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% accuracy. Keep Reading »