Social and Spiritual Intelligence in Parenting

Social intelligence refers to your competency to successfully engage others, leading to mutually satisfying relationships. It includes the ability to listen deeply and communicate profoundly with widely diverse individuals and groups. It involves seeing the world from others’ perspectives, the ability to collaborate on problems and co-create outcomes, as well as the ability to effectively compromise, allowing your desires to be subsumed for the benefit of the relationship, all without sacrificing your worth or dignity. Social intelligence generally is not a fixed attribute. Rather, it is an ever-evolving complex of information processing skills, which can be modified to alter attitudes and behavior. Social intelligence should not be conflated with social skills, which constitute only a subset.

According to Daniel Goleman, in “Social Intelligence: The Revolutionary New Science of Human Relationships,” parent-child responsiveness creates the path for parents to help their children “learn the ground rules for relationships — how to attend to another person, how to pace an interaction, how to engage in conversation, how to tune in to the other person’s feelings, and how to manage your own feelings while you are engaged with someone else.” These rules form the foundation for competent social living. According to Goleman, children lacking synchronous parenting are at risk of growing up with disturbed attachment patterns. Children raised by attuned parents tend to be secure; while anxious parenting yields anxious children and aloof parenting produces avoidant children. The attachment style of a parent predicts the child’s social style with about 70 percent accuracy.

The parenting style affects the child’s lifelong sense of self. It is important to note that 6-month-old babies already have begun to develop a typical style of interaction with others and a habitual way of thinking about themselves in relation to others. By the way, an effective parenting style leaves plenty of room for mistakes. Your occasional parental blunders can be accommodated. Successful infants will engage you to solicit “repairs” and, if successful, will come to acquire another strength — resilience. Resilience arises from developing a sense of safety and trust in the relationship.

But this is where your self-awareness is absolutely critical. If a parent tends toward anger, the child becomes angry too. If the parent is this disengaged or withdrawn, so goes the child. Children learn as much from out of sync interaction styles, as from highly synchronized ones, with one difference. Finding themselves unable to affect a repair when unhappy or out of sync, children can develop a faulty sense of themselves, translating into negative hormonal effects. Babies of depressed mothers have higher levels of stress hormones and lower levels of important neurotransmitters affecting one’s sense of well-being, such as dopamine and serotonin.

Children must learn to distinguish their emotions and learn to grasp what gives rise to one emotion or another. Neglected children do not develop this capacity. Children deprived of effective human contact often cannot distinguish emotions. For example, as a survival mechanism, abused children frequently over perceive anger in faces that are neutral, ambiguous or even sad.

Parenting work is about creating a safe nurturing, empathetic, compassionate environment in which the child can learn. Family relationships create [the] emotional reality for the child, for good or for ill. UCLA psychologist Allan Schore holds that that this climate can shape the child’s neurobiology. Neural plasticity is the process by which your brain is shaped by repeated experience, sculpting the shape, size, and number of neurons and their synaptic connections. Key relationships, like parents, through their interactions, drive the child’s neural circuitry.

As a parent, you have the obligation to weigh how you are affecting your child. You must expand your self-awareness and that of your child in relation to the environment. Engage in meditation, yoga, breathing or other practices to help you develop space in which such awareness can grow. It is here that your senses heighten, that you truly learn to listen, and that you access your wisdom. Develop your empathy to sense your child’s state. Access your compassion to support your child in fear and discomfort, to foster a sense of safety and a trusting environment. Hold kindness as your intention when in your child’s company. Kindness will guide your thoughts, speech and actions. Know that your love is built on the foundation of empathy, compassion and kindness. By these means you create and hold space for your child’s development and lay the groundwork for your child to develop healthy and meaningful relationships.

I am wary of the term “spiritual intelligence” for the misdirection it may infer. Spiritual intelligence, or SQ, has no necessary connection to religion. I prefer to reference this intelligence as “more than me” intelligence, or MTM, simply to confirm its secular base. This intelligence includes the ability to create a life dedicated to the benefit of all beings, not just you, your family, friends, cohort or clan. It rests on an awareness of and assessment of meaning and value, with which you can place your actions and lives into a wider, richer context. It manifests in your ability to initiate and sustain practices that strengthen your connection to all people and all living systems. It is an intelligence that is suffused with awareness, empathy, compassion, kindness, generosity, and wisdom.

Danah Zohar and Dr. Ian Marshall write in “SQ,The Ultimate Intelligence”:

“Human beings are essentially spiritual creatures because we are driven by a need to ask ‘fundamental’ or ‘ultimate’ questions… We are driven … by a specifically human longing to find meaning and value in what we do and experience. We have a longing to see our lives in some larger, meaning-giving … context. We have a longing for something towards which we can aspire, for something that takes us beyond ourselves in the present moment, for something that gives us and our actions a sense of worth.”

According to Zohar and Marshall, it is the creative aspect of SQ, with it accompanying abilities to change rules, alter situations, and change boundaries that gives SQ its transformative powers. It is these qualities that, as parents, you both wish to demonstrate and bequeath to your child.

Let’s step back for a moment. I previously have referenced your narrative - the story you tell yourself about yourself - that arose from your early childhood experiences and environment. Embedded in your narrative are a number of unconscious boundaries. These boundaries were designed to protect you in childhood, but, in later life, often do not. “Don’t talk to strangers.” “You can’t trust those people.” “They are different than us.” Instead of offering protection, they create separation. They often preclude you from seeing the world as it is. And if held too strongly, those boundary lines can devolve into battle lines. Many of your beliefs and judgments are such boundary lines. All the dysfunctional “isms” - racism, anti-Semitism - are beliefs and judgments that create boundaries.

One of my primary undertakings, as a coach, is to help people identify the boundaries in their narratives which no longer serve them, which lead to inappropriate behaviors, which distance them from their loved ones, families, colleagues, or communities. Our goal is to identify the boundaries, assess their relevance and utility, seek new perspectives, and instigate more appropriate responses to what the world now is presenting. In effect, my clients rewrite their narratives. As you consider the legacy that, through your presence, thoughts, and actions, you are bequeathing to your child, you must ask yourself: “What are my boundaries?” “Do my beliefs and judgments serve me well?” “How can I rewrite my narrative to better serve myself and my child?”

Begin with yourself. Work on practices of self-awareness, then begin to relinquish self judgment and offer yourself forgiveness. You then will learn how to forgive others. Forgiveness is an extraordinary healing tool. It reduces your mental and emotional burdens. It frees up your narrative - the simpler your narrative, the lighter your life. Forgiveness grants you access to deeper thinking and creates greater opportunities for relationship.

As you open yourself to relationship, you access your inherent empathy, compassion, and kindness, upon which all meaningful relationships are based. And, once in relationship, you will find your generosity. Generosity is the ultimate extraordinary gift of SQ. First, it is healing in and of itself. Second, it is always reciprocated. Perhaps, not immediately or in a manner that you anticipate, but it always returns. And, it is in this that I find a connection between SQ and religion. The generosity that you manifest, as witnessed by or known to your child and others, and experienced by those upon whom it is bestowed, offer you a taste of immortality. Your acts of kindness are remembered, paid forward to others, and remain a lasting tribute to your presence on earth. It is here that you access your life’s meaning.

Develop your spiritual intelligence, if not for yourself, for your child.