A "mom moment" on emotion

Each day in May, take a "Mom Moment" to read, reflect, and respond to a passage from a parenting book. Today's passage comes from Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child by John Gottman: "Good parenting requires more than intellect. It touches a dimension of the personality that's been ignored in much of the advice dispensed to parents over the past thirty years. Good parenting involves emotion. • REFLECT: Do I value the emotion I bring to parenting, or wish I could suppress it? How can I aide my child's emotional development? • RESPOND: With so much information to process about our child's special needs, and so many painful feelings surrounding them, it's easy to switch to all-head-no-heart mode. But suppressing emotions is unhealthy for us, and unhelpful for our kids, who may have trouble identifying and dealing with emotions themselves. To help kids learn about emotions, discuss your feelings often, and try some of these games and tools for identifying emotions and sharing them together. ... More "Mom Moments"