SEL It!

Posted on May 30, 2014

Our cofounder and resident developmental psychology expert, Dr. Julie Watson, shared this great article about Social Emotional Learning (SEL) that I was compelled to share!

In the post, Dylan Arena, cofounder of Kidaptive, reiterates what researchers like Daniel Goleman, John Gottman, and the CASEL forum have long been advocating. SEL is key to the development of the whole child as well as “pure academic achievement.”

A recent study of more than 270,000 students revealed that “those who received SEL instruction outperformed those who didn’t by an average of 11 percentile points on measures of academic achievement.” That’s more than an entire grade jump!

So how can we help our children develop these skills? Dr. Arena has some great tips:

1) Build a social emotional vocabulary—In other words, name the feeling! Talk about what you’re feeling, what your child is feeling, and what characters in books or movies are feeling.

2) Identify peer emotions—Once your child has names for emotions, help him or her realize that other people feel these emotions, too. For example, ask your child why he thinks his friend is sad.

3) Learn to manage emotions—Though this is more difficult with younger children, simply because their brains are still developing and they are unable to control strong emotions, you can still, in Dr. Arena’s words, “connect emotionally and offer strategies for riding out the storm.”

This idea of dealing with the feeling is advocated by our resident Parentologist in her new book, The “Perfect” Parent, to be published this fall. Here are the three simple steps of Dealing with the Feeling: Spot it, Say It, Okay It. For more, read our blog post here.

Thanks again to Dr. Julie Watson for the great share! Have you experienced the benefits of emotional intelligence with your child? Tell us about it on Facebook and Twitter!