Evidence-based strategies to promote emotional intelligence in children in a changing world: a narrative review

Abstract

Emotional intelligence comprises the ability to recognize, understand, express, and regulate emotions while using emotional information to guide adaptive behavior and interpersonal relationships. During childhood, these competencies emerge through the interaction between biological maturation, neurodevelopmental plasticity, language, caregiving relationships, play, peer interaction, educational experiences, and repeated opportunities for guided emotional learning. Although the fundamental developmental processes that support emotional intelligence remain unchanged, contemporary childhood is unfolding within environments that differ substantially from those experienced by previous generations. Post-pandemic developmental disruptions, the digitalization of attention and social interaction, algorithm-driven content exposure, immediate reward systems, and increasing exposure to emotionally intense global, digital, and commercial information have altered the contexts in which children acquire, practice, and apply emotional competencies. This narrative review integrates evidence from developmental science, pediatrics, education, psychology, and digital media research to examine how emotional intelligence develops during childhood, why contemporary environments may challenge the conditions that support emotional learning, and which evidence-based strategies can strengthen these competencies. Current evidence supports school-based social and emotional learning programs, mindfulness-based interventions, parenting and caregiver-focused approaches, and developmentally appropriate digital mediation as strategies capable of promoting emotional awareness, self-regulation, empathy, frustration tolerance, attentional control, and adaptive relationships. Across these approaches, the central mechanism is not the transmission of isolated emotional skills, but the ability to recognize, preserve, and intentionally use everyday experiences as developmentally meaningful opportunities through which children learn to interpret internal states, tolerate emotional discomfort, regulate responses, and engage constructively with others. Promoting emotional intelligence in contemporary childhood therefore requires preserving the relational, linguistic, playful, educational, and reflective experiences through which emotional competencies are built, while helping families, schools, clinicians, and policymakers respond to the changing developmental environments in which children now live and grow.