Emotion Coaching
Emotion Coaching is based on the principle that nurturing and emotionally supportive relationships provide optimal contexts for the promotion of children's outcomes and resilience.
Emotion coaching aims to support children to become reflective, to notice when they are beginning to feel an emotion and to access the best response for them in that moment.
Emotion coaching is all about:
- Teaching the child ‘in the moment’ about the world of emotion
- Supporting the development of strategies to deal with emotional ups and downs
- Accepting all emotions as normal and valid
- Using moments of both negative and positive behaviour as opportunities for teaching and reflecting
- Building trusting and respectful relationships
How emotion coaching helps and supports children
- Children have an increased capacity to understand and manage their emotional responses appropriately
- Children become more reflective
- They enjoy improved relationships
- They have fewer behaviour problems
- Children recognise and better understand their emotions
How emotion coaching is used at St Alban’s
Emotion coaching is used to support children to develop their self-regulation, emotional intelligence and autonomy. As mentioned previously, emotion coaching is not at its most beneficial while children are in crisis.
It's a helpful tool to support children to reflect on their behaviour choices either before going into crisis or after coming down from a meltdown. It's important to remember that emotion coaching steps can also be applied to positive behaviour as a method of increasing children’s emotional literacy and ability to reflect and notice their own feelings.
