A 4-year-old comes to his teacher in tears because another child took the seat he wanted at snack time. “We don’t need to be so upset about that,” the teacher says. “Do a belly breath and go find a different seat.” Down the hall, a different 4-year-old, upset about the same kind of thing, gets a different response. Her teacher crouches down and says, “That really bothered you. Let’s figure out what to do.”
Neither teacher uses a single feelings word, but only the second of these children learned something about emotional intelligence: that when she feels something, it’s real information.
The national conversation about social-emotional learning is stuck on the wrong question. It’s not whether SEL works. By “works,” people mean different things, including acquiring skills that lead to better test scores, fewer disciplinary incidents, or stronger mental health years down the line. What I am concerned with here is a narrower, more foundational question: What actually builds a young child’s capacity in the formative early childhood years to use her emotions as useful information?
Too often, in early childhood settings (and beyond), we tend to treat emotions as noise that needs to be managed on the way to skill-building. Instead, we should recognize emotions as a practical type of intuition that children need to understand.
My work as a therapist and researcher working with young children keeps leading me to the same uncomfortable conclusion. Many American classrooms, social work services, and therapeutic spaces have built a teaching apparatus on a foundation shakier than it looks. Amid all the feelings charts, vocabulary lessons, breathing exercises, and body scanning, we’ve forgotten something foundational to the research about emotions: All emotions carry information, and emotion regulation is the capacity to use that information wisely.
A major 2018 review of nearly 80 preschool SEL programs found real gains in specific skills: for example, children’s ability to label emotions, matching a word to a face or a story. The review found smaller, less consistent gains in what everyone actually cares about: children handling real distress better in real moments. Naming a feeling and applying those lessons to the management of real-life distress are different skills.
Classroom SEL strategies often cue a child to describe feeling states in universal and absolute terms and connect those terms to their own body awareness. However, doing so does not replace in-the-moment interactions children have with caring adults who validate their experiences, however they are communicated. Research does not reliably demonstrate a strong link between body awareness and emotional competence, especially not in preschoolers. What does reliably predict emotional competence in early childhood is a sense of trust in the child’s own perceptions, and this is developed in the context of caring relationships over time.
A focus on using the “right” words for emotions or decoding specific facial expressions can also create a sense of mistrust in one’s own experiences, should they be experienced differently. Extensive research has shown that emotions are highly subjective.
Emotional competence is so much more than reducing one’s reaction to things. Children need to know how to make sense of what they are perceiving in order to make informed choices and solve the problems that create stress. Chasing external calm for its own goal can quietly teach a child that her internal experience is an inconvenience to be minimized, even when the adult delivering that message is warm and well-intentioned. Worse, strategies like mindfulness and meditation can produce dissociative or depersonalization-like experiences, if they are employed before emotions are felt, trusted, and understood.
Children whose caregivers respond to distress by taking it seriously and helping them work through the underlying problem show measurably better emotional adjustment than children whose caregivers dismiss or minimize what they’re feeling, however gently. One randomized trial found children of parents trained in this responsive approach showed fewer behavior problems than a comparison group months later. The intervention target is teaching adults to stop treating reactions borne of emotions—big and small—only as problems to be resolved quickly.
None of this necessarily requires new curriculum, which is likely why it’s been overlooked in favor of skill-building that’s easier to package. It does require a shift in professional development, from disseminating classroom-management scripts to coaching relationship-building. A few concrete things schools can do:
First, redefine “success” for young children in a hard moment, schoolwide.
When the focus shifts from reducing a feeling’s expression to solving the problem it’s about, adults can model genuine feelings and narrate how they use that information wisely. That might include strategies that draw on partners and conversation rather than heavily relying on coping independently and internally. This teaches children to trust what they feel and make meaning of it.
Second, treat “believing the child” as a trainable practice.
The effective first response isn’t correcting the size of a child’s reaction. It’s a pause, a moment of authentic validation, a beat of real attention before deciding how to intervene. This is coachable the same way any instructional habit is.
Third, invest professional development dollars in coaching teachers through real classroom moments.
This PD can include video review, peer observation, and in-the-moment feedback, rather than another purchased curriculum. Research on early childhood educator coaching consistently finds that how a practice is delivered matters as much as which one is chosen.
Fourth, consider the structural constraints that make it hard for teachers to slow down when children are struggling.
A child’s relationship with her teacher is central to social-emotional learning. That relationship needs protecting, which means teachers need support to avoid burnout.
Whether or not a child ever learns the word “frustrated,” what matters most is both simpler and harder: whether the adults around her treat what she’s feeling as real. That’s not organic to a traditional lesson plan, and it doesn’t depend on the “right” vocabulary, as long as adults can listen to the language children speak. It’s a relationship, practiced daily, in small moments that many adults have been quietly trained to rush past.
