Research on Parenting

At the heart of Dr. Gottman’s research projects on parenting, is the emotional life of children and the emotional communication between parents and their children. Dr. Gottman and his colleagues at the Family Research Laboratory have studied parents and children in detailed laboratory studies and followed the children as they developed over time. With support from the National Institutes of Mental Health and help of the Center for Human Developmental Disability (CHDD) at the University of Washington, Dr. Gottman has made a number of observations and discoveries about the powerful impact that emotional processes can have on children and their parents. Research on emotion coaching (described below), on the impact of marital discord (described below), and the transition to parenthood (described below) are all elements of Dr. Gottman's research agenda.

Emotion coaching. From the Preface of Dr. Gottman’s book, Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child, Dr. Gottman explains, “In my research I discovered that love by itself wasn’t enough to become a good parent. Very concerned, warm, and involved parents often had attitudes toward their own and their children’s emotions that got in the way of being able to talk to their children when they were sad or afraid or angry. While love by itself was not enough, channeling that caring into some basic skills that parents practice as if they were coaching their children in the area of emotion, was enough. The secret lay in how parents interacted with their children when emotions ran hot.”

Dr. Gottman's emphasis on the emotional bond between parent and child emerged from longitudinal research that included emotional content in all family relationships. To our knowledge, Gottman's is the first research to confirm the work of the brilliant child clinician, psychologist Dr. Haim Ginott. Much of Dr. Gottman's research on parents and children is reported in his book, Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child. After a decade of research in the Family Research Lab, Dr. Gottman's research team encountered a group of parents who did five very simple things with their children when they were emotional. Gottman calls these five things "Emotion Coaching." Dr. Gottman discovered that children who had Emotion-Coaching parents were on an entirely different developmental trajectory than the children of other parents.

What are the five elements of emotion coaching?

• Be aware of a child's emotions
• Recognize emotional expression as an opportunity for intimacy and teaching
• Listen empathetically and validate a child's feelings
• Label emotions in words a child can understand
• Help a child come up with an appropriate way to solve a problem or deal with an upsetting issue or situation

Dr. Gottman's research demonstrated that emotion-coached children

• Are able to regulate their emotional states
• Are better at soothing themselves when they are upset
• Could calm down their hearts faster after something upsetting happens
• Have fewer infectious illnesses
• Are better at focusing attention
• Relate better to other people, even in tough situations like getting teased in middle school
• Are better at understanding people
• Have better friendships with other children
• Are better in school situations that require academic performance

Transition to Parenthood. The Family Research Laboratory has conducted several studies that track a married couple through the transition to parenthood. In a study known as “Bringing Baby Home,” Dr. Gottman and colleagues, including Alyson Fearnley Shapiro, have found that the best predictor of marital adjustment after the baby arrives is the quality of the friendship in the marriage before the baby arrives. The researchers are currently conducting a study at Swedish Hospital in Seattle to assess the usefulness of couples education for prospective parents. The study will follow these couples through the first years of parenthood. For more details on this study, click on the title above.