Parents told to spend more time to monitor children’s emotional development

An emotional intelligence coach, James Kwasi Anderson, has advised parents to make some time for their wards no matter how busy their schedules are, and to ensure that the kids inculcate some of their behaviors towards developing the right emotional characters for their social lives.

The comment is in connection with the growing demand for sex from job seekers in the corporate world which the emotional intelligence expert attributed, partly, to the upbringing of the person—the employer—requesting it.

According to Mr. Anderson, some parents have devolved their responsibilities to caretakers which is a major contributing factor to the moral degeneration among the children even into adulthood.

He said between the early and middle childhood years of the kids (i.e. ages 4 to 12), mentoring them become very critical, because these are the period when they need to develop the right social relational skills for their lives. They need comprehensive understanding of things in these stages. Thus, transferring responsibility to caretakers around these periods could be detrimental to their development.

Citing an example to explain his point, he said, “when the world didn’t develop to this point, when we returned from school, we came to meet our mothers and grandparents at home. They taught us and instructed us to bath well. They advised us on how to speak to the elderly. Today, it is not so. When the children are sent to school at six, they are picked up 12 hours later. We are losing something serious in that gap,” he added.

The expert continued: “If a teacher is not someone who understands emotions and a child is not intelligent, you hear ‘you are so witless! Get out of my sight!’ meanwhile, where the child is coming from, something may have been negatively affecting him.

“Take for instance a child who has been beaten and driven in an air-conditioned car to school: he will be reflecting on the beating he suffered from his mother than the simultaneous equation put before him.”

Concluding his statement, he said “If the emotional aspect is not looked at carefully, we will destroy the rest of the things we would want to build on.”