Raising a child in today’s fast-paced, achievement-driven world is no small feat. While many parents focus on grades and extracurriculars, one of the most overlooked skills is emotional intelligence.

This doesn’t just help kids excel socially; it helps them grow into resilient, empathetic, and successful adults who can navigate challenges with confidence, foster meaningful relationships, and lead fulfilling lives.

So, what do parents who raise emotionally intelligent kids do differently? After years of studying over 200 parent-child relationships — and from practicing healthy habits with my own child — I’ve uncovered seven powerful strategies that these parents embraced early on.

They gave their child space to process their feelings and trust their inner voice. When their child was upset, they sat quietly beside them, offering comfort without words. Embracing silence can help children better navigate and reflect on their emotions.

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By verbally sharing feelings — like “I’m frustrated” or “I’m happy” — they taught their children emotional awareness and gave them words to express themselves. This helped their children see emotions as normal and share them openly rather than suppressing them.

They showed their child that mistakes are part of life and taking responsibility is a strength. Apologizing built trust and showed respect, making their child feel valued. It also modeled empathy and taught them how to repair relationships.

This might sound unconventional, but they knew kindness and respect can’t be forced. Instead, they modeled these behaviors, trusting their child to learn by example. If their child forgot to say thank you, the parent said it for them, confident the lesson would stick over time.

This takes a lot of bravery! But as a parenting coach, I’ve never told my 6-year-old to say please or thank you. Now he says it all the time on his own — because he hears me say it.

They took their child’s concerns seriously, whether it was a lost toy or trouble with a friend. By validating their feelings, they showed their child that emotions matter. This fostered self-worth, emotional safety, and respect for their experiences.

The best way to teach decision-making is to encourage children to make their own decisions. Instead of fixing problems, they asked, “What do you think we should do?” This helped boost critical thinking, confidence, and independence.

They let their child get bored, which helped them become comfortable with stillness. This built creativity, self-regulation and problem-solving skills. Their child learned to enjoy their own company and find joy in simple moments, like staring out the car window instead of needing a screen.

• Modeling the behaviors you want to see: Express your emotions openly, apologize when you make mistakes, and show kindness and empathy in your interactions.
• Validate your child’s feelings, no matter how small they may seem, and give them the space to process those emotions without rushing to fix or dismiss them. 
• Encourage problem-solving by asking open-ended questions instead of providing all the answers.
• Let them experience moments of stillness or boredom to build creativity and self-regulation.

Most importantly, focus on building a relationship rooted in respect and trust — because emotional intelligence starts with feeling safe, valued, and understood.

Reem Raouda is a certified conscious parenting coach, mother, and creator of BOUND — the first and only parent-child connection journal designed to nurture emotional intelligence and self-worth in children. She has transformed hundreds of families through her courses, coaching and tools. Follow her on Instagram. 

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As a plastic surgeon, my job involves many kinds of so-called anti-aging procedures. But while they may make you look younger, the cells in your body won’t function the way younger cells do.

That’s why I’ve spent thousands of hours over the past 10 years learning about a way of treating patients that I was never taught in medical school or in residency, which I write about in my book, “Younger for Life.”

One of the most surprising and often overlooked things I discovered is that your state of mind can do wonders for your physical body, specifically having a younger attitude.

Research shows that how we think is reflected in our bodies, and how we hold our bodies is reflected in how we think.

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For example, if you smile, it can start to make you feel happy. If you slump, you can start to feel sad. Conversely, feeling sad can cause you to slump, and feeling happy can trigger an automatic smile.

You can use this to your advantage with one simple little thing: positive thinking.

Several recent studies have shown that people with good attitudes about aging have better mental health and improved quality of life as they get older.

One 2022 Harvard study of 14,000 adults over the age of 50 showed that the people with the highest feelings of satisfaction about aging were the most likely to feel better, live longer, have better mental health, and have better health habits than their more negative-thinking counterparts.

Think about some of the stereotypical differences between old and young people. Young people tend to want to learn new things, laugh often, move more, and feel cheerful — maybe because they haven’t experienced as many hard lessons and don’t have as much responsibility.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t borrow from them. Some older people like to spend time with younger people to help them stay young in their minds and hearts. They maintain a positive outlook, retain their curiosity, evolve with changing times, and don’t get set in their ways.

Here’s my best advice for keeping a younger attitude:

• Learn new things. When you try new things (brush up on a language, learn an instrument, read a challenging book, ask questions), your neurons will create new connections and even slow down the aging process of your brain. This is the concept of neuroplasticity, and it can keep your brain working better.
• Take breaks. You don’t have to work all the time. Build time into each week to let yourself relax and have some fun.
• Stop being hard on yourself. When self-doubt and negativity creep in, take a beat and remind yourself that you’re doing your best.
• Forgive and move on. One of the worst things you can do to increase stress in your life is to hold onto bitterness and grudges. There are people who will do you wrong, have toxic personalities, who have cost you time, heartache, and more. Don’t let them wrong you even more by giving them any airtime in your mind.
• Celebrate life. Holidays, rituals, family gatherings, friends — lean into milestones and opportunities to connect with the people you care about.
• Love. Love your family, your friends, your pets, your life, and especially, love yourself. Indulge in love often and offer it generously. This alone can keep you feeling young and vital.

Dr. Anthony Yuon, MD, is a board-certified plastic surgeon, award-winning author, and anti-aging expert. Recognized as a leader in the field, he is highly valued for his honest approach and ability to speak to all areas of health and well-being, not just plastic surgery. He hosts the podcast The Doctor Yuon Show, and has appeared in television shows like Live with Kelly and Mark, The Rachael Ray Show, The Doctors, and many others. He is also the author of “Younger for Life: Feel Great and Look Your Best With the New Science of Autojuvenation.”

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Adapted from “Younger for Life: Feel Great and Look Your Best with the New Science of Autojuvenation,” by Anthony Youn. Copyright 2024 by Anthony Youn. Used with permission by HarperCollins/Hanover Square Press.

The day Karen Robinovitz was reintroduced to slime in 2018, she ran up to her New York apartment’s rooftop with her friend’s 10-year-old daughter and tried drizzling it all the way to the ground.

“It turned me into a 7-year-old for four hours,” says Robinovitz, 52.

It was the first time she’d felt joy in a year and a half, she says. Within a nine-month span, her husband had committed suicide and her teenage cousin was killed in the Parkland high school shooting. Amid medications, support sessions and therapy, playing with slime offered Robinovitz some unexpected relief — so she bought a handful, then hundreds, of jars from TikTok creators.

She’d stumbled onto a niche industry: Some small businesses, particularly on TikTok, have reported bringing in more than $1 million per year making and selling stretchy, elastic goo that you can squish and pop in your hands. But Robinovitz, who ran a talent management agency for social media influencers, and her friend Sara Schiller, founder of an event space company, saw a chance to sell more than just slime.

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Today, they co-run The Sloomoo Institute, an interactive slime experience — a description they prefer to “museum” or “play space” — with locations in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago and Houston. After buying tickets, which average $34 per person, visitors are handed a gob of slime and invited to smack it against a wall. Inside, they’ll find customizable slime stations, ASMR rooms and white fiberglass vats of slime with different textures and smells.

Sloomoo sells slime too, but about 85% of its revenue — up to $4.3 million per month last year, it says — comes from ticket sales. Its first four locations brought in $28.9 million in revenue in 2023, including $4.6 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

The company says its full-year earnings for 2024 aren’t yet finalized.

“Karen and I [have] a deep belief that in tapping into your senses, you’re creating an emotional connection,” says Schiller, 54, adding that Sloomoo has been profitable since the day its first location opened. “That’s so much more powerful than just mailing out packages of slime.”

Sloomoo unofficially began at one of Robinovitz and Schiller’s weekly get-togethers, at Schiller’s loft in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood. Both women needed emotional relief: Schiller’s husband suffered brain-damaging strokes a couple years prior, making her the family’s sole caretaker.

Slime occupied their hands as they spoke: Such sensory-heavy activities can improve depression and anxiety symptoms, some studies show. Then, the pair watched Schiller’s daughters, one of whom is nonverbal and has limited motor skills, handling the slime together — a rare way for the siblings to connect and play with each other.

The two friends bought more than 900 jars of slime to study, Schiller says, then worked on their own recipes. (Always start with Elmer’s glue, Robinvitz says.) They attended conferences, where they met and hired slime creators, and raised $1 million from a private investor, the co-CEOs say.

They put $400,000 of their investment money aside — “If this flopped, we still had to pay rent,” Schiller says — and put the other $600,000 into refurbishing a rental space near Schiller’s home.

They invited slime, parenting and lifestyle influencers on hardhat tours mid-construction as a marketing strategy, Schiller says. Their grand opening in October 2019 sold out — 3,000 tickets — before the duo even opened their doors, they say.

“I remember this mother was crying to me, saying, ‘My daughter has to come today, all her friends are here,’ and I was like, ‘I cannot sell you a ticket, we’re at capacity,’” Robinvitz recalls. “But when I turned around, the little girl ran [in], threw off her shoes and jumped in the lake of slime.”

“There were lines down the block,” Schiller adds. “People weren’t mad they were jostled in. They couldn’t believe they had an opportunity to actually get in.”

In its first week, Sloomoo sold $1 million worth of tickets, Robinovitz and Schiller say. Five months in, the Covid-19 pandemic arrived and the business let go of roughly 90 part-time employees, keeping just the co-CEOs, a bookkeeper and their resident slime-maker.

They sold slime online, hosted virtual slime-making camps for kids, and hosted corporate workshops for companies like Google and Pfizer until fully reopening in 2021. The following year, Sloomoo raised $5.8 million in a Series A funding round led by Raptor Group, and opened its Chicago and Atlanta locations.

The company took on $5 million in debt from its investors to open in Houston in 2023 and Los Angeles last year, the co-CEOs say. They’ve paid the money back, and their future expansion plans include more locations, physical products, leaning programs, games and even live entertainment, they note.

The popularity of their central product, the slime itself, has ebbed and flowed over the decades — from the slippery, chemical-smelling slime of the 1970s to Nickelodeon’s “Slime Time Live” in the early 2000s. Since today’s TikTok-fueled slime popularity will probably fade eventually, Sloomoo’s longevity is dependent on giving visitors memorable, unique experiences, says experience economy researcher, consultant and author Joe Pine.

Experience-based businesses are successful when they’re memorable, meaningful, create a sense of awe and, most elusively, change who we are, says Pine. Interactive art exhibition company Meow Wolf and Italian food market chain Eataly, for example, check all four boxes, he says.

Sloomoo’s vats, walls and lakes of scented slime fulfill the first three, Pine notes. He’s not 100% sold on Sloomoo’s ability to transform people — but Schiller and Robinovitz say it’s certainly changed the two of them, at the very least.

“Karen and I could be SVPs at major companies, and we’ve chosen to do this because it’s really meaningful to us,” Schiller says. “We want people to know that you can choose to try, get out there and do something that’s never been done before.”

“After what we’ve both been through, what are we going to be afraid of now?” she adds.

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Though Southern states tend to have warmer climates and large populations of older adults, several rank among the worst states to retire in the U.S.

That’s according to senior living website Seniorly.com, which recently determined the best and worst places to retire, ranking all 50 states plus the District of Columbia on affordability, quality of life and health care.

Though Southern states are largely more affordable than other regions, Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas all received poor scores on Seniorly’s health-care metrics, which include the number of doctors in each locale, Medicaid spending on long-term care and the health of Medicare beneficiaries.

Florida received the worst health-care ranking in the U.S., but its relatively lower cost of living, availability of recreational activities and large senior population help keep it out of the bottom of the overall rankings. Alabama has the third-worst health-care environment for retirees, Seniorly finds. 

These are the 10 worst states to retire, according to Seniorly:

1. New Jersey
2. Alabama
3. Kansas
4. Georgia
5. Oklahoma
6. Mississippi
7. Massachusetts
8. South Carolina
9. Texas
10. Arizona

New Jersey offers miles of coastline and plenty of shopping malls for leisure and entertainment, as well as decent access to health care for retirees. But a high cost of living and high personal income tax rates contribute to the state’s poor overall ranking, Seniorly finds. 

Though Social Security income isn’t taxed at the state level in New Jersey, the state has the highest property tax in the country at an effective rate over 2%, according to the Tax Foundation. Homeowners in the state pay a median of $9,345 in annual property taxes, SmartAsset reports, so even retirees who’ve paid off their mortgages may still be on the hook for hefty housing costs.

The Garden State also has the sixth-highest cost of living of all the states, according to the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center data Seniorly used for its ranking. Massachusetts is the second-most expensive, only behind Hawaii, which contributed to its poor overall ranking.

When it comes to quality of life for retirees, Texas ranks dead last, according to Seniorly’s ranking. The Lone Star state may offer a mild climate most of the year, but it has one of the smallest shares of adults ages 65 and up of any state, with just 13% of the population in that age group, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

By contrast, in Montana — the best state to retire, by Seniorly’s metrics — seniors make up nearly 20% of the state’s population. 

Texas also has room for improvement when it comes to retiree health care. United Health Foundation ranked it No. 38 for senior health in its 2024 Senior Report, noting that the state has slightly higher rates of seniors living in poverty and struggling with food insecurity than the country as a whole.

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Positive social relationships are proven to combat anxiety, increase our happiness and help us live longer. But, as we get older, maintaining certain bonds, specifically friendships, can feel more challenging.

On a recent episode of Jay Shetty’s podcast On Purpose, author Mel Robbins attempts to demystify why it’s so hard to find friends in adulthood.

“The rules of friendship completely change when you hit your twenties,” Robbins, who authored “The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can’t Stop Talking About,” told Shetty.

For a friendship to work, three different factors need to align, Robbins says.

“When you were little, you were in proximity to people your age all the time,” Robbins said.

School, groups sports, or church made it so we were constantly surrounded by people who were our age.

Today more than half, 58%, of Americans don’t live near or in the community where they grew up, according to 2018 data from Pew Research Center. This means that many of the friendships they had growing up probably are harder to maintain.

To really be someone’s friend, seeing them consistently needs to be easy.

The older you get, the more people you’ll meet who are in different phases of life.

“Everybody’s on different timelines,” Robbins said. “Some of your friends are getting married. Some are going to graduate school. Some are now pursuing jobs.”

Finding friends who are experiencing the same hurdles and hitting the same milestones makes it easier to connect.

How much you and another person have in common might change over time. And if your values don’t align, it’s hard to maintain a bond.

“You can have fantastic energy with somebody, and then if you decide you’re not drinking anymore, the energy is off,” Robbins said. “If you decide to get really focused on fitness, the energy is off. If you have very different political beliefs, the energy is off.”

When an adult friendship fizzles, it’s usually because one or more of these three pillars dissolves. And while it’s hard to accept “you can’t force those things,” Robbins said.

To continue making friends when you’re older, focus on who is close to you, what they are going through, and how much you two have in common. Being more intentional about who you approach means you’re more likely to meet the right people.

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