Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child

Children's Emotional Intelligence revealed!
Gottman is a renound researcher and author and has once again provided fascinating and up to date research on the life of a child and the importance of parent style and interactions with their children. Teaching children to name their emotions and learn from them provides a foundation for healthy relationships and the ability to regulate emotion. A must read!!

If you love your child, you must apply these principles
Gottman bases his conclusions and principles of raising an emotionally intelligent child on sound long term research. But he also manages to write in a style that is easy and nice to read. The decision of buying or not buying this book might seem quite unimportant now but the outcomes of your choice may be great. Such outcomes will likely range between raising an immature individual who may blame you when he is adult for your inadequate effort developing him and raising a mature, self-responsible mentally and emotionally healthy individual who can be a responsible leader for himself and for others around him. A must-own book if you walk your talk when you say that you truly love your child and want all the best for him.

Not For Expecting Parents
Due to the strength of the reviews on this site (and being a slightly Type A person), I decided to move on to this book in my last few months of pregnancy when I had both the time and the mental capacity to absorb it. For all other expecting parents out there looking to be similarly prepared, I'd save this one for later. Much of the book focuses on your current parenting style (and bad habits) and unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), we do not know ours yet. Plus, not having experience dealing with difficult parenting situations, many of the prescribed solutions seemed trite and even paradoxical. In its worst moments, the book reads like a bad script for a mid-week parenting sitcom but I'm sure that when our child comes into this world, I'll be thankful for the simplified advice.

Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child
Every parent should read this book. It has helpful information for all aspects of any relationship.

Different flavour than Gottman's marriage books
I got this book because I admire Gottman's marriage books, especially the idea that different people express themselves in different ways, and not all couples have to sit down and have "meaningful" heart to hearts to get along.

Unfortunately, this book leans the direction of only one way of doing it right. Those of us at the ends of bell curve that were so delighted to see how two similar grownups could have a good life together even if it didn't fit the TV world of everyone talking everything over, get left out of this book. If people do grow up to have normal but avoidant marriage styles, why can't that style carry over to parenting? Especially if your child is so like you, the two of you sometimes, in a tricky situation, just look at each other and nod.

Also, I found the assessment questions more black-and-white than in the marriage books. I wanted to answer "sometimes" to far too many. (E.g. "it is a good thing to express emotion"...this depends entirely on the situation!)