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I am a father, and I have come to believe that the emotional intelligence I help my children build matters more than almost anything else I can give them. The world they are growing into rewards performance, achievement, and the appearance of confidence, and it is largely indifferent to their actual inner lives. So the work of raising emotionally healthy children has become quietly countercultural, and deeply important. Let me share how I think about it, from Port Harcourt, as a father who takes this seriously.
The Deeper Work
There is a version of parenting that is entirely about performance. Get the grades, win the prizes, look confident, achieve, succeed. The world rewards all of this, loudly and constantly, and it is easy to pour your parenting into helping your child perform well by these measures. But there is a deeper work underneath, and I have come to believe it matters more than any of the performance, because it is the foundation the performance is supposed to rest on. It is raising a child who genuinely understands their own inner life.
I am a father who thinks carefully about this, from Port Harcourt, and I have watched the environment my children are growing into. It rewards the appearance of things, the confident exterior, the visible achievement, and it is largely indifferent to what is actually happening inside a young person. In such an environment, raising an emotionally intelligent child, a child who actually understands and can navigate their inner world, has become quietly countercultural. It has also become more important than ever, because a child who can perform but cannot understand themselves is built on sand. Let me explain what emotional intelligence really is, why the culture works against it, and what a parent can actually do.
What Emotional Intelligence Actually Is
Start with the concept, because it is widely misunderstood, usually reduced to managing or controlling feelings. That is a small and distorted piece of it. Genuine emotional intelligence is a form of understanding, applied to the inner world, and it has several distinct parts.
The first is understanding your own emotions. Not suppressing them, not performing calm, but actually knowing what you feel and why, being able to recognise an emotion as it arises, name it, and understand what it is telling you. A child with this can say, at least to themselves, I am anxious because of this, rather than being blindly driven by an anxiety they cannot even identify. The second is reading others, the ability to perceive and understand what other people are feeling, to sense the emotional reality of a situation and of the people in it. This is the foundation of empathy and of every good relationship. The third is responding wisely, the ability to take that understanding of self and others and act on it well, rather than reacting on raw impulse.
Put together, emotional intelligence is the capacity to understand and navigate the emotional world, your own and other people's, with real insight. It is not softness, and it is not the absence of difficult feelings. It is a genuine intelligence, as real as the kind we measure in school, and arguably more determinative of how a life goes, because it governs relationships, decisions, resilience, and self-knowledge. And like any intelligence, it develops, most powerfully in childhood, which is why what happens in these years matters so much.
How Performance Culture Does the Damage
Now the obstacle, because you cannot build emotional intelligence well without understanding what is working against it. The environment children grow up in, in schools and especially online, is a performance culture, and performance culture is quietly corrosive to emotional development.
Here is the mechanism. Performance culture rewards how things appear. It rewards the confident exterior, the constant achievement, the look of being fine and successful and in control. What it does not reward, and often subtly punishes, is the honest inner reality, the admission of struggle, the visible difficult emotion, the not being okay. So children learn, quickly and thoroughly, to perform an emotional state rather than understand their actual one. They become skilled at appearing confident while hiding anxiety, at looking fine while feeling lost, at managing the impression rather than knowing the reality.
The damage is that this teaches children to be estranged from their own inner lives. Instead of developing the capacity to understand what they feel, they develop the capacity to hide and perform it, which is the opposite skill. Online spaces intensify this enormously, turning childhood and adolescence into a constant performance for an audience, where the curated appearance is everything and the actual inner state is to be concealed. A generation is learning to manage how they seem while losing touch with how they are, and that is precisely the reverse of emotional intelligence. The child becomes fluent in the mask and a stranger to the face beneath it.
What Parents Can Actually Do
Against this, the home becomes the crucial counterweight, and there is a great deal a parent can practically do, starting from early childhood. The core of all of it is simple to state. Treat your child's inner life as real and worth understanding, consistently, and build the specific habits that follow from that.
Help them name their feelings. From when they are very young, give children the language for what they feel, and help them identify it. A young child in the grip of an emotion they cannot name is overwhelmed by it. A child who can name it, I am frustrated, I am disappointed, I am scared, has already begun to understand and therefore to navigate it. This naming, done patiently over years, is one of the most powerful things a parent does, because it builds the basic capacity to understand the inner world.
Help them understand, not just name. Go beyond the label to the why, helping them see what the feeling is connected to and what it is telling them, so that emotions become intelligible rather than mysterious forces. Do not dismiss or rush past difficult feelings, which teaches a child that those feelings are unacceptable and should be hidden, the exact lesson the performance culture is already teaching. Instead, acknowledge them, sit with them, treat them as valid and worth understanding. And have the conversations that matter, the honest ones about what your child is feeling and facing, so that your home is a place where the inner life is discussed openly rather than concealed.
Above all, model it yourself. Children learn emotional intelligence far more from what they see than from what they are told. A parent who understands and names their own emotions, who handles difficult feelings with insight rather than denial or explosion, who is honest about their inner life in age-appropriate ways, is teaching emotional intelligence continuously, simply by being that way in front of the child. You cannot raise an emotionally intelligent child while modelling emotional avoidance, because the modelling teaches more loudly than the words. The most important thing you can do is become, yourself, the kind of emotionally intelligent person you want your child to be.
The Foundation Everything Rests On
I want to end by insisting on why this matters so much, because in a performance culture it is easy to treat emotional intelligence as a soft extra, nice but secondary to the real business of achievement. It is exactly backwards. Emotional intelligence is the foundation that everything else in a child's life is built on.
A child who understands their inner world can handle difficulty without being destroyed by it, can build genuine relationships, can make wise decisions rather than being driven by unexamined feelings, and can know themselves well enough to build a life that actually fits them. A child who can only perform, who is skilled at appearing well while estranged from their inner life, is fragile beneath the impressive surface, and the fragility tends to surface eventually, often painfully. All the achievement in the world sits on top of a person's emotional foundation, and if that foundation is hollow, the achievements do not hold the person up.
So of everything I try to give my children, from Port Harcourt, the emotional intelligence matters most, because it is the ground the rest stands on. The world will keep rewarding them for performing confidence and hiding what they feel. My work as their father is to build, underneath the performance the world demands, a genuine understanding of their own hearts, so that they are not just able to look fine but able to actually be well, and to know the difference. That is the deepest foundation a parent can lay, and in a world that rewards the opposite, laying it is one of the most important and countercultural things we can do.
