Raising Emotionally Intelligent Kids: Communication, Conflict, and Confidence

What happens when a simple basketball game turns into a parenting lesson about emotional intelligence, communication, and conflict resolution?

In this episode of Steel Roses Podcast, we unpack a real-life parenting moment: a basketball bounces the wrong way, a child gets hit in the face, and two very different parenting instincts show up right away — comfort first versus toughen up. But the most powerful part comes next, when a 10-year-old calmly finds the words to say, “I didn’t like that you did that.”

That moment opens the door to a bigger conversation about raising emotionally intelligent kids, teaching children how to speak up respectfully, and helping them learn how to express feelings without shutting down or exploding.

We also talk about the growing gap in communication skills for kids and teens. In a world where children are constantly connected through social media, many are still underprepared for real-life conversations, conflict, eye contact, emotional expression, and problem-solving. Instead of lectures, we explore how parents can model communication skills at home in everyday moments.

This episode covers why a united front in parenting matters, how transparency after discipline builds trust, and why teaching children to understand more than one perspective can strengthen both empathy and resilience.

We also touch on ADHD and emotional regulation, including why kids who struggle with impulse control or big feelings need extra coaching around labeling emotions, self-advocacy, and respectful communication.

If you’re looking for practical parenting tips for raising confident kids who can speak up, listen well, handle conflict, and advocate for themselves with respect, this episode is for you.

Listen now, share this episode with another parent, and leave a review to help more families find Steel Roses Podcast.

Transcript

Car Check In And Self Care

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning everybody. This is Still Roses Podcast. This podcast was created for women by women to elevate women's voices. I hope you are all having a really, really lovely day. We finally have some nice weather, and I every time it comes up, I'm gonna mention it because I'm desperate for some nice warm weather. But today, finally, the skies are clear. It's a little breezy, but I'll take it because the sun is out and I get to be out and about. If you can't already tell, I'm in my car recording because I don't have work today, and I finally am prioritizing doing something for myself and I'm going to go get my hair done. My stepdaughter is very talented, and she's a stylist up in Nutley, New Jersey, and does fabulous things, really loves what she does. So I always head up to her to have her handle my hair and my daughter's hair. So I'm taking some time today to be able to do that. I'm mentioning that because, as you all know, I am categorically horrible, historically horrible at doing things for myself. If it comes to the kids, you need new clothes, I got you, you need new sneakers, no problem. You need your haircut, you need skincare, you need whatever you need. But when it comes to me, it's a consistent, well, I'll figure out a different way, or oh, it's okay, I'll go without it. Um, or I just won't, you know, won't prioritize like the hair thing. Not for nothing. I literally probably only go once a year, if that. There's definitely been years where it's further. The last time I got my haircut was about a year ago. Actually, that sounds about right. Maybe about a year ago. I can't remember if I went twice last year. But again, typically I'm only going once a year because I just don't make the time for it. And I want to set an example for my daughters. A big thing for me once I had kids was how I'm how am I setting an example here so that they could do things that I never did or so they could be a certain way that I never, you know, didn't realize until I was an adult. A large part of how my husband and I parent our kids is almost, it's not reactionary. It's definitely more like in preparation for. So there's things that my husband and I have identified as like deficits, maybe, basically, or things that we didn't like about how we were brought up, and we're course correcting with our kids. I've talked a lot about how we communicate with our kids. The reason why I bring this up so much is because I think for all of us who are in our early, late 30s, early 40s, I'm early 40s, and you know, up into the 50s, we all had the same set of parents. A co a colleague of mine and I consistently joke about how our parents would be best friends because the care for mental health and the ability to articulate what you're feeling seems to have gone out the window with some of the generation. And I do not mean that in any offense, any way, shape, or form. You already know that I think the generation that's currently in their 60s and 70s. They were raised by parents who, you know, grew up in the Great Depression and had to prioritize, like, I need to make sure there's food on the table. Like everything else went to the wayside. Now we have the luxury, and it is a luxury, of being able to prioritize like mental health and how are we handling mental health. So long, long, long-winded way to say we have the privilege now to reset the tone for our kids. What kind of future do we want our children to have that starts at home, that starts at home with us and how we're communicating to our kids and how we're preparing for them to communicate out in the world. Now, I um definitely very recently have talked um with personal people and then on the podcast itself about um the inability to communicate amongst the younger generation. You know, the younger generation, um, I want to say, I can't, I don't know if they're Gen X, Gen Z, but prior to after millennials, the generation that has been brought up saturated with social media and saturated with connection all the time, that generation, from what I've observed, severely lacks a lot of the things that millennials grew up with. Now, millennials, I'm not saying we're like the cream of the crap, but I am saying that there's certain things that we got a really decent mix of because our childhood was not made up of technology. Our childhood was still old school, no technology, needing to use your imagination, needing to be creative, needing to actually physically make an effort to be friends with somebody, because you had to physically pick a phone up and make a phone call and talk to your friend's parents to get to your friends. So completely different kind of lifestyle, how we grew up. Even in terms of like how we focused our efforts at school, how we communicate with our parents, how we communicated with our peers. A big thing to note that I noticed, not even in um my kids' age range, but like in the early 20s somethings and the mid-20s, a large thing that I noticed was like the inability to communicate with each other in terms of like even romantic relationships. How do you go out and strike up a conversation? This is an area where I'm like, obviously, you can tell, like I could talk to anybody about anything. Like I can make myself comfortable in any setting and just give it a good, you know, give it a go and make friends with people. That's just in my nature. However, that's a skill that I've cultivated for a really long time because being able to talk and communicate doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. And so generating a conversation out of nothing, that's a skill. So that's also something that like we're trying to impart on our kids. Now, I want to give an example here of communication skills that I was actually quite impressed with. It also gives an example of parents backing each other up. In our household, we feel very strongly about a united front as parents, regardless of if we disagree with each other or not. To our children, we show a united front. Now, I'm not saying that I bold face lie. I will absolutely honestly say I don't agree, but I respect your father. And if this is what he's saying, then we're all gonna, we're all gonna get on board and I will back him up. It is what it is, and vice versa. He doesn't love it, but occasionally I do disagree with him and I'll say, like, you know, just give it a rest for this or whatever, or lay off of this. And then he backs off. So we balance each each other quite well. Now, the communication part that I wanted to highlight here, and this is really significant. My son is 10 years old. So we're all sitting in the driveway, the kids were on their bikes because they were gonna go out on a bike ride with their friends, and uh one of my daughters was playing basketball, and she, you know, shot shot the ball, bounced off the hoop, hit my son right in the face, right in front of me. So my reaction as a mother, oh my god, are you all right? And I went to grab him to check, you know, make sure he was okay. My husband's reaction as a father, all right, that's it. You just got hit in the face. That's you're fine. Went right into tough guy mode. You're a tough guy. My son did not appreciate that. He was pissed. And he said, he straight up said to my husband, What is wrong with you? I just got hit in the face with the ball. And, you know, he was upset. And I already knew, I'm like, he's offended. He's offended that my husband didn't check on him first. So we let the dust settle. He was okay. Honestly, he he got clipped in the face, but it is what it is. Who hasn't got hit in the face with a with a basketball? It's happened to all of us at some point. So he's really upset, and I already knew, I already knew where it was gonna go. But moments like that are teachable moments, and you have to define, find those teachable moments with your own kids. So my son's pissed off, rightly so, right? I go in the house to get something and I heard him coming behind me. So I turned and I said to him, I was like, hey, bud, I'm like, come here, are you all right? And I gave him a hug. I'm his mommy, I'm gonna help regulate him. So I'm hugging him and I, are you all right? He's like, Yeah, I'm all right. He was like, It hurt. And I was like, Yeah, buddy, I it's gonna hurt. Are you okay? And he's like, Yeah, and I was he goes, Well, he's like, it didn't hurt too bad. He was like, it just, it's it freaked me out. And I was like, I know, kid. I'm like, but I'm like, you're all right. He's like, I'm he was like, I'm mad. I'm mad that Bobby didn't check on me. Like, what's wrong with him? Why didn't he just check on me first instead of just going right into telling me not to to cry? And I explained to him, I'm like, you know, bud, you have two parents here. Bobby's giving you the um, Bobby's coming from a place of a father. He wants to make you into a man. He wants to make sure that you're a strong boy and that you're growing up with strong character, and he wants to make sure that he's giving you those lessons all the time. And I said, Mommy is your mother. I'm gonna be softer with you. I'm gonna show you more empathy because I'm trying to teach you empathy. And he just kind of looking at me, he's like, All right, he was like, All right, he's like, Well, I'm gonna talk to him. And I was like, All right, you should get it. You should talk to him. Or no, I think I didn't tell him to talk to him. I said I was like, just, you know, like Poppy is doing the best he can. We're both doing the best we can. Now, I always, always, always will impart on the kids because my husband doesn't always do it, but I make sure I always back him up. If he yells at the kids for something, I always have his back and I'll go in after and say, like, hey, do you understand why? And then my husband will usually kind of back that conversation up too with uh, listen, I yelled at you because of X, Y, and Z. We're always very transparent. Transparency is a big deal in our house because think back to when you were a kid. When your parents flipped out on you and didn't give you a reason, you're left confused, you're left upset, and then you're angry. And you're gonna just be angry at your parents because you don't understand why they screamed at you when there's legitimate reasons why parents do things, right? So later on in the evening, um, we put the kids to bed and my husband and I are just talking, and I said, Oh, by the way, Vicente's really pissed at you. And he was like, he already came and talked to me. Now, a 10-year-old felt empowered enough to go to his father and say, you know what? I didn't like that you did this. That is amazing to me. Because, first of all, to have to have the the balls really to do something like that to me is is is amazing. But the part that really makes my heart sing is that he recognized what he didn't like. He went too directly to the person and said, I don't like that you did this. There are some adults that can't do that. And my 10-year-old son exhibited it. And that action right there tells me that he is getting the communication skills that we've been trying to drive home with him since he was a little kid. Now, this is also significant in nature because my son also has ADHD. So his ability to regulate his own emotions and recognize them and specifically articulate them is gonna be impaired in comparison to other kids. And yet he's at the top of his class with his articulation skills. This all starts at home. You're got you're sending your kids to school because they're getting socialized at school, they're getting education at school. I'm not gonna teach my kids math. That's not happening. That's happening at school. But what I am teaching them is how to be human, and I'm teaching them how to be kind and you know how to really communicate. And with all that, also comes the work of making sure that he understands there's two perspectives to things, and that my husband and I are both helping him build skills that he needs for his for the rest of his life. And it was this example that came up, and immediately I was like, I need to share this with the audience because it's important. This is significant. If you want your children to be successful, starting at home with some core baseline values of how to approach things is critical. Everything we do is an example to our kids. Every step that we take, every phrase that we say, every single thing that we do is shaping their lives and it is shaping their futures. So if we're not cautious and we're just letting things fly, that is going to affect them. And while it's exhausting and my husband and I at the end of a lot of days are just like completely emotionally depleted, that's okay because we're building warriors to go out into the world so that they could be able to stand on their own two feet. I really encourage you. I didn't read parenting books about this. I'm gonna be honest with you. I tried in a few instances when the kids were little. I was like, oh, let me let me read some parenting books. I read a couple, but I nothing really resonated deeply. It was a lot of how to handle toddler situations. This all came from my training in communications and how I wanted to make sure the kids are being shaped, just based on my experience and my husband's experience. So I really encourage you, think outside the box. You know, don't treat your kids as kids. Treat them as young people, treat them, you know, with respect. They have opinions too. They're gonna want to voice those opinions. If you're always slamming them down, how are we teaching them to be prepared for the world then? You know, everything we do is shaping how they're gonna step out into the world. So I really encourage all of you to really take a step back and think about how you can make, even if it's a small change, how you can make a small change to shift your kids into being really expert communicators. I hope you guys found this episode informative. I'm very excited to be recording from the car because it means I'm doing something for myself. And I just greatly appreciate all of you being here with me. Honestly, this the the podcast journey has been very interesting and very unique. And I've just been grateful for everything that has come along with it. So thank you so much for listening today, and I will catch you on the next one. Take care.