What Our Kids Need

Think of a child you love–maybe your own, or a grandchild. Now reflect on the skill set that child will need over the decades of his or her lifetime. Emotional intelligence will be essential.

When I wrote the book Emotional Intelligence some 25 years ago, I argued for educating students’ emotional and social skills. I was spurred by the finding that when it came to students’ problems like violence and bullying, drug abuse, depression, and dropouts, the programs that worked all cultivated the same basics of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and social skills. 

Around the same time, a small group of us founded the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning to spread an approach designed to help kids develop these life skills. Today it has become a worldwide movement known as “social/emotional learning,” or SEL.

There are many variations of SEL: some use full half-hour lessons, others embed those lessons in the standard academic curriculum. The best versions are gauged to the cognitive and emotional level of students at each grade level.

For instance, take making social decisions. At age seven, children might brainstorm what would help and what would hurt if they thought someone had taken their pencil. But at age 14, the same brainstorm is about a big problem for teens: how to say “No” to drugs and keep your friends.

Research shows that these programs work: a study of 270,000 students found SEL lowers antisocial problems like fights and bullying by 10%, increases prosocial attitudes–such as liking school–by 10%, and boosts academic achievement scores by 11%. A more recent study found an advantage of 14% in academic achievement. And these benefits last up to 18 years, the longest SEL students have been followed.

The first week of April saw the launch of a next-generation SEL program, the Emory University SEE Learning. It adds to SEL several crucial skills that are largely missing from existing programs–some of which I identified in my book The Triple Focus–written with MIT’s Peter Senge. These include attention training, care and compassion, systems learning, and the development of an ethical outlook. 

Take attention training. I was in an SEL classroom of seven-year-olds in Spanish Harlem, a poor neighborhood in New York City. A large portion of the students there have problems like hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder. I expected the classroom to be noisy and chaotic, but the kids were calm and focused. I asked why and the teacher encouraged me to watch; they each took their favorite stuffed animal and found a place to lie down on a rug. They put that stuffed toy on their belly and watched it rise on the in-breath, fall on the out-breath for four or five minutes.

This is an exercise in what scientists call “cognitive control.” It strengthens the brain circuits that let you focus on one topic and ignore distractions–the same circuits also decrease impulsivity. This simple brain training helps ready a child to learn.

In New Zealand, a thousand children were assessed for cognitive control when they were 4 to 8, and tracked down again in their mid-30s. Cognitive control predicted their financial success and health better than their IQ and better than the wealth of the family they grew up in. It levels the socioeconomic playing field.

In addition, helping children cultivate compassion provides an ethical foundation for SEE Learning. This combination of calm, clarity, and compassion seems exactly what the world needs now–and today’s children will need increasingly.

Scientists at the Lamont Environmental Research campus of Columbia University tell me that over the life span of today’s children the earth will transform:

• Rising water levels will flood many coastal cities.
• The world’s four major food crops–rice, wheat, soy and corn–will no longer grow where they thrive today.
• Starting in South Asia, and gradually spreading to other tropical climates, there will be several days each year when super-high humidity and soaring temperatures will mean sweating no longer cools the human body–many people will die.

The me-first ethic that has become so dominant in economics and society today will likely make these disasters worse. For the human species to survive, we will need an ethic of compassion, and emotional intelligence skills like resilience, empathy, teamwork, and collaboration, more than ever.

My hope is that programs like SEE Learning will be adopted far and wide, and will help more and more student throughout their lives, as they grow up and grapple with challenges not seen before in human history.

If you'd like to help lead a more emotionally intelligent future, consider becoming an Emotional Intelligence Certified Coach. Graduates can utilize their certification in a variety of fields, including education, healthcare, and consulting. You can learn more and apply here.