Emotional Intelligence (EQ) & Caregiving

Emotional intelligence, also known as emotional quotient or EQ, is?the ability to understand and manage your own emotions and that of others to communicate and solve problems, empathize with others and overcome challenges.

Emotional intelligence is commonly defined by four attributes:

1.?????Self-Awareness?–It is the ability to recognize your own emotions and how they affect your thoughts and behaviour. It is about understanding your strengths and weakness.

2. Self-Management?– It is the ability to manage your own feelings, emotions and behaviour to navigate in the best possible way through any situation.

3.?????Social Awareness?– You can understand the emotions, feelings, behaviour of other people and can manage social situations with ease by understanding emotional cues and recognizing the power dynamics in a group or organization.

4.?????Relationship Management?– You understand how to develop and maintain good relationships, communicate clearly, inspire and influence others, work well in a team, and manage conflict.

What is Caregiving?

Caregiving is the activity or profession of regularly looking after a child or a sick, elderly, or disabled person.

Parenting involves caregiving. A mother and father are caregivers.?

What does it involve?

Look at an infant child – what all needs to be done for them?

·??????They need to be bathed and cleaned and dressed according to weather.

·??????Need to be fed every 2 hours i.e., 6-8 meals in a day.

·??????Poop cleaned for 2-4 (or more) times a day.

·??????Cooking for self and others

·??????Grocery shopping, maintenance of the household.

·??????Medicine and doctor check-up for illness?

Dynamics of Caregiving

Caregiving involves 2 people – a person who needs care and the person who is giving care.

The mental state of the caregiver is important as a happier caregiver would give care to the other person happily.

The person who requires care might be a normal child or a disabled child. It would be much harder with a disabled child, as a lot more needs to be done.

In case a bedridden elderly is to be taken care of, the caregiving is more difficult than a normal elderly.

Caregiving is clearly a two-way process. ?The caregiver and the receiver. The mental, physical and emotional state of both matters.

We are all attached to each other with strings of emotions which are of love, care, compassion, kindness, gratitude, jealousy, hatred, anguish etc. We have different relationships with people in our lives. There is no relationship without emotions. Look at Robots, they cannot have relationships.?

How We care Matters

The above-mentioned chores are that need to be done for taking care of the child. It is not just the what but the how matters. These are not just what needs to be done for the upbringing of a child. Most important is how it is done. It is the intention of the caregiver that matters.?

From a Child Perspective

If the caregiver is doing the chores lovingly, then the way the child will be held and dressed and cleaned and fed will all be felt by the child. When done with love, it is what gives good experiences to the child and makes the child happy. The child learns everything at this stage by feeling as they cannot read, write or express themselves.

When a child understands the feelings of others then that comes into an aspect of social awareness. But they are not aware of it as it is unconscious. The child themselves feels happy when they are lovingly held and that makes it self-awareness.

This helps in bonding as a mother has the purest intention and her love is felt by the child. This is why the mother-child bond is said to be the strongest.

From the Caregiver Perspective

Look at the child – The child does not have the ability to talk, write and communicate only through his emotional cries. When we understand others based on their emotional cries comes under the category of social awareness.

The caregiver which is mostly a mother goes through her own problems of post-partum depression, changes in the body and 24x7 care which many a time is frustrating and upsetting. She gets angry, depressed and has to overcome these emotions to take care of the child. This is self-awareness and relationship management.

In fact, any gender who would do the work of caregiving of a child would require better EQ as that is the skill set required to do the job. If you look at the gender differences then you will find that mothers have better EQ. And it is the EQ of a child which is being built by the primary caregiver.

What is the mother, the primary caregiver doing?

She is building a child emotionally by showing her own emotion of love, compassion and kindness which is really required when a child is small as they are completely under the power of caregivers.

If the child is not shown these emotions the child will face a problem understanding these very emotions. Why? Because if you are not shown the emotions, you do not tend to understand them.

I have been researching in the area for a long time to find answers as ?I have struggled with EQ so much in my life. You tend not to understand emotions when you are not shown those as a child. This does not help in understanding emotions of your own. This has a detrimental impact on self-esteem and self-confidence. When you do not understand your own emotion, you have a hard time understanding the emotions of others. You do not know how to react to a social situation. When that happens, you are called a misfit in society.?Like if a friend lost someone and is looking for consolation, then you would not know what to do as your memory does not have any example of how to act in the situation. Then the relationship takes a hit.

Caregiving is a lot about EQ.

Elderly Care

Taking care of the elderly is also similar as it requires a similar kind of work. Apart from the chores, the intent, the trust, the bonding, the care, kindness, compassion – the emotions involved would be the defining parameter of how well caregiving is being done.

Caregiving is completely about Emotional Intelligence.

What do you think?

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About Mona Mehra

Mona Mehra is a work-home integrator, an activist and a risk management professional. She study’s various concepts to understand how they affect everyday human life. She reads various researches and observes people all around and from her personal experience tries to give a more realistic perspective.??

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