Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Welcome back, everybody, to another conversation in the Parenting with Impact podcast. Diane and I are going to share our thoughts, reflect, and explore the fascinating and thought-provoking topic of emotional intelligence.

Diane Dempster: Emotional intelligence—like, we knew we wanted to talk about this, but we were like, wait, what was it we said that made us want to dive into this topic?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Can I share what we were talking about?

Diane Dempster: Yeah, go ahead.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: It was kind of funny. So, you probably know that I have a kid in med school. Every now and then, she’ll text me about something she learned in class that caught her interest. Usually, it’s some science-related stuff that I don’t fully understand, but today, they had a lecture—interestingly—on addiction among physicians. She texted me a quote from the lecture: "Extended schooling encourages an over-reliance on cognitive intelligence to the detriment of emotional intelligence."

Diane Dempster: Oh, wait—I just had a brilliant idea!

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah.

Diane Dempster: So, they always talk about kids in school and how to determine whether a child is neurospicy or neurotypical. Often, it’s about the gap—where one area is highly developed, and another is underdeveloped—and that’s what creates neurospiciness. So, maybe all doctors are a little neurospicy.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Neurospicy? No.

Diane Dempster: Sorry—maybe not.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Well, she did go on to say that doctors are often moderately well-compensated, obsessive, and compulsive.

Diane Dempster: We’re not here to criticize doctors—just to be clear. But this is what started the whole conversation.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right.

Diane Dempster: About emotional intelligence and why it’s such an important topic for our audience.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Just to clarify what you said, so we can move forward—what identifies someone as neurospicy is a developmental disconnect between two areas. It might involve cognitive and emotional development, but it doesn’t have to. There are many different possibilities.

Diane Dempster: Different arenas, yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: The key is the gap between areas of development—typically at least two standard deviations apart. That’s what defines it.

Diane Dempster: Right. And some of you listening may have kids who experience this incongruence between cognitive intelligence and emotional intelligence.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: A lot of us do.

Diane Dempster: Maybe they aren’t socially aware at the same pace as their peers. Some of you—well, I was talking to a mom the other day who has this really empathic kid.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah.

Diane Dempster: This child is emotionally advanced—beyond their developmental age—but their executive functioning is in a completely different place. It’s the incongruence that can often be the frustrating and difficult part to navigate.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right. So, let’s define emotional intelligence. You mentioned you found a definition online that you liked?

Diane Dempster: I did. Of course, me—I Googled it! Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, recognize, and use emotions in a way that is wise. I really like that definition.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Wise.

Diane Dempster: Wise.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Understand, recognize—

Diane Dempster: —and use emotions in a way that is wise. For me, there are two parts to that. One part is being aware of my own emotions—recognizing when I’m overwhelmed, frustrated, or upset. How attuned am I to what’s going on internally? The other part is being attuned to what’s happening with the other humans in my world.

For example, there might be a kid who doesn’t recognize social dynamics. I was telling a story about a client whose child was being bullied in middle school but didn’t realize it. The child would say things like, “Hey, my best friend pushed me in gym class today!” And then, two weeks later, “Hey, my best friend pushed me in gym class again—by mistake.” The child didn’t even realize they were being bullied. In this case, it turned out okay, but there are plenty of times when it doesn’t.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right. And I think this happens often with certain kids, especially those on the spectrum. Many examples that come to mind involve kids on the spectrum, though not exclusively.

Diane Dempster: Exactly.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Like the kid who thinks everyone is their best friend, or assumes everyone in their class likes them. They don’t realize that just because they feel positively toward others, it doesn’t mean everyone feels the same way about them. When they’re younger, this can actually be a great protective mechanism, but it also means they’re not reading the social cues.

Diane Dempster: Well, and that’s the thing—they might not even register the social cues, even when those cues are obvious.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right. So, there’s a clear connection between emotional intelligence and social dynamics, isn’t there?

Diane Dempster: Yeah, there absolutely is.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Let’s explore that a little more.

Diane Dempster: I think that’s the key—if you’re not able to pick up on what someone else is feeling, you’re likely unaware of what’s really going on. You might miss the nonverbal cues entirely.

Think about girls in elementary school. A kid might come bounding into a group, talking nonstop—just talk, talk, talk. Meanwhile, the other kids are sitting there, confused, thinking, Wait, what’s going on? They were in the middle of a conversation or activity, and now someone has disrupted that dynamic.

A lot of the time, our kids can be so impulsive and caught up in the moment that they don’t notice how their actions might not fit the social flow of what’s happening.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Here's another example, and I’ve shared this in a podcast we did together. I distinctly remember one of my kids, who has language processing issues, dyslexia, anxiety, and ADD, coming home—especially during middle school and early high school—and saying, “Mom, I don’t know what my friends are talking about. I don’t understand what they’re saying.”

Because she wasn’t processing the language quickly enough, she struggled to read the social cues, right? Girls at that age often gossip or talk about what’s happening on TikTok, social media, television, or whatever. Since she couldn’t process it, she couldn’t figure out how to respond because she didn’t fully understand the content of the conversation.

Diane Dempster: Well, I don’t know if you’re ready to jump into what should you do about it? but as I was thinking about it—what should you do? One of the things we just recorded was our last episode.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: About the three A’s.

Diane Dempster: Yes, the three A’s. I’m wondering if we could apply them to this situation and ask: What do you do? What do you avoid? What do you accommodate?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Accommodate.

Diane Dempster: Where do you take action? Right? Because for parents, this kind of situation often causes a lot of anxiety. I mean, I had a parent of a 13-year-old tell me recently, “My kid doesn’t have any friends. I’m really worried they’ll never have friends.” That kind of worry is so common, and it’s tied to our own experiences.

For example, maybe I had a hard time socially when I was a kid, and I don’t want my child to go through the same struggles. These fears can be overwhelming. One of the first things to consider, though, is this: if you have a younger child and the situation isn’t bothering them yet, it might be a signal to step back and say, “Okay, I’m not going to…”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: …pay attention.

Diane Dempster: Right, I’m going to pay attention to my own fears and anxieties. I’m going to manage those feelings, rather than letting them drive my actions. I’ll wait for my child to come to me and say, “I noticed this happened, and I didn’t like it.”

It’s tough for us as parents to be patient and wait for that moment, but that’s often a sign that they’re ready to start working on the tools and skills they need. Until then, pushing them may not be helpful.

I’ve also had parents of younger kids—like a parent of a nine-year-old—express concerns like, “I don’t want my child to grow up thinking the world will bow to their every whim. I want them to learn these lessons right now.” But often, we project these fears onto kids who simply aren’t ready to learn certain skills yet.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: So, as with everything, the first step is always to look at ourselves and manage ourselves, right? Almost every problem you're facing—the change you want for them—starts with you.

But before we dive deeper into addressing social problems, I want to pause and reflect on something. We’ve defined emotional intelligence, but what does it look like to actually cultivate emotional intelligence?

I know that using the coach approach always leads to cultivating self-awareness and social-emotional intelligence. What were you going to say?

Diane Dempster: Oh, I was just going to say that feels like a good topic to tackle after the break.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Excellent idea. Let’s do that.

[After Break]

Elaine Taylor-Klaus:Welcome back, everyone. This is Elaine and Diane, and we’re talking about emotional intelligence. As Diane aptly pointed out, a great next step is to discuss how we cultivate emotional intelligence in our kids.

Diane Dempster: Right. And this ties into something we were discussing earlier—whether to avoid, accommodate, or act. As parents, we are probably the most socially influential people in our children’s lives.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Absolutely.

Diane Dempster: So when parents come to me saying, "I want to teach my kids social skills. Should I take them to a social skills group?" my answer is nuanced. Yes, there are great social skills groups, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t consider them. But the truth is, you are already socializing with your kids and modeling social behavior every day you’re with them. It all starts with you.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: One of the first articles we published on Impact back in 2011 talked about building social skills by simply playing cards with your kids.

Diane Dempster: Yes, I remember that article.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right? I know, but it was like it was in the first couple of months. 

Diane Dempster: Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And it's just as relevant today as it was back then. Part of it is recognizing that we always have an opportunity to cultivate emotional intelligence, right?

Diane Dempster: Well, I’m laughing because I’m remembering a moment, and honestly, I’m not sure if it was when I was a kid or when my kids were kids—it’s all a bit blurry in my mind—but it’s like when a kid loses a game and just throws the board across the room. It’s something I might have done when I was a kid, but there’s an opportunity there to teach a social skill. You could punish them and say, “How dare you!” and go off on a rant, right?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Well, I want to point out that rather than focusing on the social skill, let’s go back to the emotional intelligence that underpins the social skill.

Diane Dempster: Yes, exactly. And let’s use that example. Instead of focusing on the social skill—“Hey, we don’t do that when we’re playing together. That’s not nice. You did something wrong”—you could say, “Wow, you’re really upset about what happened in the game.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Really, yeah.

Diane Dempster: It was really hard for you. Losing the game was tough for you.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah.

Diane Dempster: And just being there to help them recognize, "I had a big emotion about losing this game," and just acknowledging that I had a big emotion.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah.

Diane Dempster: We tend to skip over that, right? Because big emotions can feel wrong to us as parents.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Well, it’s funny because, as we said a minute ago, whenever you don’t like what you’re seeing, the first place to focus is on yourself. The second place is to acknowledge their experience.

Diane Dempster: Right.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And part of their experience is their emotion around whatever is happening, especially for children, because they are still developing. As you were talking, Diane, I was thinking about when John—my youngest—was nine. He was, and he knows this because we joke about it a lot, a difficult kid for a couple of years. He has some very clear explanations for why that happened, like a childcare worker leaving and a grandparent dying, among other things. But there were a couple of really tough years where he was hard to live with. What’s interesting, in the context of this, is that at some point, we were working with a therapist. One summer, I hired someone for two weeks to care for him, and we called it “Kim Camp.”

So, Josh thought he was just getting to hang out with this adult for two weeks, but I actually hired a graduate student to spend that time putting him into scenario after scenario after scenario where he would lose or be told "no." We practiced and practiced helping him learn to be okay with things not going the way he wanted. Because, to your point, he was the kid who would knock over the game board or throw a fit. He was a terrible loser.

Diane Dempster: Well, I don’t know how Kim Camp went, but it really was amazing. I think the thing to remember, and we talked about this a bit in the last episode, is that step one is your own self-regulation and self-awareness. You need to figure out how to stay calm. How do I calm down enough? Because if your kid hits a friend or does something really big, emotions like fear, anxiety, and worry are going to come up for you, and you're going to want to stop that behavior in its tracks, right?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah.

Diane Dempster: And react. So we want to pay attention to that because…

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: These are your own emotions.

Diane Dempster: Exactly. This is a skill we’re trying to teach. So, step number two is that kids need to be able to regulate their own emotions.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Well, I would say step two is recognizing and acknowledging their emotions and helping raise their awareness of them.

Diane Dempster: Yes, exactly. And part of that is noticing that they are emotional and helping them learn the tools to regulate. Because before we…

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: That’s what comes after.

Diane Dempster: Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right. And you may not do it all at once. You may spend a couple of weeks just focusing on helping them recognize when they’re feeling something.

Diane Dempster: Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Before you even get to actually managing it well.

Diane Dempster: And I think that's where we get tripped up as parents. Our kids just had a big moment—maybe they’ve said something terrible to us, hit us, hit someone else, or thrown the board game across the room. And we want to jump straight to solving the problem or teaching the lesson, or whatever else. But if your kid is dysregulated in that moment, they’re not available to learn the lesson.

So the first thing you have to do in that moment is help them calm down. The whole process is about learning: what are the things that upset me? How do I notice when I’m starting to get upset? How do I avoid getting upset? I mean, this is what you were saying about practicing being in situations where you get upset. It’s not about saying, “No, you can never be upset again.” It’s more about recognizing that we all get upset. We all do.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah.

Diane Dempster: We just have to learn how to navigate it.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yes, exactly. And I like the way you broke it down. First, we have to acknowledge that they are having real emotions behind those behaviors. We’re always looking at what’s underneath the behavior. There’s an emotion going on, and we have to begin to figure out how to raise their awareness of it without judging them or making them feel bad for feeling the way they feel, right? So, we want to legitimize their fear.

Diane Dempster: Because even if their behavior was unwanted—if it was harsh, bad, or whatever you want to call it—the emotion underneath it was legitimate and real. They were mad, angry, disappointed, or whatever else. Those are real, valid emotions that they need to deal with.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And because we want those feelings to go away, sometimes we invalidate their emotions. So, it’s really important to legitimize their feelings instead of saying, "Don’t feel that way," or "You shouldn’t be upset about that." It’s okay. We have this tendency to want to make it better, but by doing that, we’re actually disempowering them from feeling what they’re feeling. So, there’s a step here where we acknowledge it, raise their awareness of it, and then legitimize their feelings, right? We help them understand that this is how they’re feeling, and therefore, maybe this is the behavior that happens when they feel that way.

Diane Dempster: Right. And if you’re helping them regulate through the emotion—this is where the first set of experiments comes in. Like, "Wow, this kid is really upset." We teach them. There’s a whole episode on the trigger model, I think, Elaine. I don’t remember what episode number it is, but you’ll figure that out.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Confidence in me.

Diane Dempster: Go listen to the episode on trigger management. But it's about helping them co-regulate with you or helping them learn how to self-regulate, depending on their age and where they are in that process.

And then, it’s about how do I prevent the trigger next time, which is a whole other set of skills that we want to teach them—but at the moment, they’re really not ready to learn yet.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: No, I was going to say, and I don’t think I’m ready to go there yet, which is a great indication of what you’re saying. First, it’s acknowledging their emotions, raising their awareness of it, and legitimizing it. Then it’s about helping them down-regulate.

Diane Dempster: Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Learning to put strategies in place. I think back to when my kids were younger—it's different when they’re teens or young adults; the conversation is different. When they were younger, it was about building blocks and knocking them down, pounding on pillows, or screaming into pillows.

When my kid was older, in elementary school, we had this thing where, when he got angry a lot, to help him navigate his anger, we let him break down the recycling boxes with a baseball bat and a helmet, right? So it became kind of play, but it was also about releasing that aggression.

So, all of those down-regulating techniques to manage the energy of the emotion had to come after we understood the emotion and before we tried to prevent it.

Diane Dempster: Well, and it’s really interesting because I have a client who happens to be a bit of a hothead parent, and we’ve been focusing on it in the same direction, right? It’s like, you want to start with, “Okay, how do I prevent getting upset in the first place?” But the reality is, you are getting upset. The upset is happening, so you’re better served to focus on, "What are my tools for navigating the upset?"

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah.

Diane Dempster: First, so that I can be calm enough to go back and say, “Okay, wait, I’m starting to get upset.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah.

Diane Dempster: What are the things that start me on that path, right? And it’s the same thing with our kids. You said something, Elaine, about the order here, and I just want to make sure parents are really clear. It’s not about the order in the hour after the upset happens.

The first time you do this—like you were talking about Kim Camp being two weeks—it’s a whole process. This is a process, right? If you spend a month with your kid helping them recognize…

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: When they’re getting upset, and why?

Diane Dempster: Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right?

Diane Dempster: And the tool you would use, we’ve even talked about this, might be something like repair, right? It might be teaching your kid how to hug it out with their sibling if they’ve been unkind. It could be writing a love letter to Mom if they’ve called her names. There are all kinds of things it could be. So, you might focus on helping them navigate the big emotion. When we have a big emotion, we want to make sure that we repair the relationship as soon as we can after it happens.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah.

Diane Dempster: And then we’re going back to some of the prevention strategies.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Well, parents come to us all the time with the question: how do I get my kid off technology, right? And what I remember with one of my kids is that we broke it down into different areas to focus on. First, we started by teaching them to navigate turning off the device when asked. It was much later when we started focusing on turning off the device without an attitude, respectfully, or kindly, without pushback. So for a while, it was just about turning off the device, and if they were obnoxious about it, I avoided addressing that issue. I wasn’t tackling the attitude—I was just accommodating the obnoxiousness because I was focused on the action. Then, later, we shifted our focus to the behavior—turning off the device respectfully. That was a different issue. So, I really want people to understand that sometimes, when we’re dealing with emotional management issues, they are separate from the actions we want the kids to take. We have to break it apart to make it doable for them, because it’s not always intuitive for them to not only follow the directions but to do so without getting upset about it.

Diane Dempster: Well, so we started talking about emotional intelligence, and we ended up focusing on the self-awareness and dysregulation pieces of it because the social situation I gave was one where you had a dysregulated human. Do we want to talk about other social situations where kids are having a hard time, or should we save that for another episode? What do you want to do, Elaine?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: I think maybe we save that for another episode and pin that for later. Really, right now, we’re talking about setting the stage for cultivating emotional intelligence—awareness of emotional reactivity, where it’s coming from, and how we help them identify their feelings. Then, we can connect that to social dynamics in another conversation. Is that fair?

Diane Dempster: It is. I love how you just wrapped that up. Did you do that?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Nope.

Diane Dempster: Alright.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: You guys, this is why we love working together and doing this work with you.

Diane Dempster: So, take a moment for yourself, right? What do you think? We were a bit stream of consciousness today, and that’s okay. Some of you learn really well with a stream of consciousness, and some of you need more structure. So, take some notes for yourself and think, “Okay, we’ve been talking about emotional intelligence, self-management, and helping your kids through their big emotions.” What do you most want to take away from our conversation today?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Or maybe I can reframe that a little bit. What are you taking away from the conversation, and what do you want to do with it? What’s your insight, your awareness, and is there any action you want to apply it to—whether for yourself, for your kids, or both?

Diane Dempster: Awesome.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And as always, y’all, thanks for tuning in. Thanks for being part of this amazing community. Thank you for everything you're doing for yourself and for your kids, because you make an extraordinary difference.

Diane Dempster: See you next time, everybody.