Emotion coaching: John Gottman's five steps, explained for family life

A child bursts into tears because their sibling got the bigger slice. Most parents have two reflexes: fix it ("I'll cut you another one") or stop it ("That's nothing to cry about"). Psychologist John Gottman's research suggests a third way — one he called emotion coaching.

Who is behind emotion coaching

John Gottman is a psychologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, where he carried out the research behind emotion coaching with colleagues including Lynn Katz and Carole Hooven. In 1997, with Joan DeClaire, he published a book for parents, The Heart of Parenting, later retitled Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child. The Gottman Institute, which he co-founded with Julie Schwartz Gottman in Seattle, is a training organisation that shares this work.

What the research looked at

In a study published in 1996, Gottman, Katz and Hooven introduced the idea of parents' "meta-emotion": what parents think and feel about emotions — their own and their children's. Some parents treated a child's anger or sadness as something to dismiss or get rid of quickly. Others treated it as information, and as a chance to help.

The researchers followed 56 families with young children. Children of "coaching" parents tended, a few years later, to do better on several measures, including their physical ability to calm down, their school achievement and their relationships with other children. The authors presented these as preliminary, correlational findings — and later research has continued to test the idea, including a randomised trial of a parenting programme called Tuning in to Kids in Australia (Havighurst and colleagues, 2010), in which parents became more emotion-coaching and reported fewer behaviour problems in their children.

The four parenting styles

Gottman describes four ways parents respond to children's emotions:

• Dismissing — ignoring or minimising the feeling ("You're fine").
• Disapproving — criticising or punishing the feeling itself ("Stop crying right now").
• Laissez-faire — accepting the feeling but setting no limits on behaviour.
• Emotion coaching — accepting the feeling and guiding the behaviour.

The five steps of emotion coaching

1. Be aware of the child's emotions — including the quieter ones.
2. See the emotion as an opportunity for intimacy and teaching, rather than a problem to make disappear.
3. Listen with empathy and validate the child's feelings.
4. Help the child label emotions in words they understand.
5. Set limits while helping the child solve the problem. All feelings are accepted; not all behaviour is.

What it means at your table

Back to the slice of cake:

• Aware and opportunity: "I can see this really matters to you."
• Empathy: "It feels unfair when someone gets more."
• Label: "You're disappointed — maybe a bit jealous?"
• Limits and solutions: "Shouting at your sister isn't OK. What could we do next time we share a cake?"

It doesn't take longer than a lecture. And it often ends the crisis faster, because the child feels understood.

How it shapes the Kalmdix method

• Parents practise it privately. The private goal Welcome an emotion asks parents to name the emotion before looking for a solution — step 4, practised over five meals. Kalmdix never mentions it at the table.
• Children learn to accept limits calmly. The Accept "no" calmly mission practises the other half: feelings are fine, and "no" still means no.
• Feelings get words. Feelings detective and Notice feelings build the emotion vocabulary that step 4 depends on.
• Kalmdix never lectures. Correcting and comforting a child are the parents' job; Kalmdix keeps the meal light and hands big moments back to the family. For hard evenings, see our article on tantrums at dinner time.

Sources

• The Gottman Institute. An introduction to emotion coaching. gottman.com
• The Gottman Institute. The four parenting styles. gottman.com
• Gottman, J. M., Katz, L. F., & Hooven, C. (1996). Parental meta-emotion philosophy and the emotional life of families: Theoretical models and preliminary data. Journal of Family Psychology, 10(3), 243–268. DOI
• Gottman, J. M., Katz, L. F., & Hooven, C. (1997). Meta-Emotion: How Families Communicate Emotionally. Lawrence Erlbaum. Publisher
• Havighurst, S. S., Wilson, K. R., Harley, A. E., Prior, M. R., & Kehoe, C. (2010). Tuning in to Kids: Improving emotion socialization practices in parents of preschool children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51(12), 1342–1350.

Kalmdix is independent. John Gottman and The Gottman Institute are not partners of Kalmdix and have not evaluated it. This article summarises published research in our own words — read the sources for the full picture.

Frequently asked questions

What are the five steps of emotion coaching?

Be aware of the child's emotions; see the emotion as an opportunity for intimacy and teaching; listen with empathy and validate the feelings; help the child label emotions; and set limits while helping the child solve the problem.

Does emotion coaching mean accepting all behaviour?

No. Emotion coaching accepts all feelings but still sets limits on behaviour. In Gottman's terms, accepting feelings without limits is a different style, called laissez-faire.