a parent handles a child's sadness, anger and fear matters a great deal, separately from how warm the parent is in general. Children whose parents treated feelings as worth paying attention to tended, in his studies, to calm down more easily, get along better with other children and cope better with stress. He called this style emotion coaching.

Four ways parents respond to feelings

• Dismissing: treating a feeling as unimportant or something to get past quickly - distracting, cheering up, or saying it's no big deal. Usually loving in intent, but the child learns the feeling is wrong or not worth sharing.
• Disapproving: like dismissing, but with criticism or punishment for showing the feeling (for example, being scolded for crying).
• Laissez-faire: accepting every feeling warmly but offering no limits on behavior and no help working out what to do.
• Emotion coaching: accepting the feeling while still limiting the behavior, and helping the child find a way through. Most parents use all four at different times. The point is to notice your default and move toward coaching more often, not to be perfect.

The five steps of emotion coaching

1. Notice the feeling, ideally while it is still small - a pout, a clenched jaw, a quiet child who is usually chatty. Notice your own feelings too, including discomfort with certain emotions.
2. See it as a chance to connect and teach, rather than a nuisance to shut down. Smaller feelings are good practice for bigger ones.
3. Listen with empathy and let the child know the feeling makes sense. Get down to their level, reflect back what you see, and hold off on fixing or lecturing.
4. Help the child put a name to it. Words like frustrated, disappointed, left out or nervous give a child a handle on what is happening inside them.
5. Set limits and solve the problem together. All feelings are acceptable; not all behavior is. Once the child is calmer, explain the limit and think together about what they could do next time or what would help now.

What it looks like with a toddler or preschooler

A 3-year-old screams because a sibling took a toy. A coaching response might be: get close, say that it looks really frustrating when someone grabs your thing, stop any hitting, and once the storm passes, help the child think about asking for it back or finding a parent. With younger toddlers, steps 3 and 4 do most of the work; problem solving gets richer through the preschool years and beyond.

When to hold off

Gottman notes that not every moment suits coaching: when you are rushed or in public, when you are too upset yourself, or when serious misbehavior needs to be stopped first. Handle the moment, then come back to the feeling later. See the guides on tantrums and emotion regulation and on repair.

Where it fits and where it's debated

• Strengths: a clear, teachable sequence that many later approaches build on. Connect first, then limits, is the same rhythm as the whole-brain approach (see the Whole-Brain Child guide) and Good Inside. Parenting programs based on emotion coaching have shown benefits in trials.
• Critiques: much of the original evidence comes from Gottman's own observational studies of fairly small groups of families, which show links, not proof of cause. The book is from the late 1990s, so some examples feel dated, and the steps can sound formulaic if used as a script.
• Who it suits: parents of toddlers through teens who want a simple framework for feelings, and especially parents who grew up in homes where emotions were brushed aside. It works in any family shape and across cultures, though how openly feelings are discussed varies between families, and that is fine.