Maurice Elias began his emotional intelligence work as a graduate student in the 70’s. Working with disturbed underprivileged children at The Children’s Village, he found that social-emotional learning was the key to reach kids. His work in communities has continued, and Dr. Elias is now a Professor in Psychology at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous books on educating with EQ, including Teach your Child Decision Making (1986), Building Social Problem-solving Skills (1992), and Promoting Social and Emotional Learning (1997).

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Teaching Peace
with Linda Lantieri

Approaching Emotional Intelligence by Joshua Freedman

 

Josh: Do you think there is a piece of research or an EQ fact that should be in red letters on every refrigerator door and every classroom in the country?

Maurice: Yes I do, actually. When we remember something, we just don’t remember it as an isolated piece of information. The evidence now shows clearly that human memory consists of information in a context and with a feeling -- those three together make up the basic unit of memory.

So when kids remember, they connect information, when and where they learned it, and how they felt as they were being exposed to it. And so we can’t be indifferent to the learning environment in which information is given to children.

It also means, and this would be the second part of what would have to be red-lettered, that all long-term learning takes place in the context of relationships. Outside of a relationship, you get very little long-term, applied learning.

 

Josh: This has profound implications for the way teachers relate to students.

Maurice: Absolutely. It has profound implications for parenting as well.

 

J: What did you hope to achieve in publishing this book?.

M: Our goal was to create a book that parents would open anywhere and say, “You know, they’re writing about my house, they’re writing about my family, not some ideal family or generic family. They’re writing about us and that’s something I want to try.”

To write things that parents would be very willing to try and use, that would bring these skills into their parenting. And the objective was to reduce levels of stress in the house, increase levels of fun in the house, and just to create a more peaceful and cooperative atmosphere.

Kids are under so much pressure and feel so much tension that now, more than ever, kids need to have in their homes a place that they can feel comfortable. Adolescents tell my co-authors and me that they don’t want to talk to their parents, because parents just add to the stress. And so this is something that has to be stopped. Otherwise, these kids are going to be at tremendous risk for all kinds of self-destructive, problem behaviors.

 

Josh: If you could have someone read the book and hold on to just one idea or one technique, what would you want them to hold on to?

Maurice: I would want them to hold on to the idea at the very beginning of the book that we call The 24K Golden Rule: Do unto your children as you would have other people do unto your children. We should always think about the impact of our actions on kids, and be as particular in what we do with our kids as we would want others to be with our kids.

And I’d like people to remember the techniques related to how we talk with and model for our children. We write about the importance of the parents’ role as a model. Kids observe even indirect conversations, where parents are talking to other people -- including their own parents and relatives -- and the kids extract a tremendous amount from those passing statements.

 

J: Is there anything else you wanted to add about the book or about EQ, something that I missed or that you feel is important?

M: The family should be an enjoyable place for kids to be. And I think that we underestimate, with all the busyness that we have, the importance of having fun. We tend to think of “fun” as frivolous. So one of the things we try to show parents is that fun is not just fun. Fun is almost like medicine for the body because of what laughter does for the immune system, for our circulation, for the way oxygen gets into our blood and into our cells and just clears our thinking. Laughter and high achievement really do go hand in hand. Throughout the whole book we take a tone of the importance of humor and of finding the enjoyable, funny moments.

The other thing I want parents remember to add to their role modelling is the fact that we are not perfect. Kids are under a lot of pressure to be perfect, and they sometimes get very afraid of making mistakes.

We talk a lot in the book about the importance of parental apologies. That when parents are wrong, when they have just been too upset to handle the situation well, it is very important to talk to kids about that and to be willing to say “I am sorry.”

When you go back and think about human memory and how kids remember things based on a feeling and the context, the apology can transform a highly negative situation into a positive situation from which the child can actually learn. We need to be courageous enough to take advantage of those opportunities.

 Josh: More generally, if you had the power to make changes in a school, what are the elements you would put into an EQ program?