I have two early elementary aged children. The amount that adults around them talk to them about anxiety is alarming. Everyone is constantly talking about their kids fears and worries. It's collective rumination on a massive scale. The adults kids look to to model confidence and leadership are walking around talking about anxiety and mental health 24 hours a day. On my sons first day of Kindergarten he came home with a drawing he had done during an SEL lesson that asked them to draw one of their fears. It was a picture of him laying in bed in his dark room. Welcome to school, tell us what scares you so we can talk about it. How absurd. Look at the current popular kids movie in theaters right now. Inside Out 2. It is a movie about anxiety. SEL doesn't work because all the skills it is trying to teach are naturally learned through experiences children are denied at school and at home. And even worse, when children do see the natural consequences of behavior they are told to ignore what they see and understand to be true and given a clearly wrong alternate explanation or set of rules to respond with. Kindness and inclusion are weaponized.
I could not agree more! Your point about how “SEL doesn't work because all the skills it is trying to teach are naturally learned through experiences children are denied at school and at home” is especially insightful. Thank you for articulating this so beautifully.
While in a different setting, I realized a lot of my own anxiety and depression as a 911 Dispatcher came from being told I should feel traumatized. A group of colleagues would send out monthly newsletters giving ideas on how to be more resilient. They also put up pop-psychology posters in the bathrooms about staving off the effects of trauma. The effect? I started to think of myself as broken and vulnerable. Meanwhile, many of the “old guard” who had done the work for 30 years told me they were just fine.
Yeah it feels like that was a whole wave, thinking that "awareness" would fix everything. But now, like with this post, we're realizing that awareness as it stands is part of the problem? I think some of it is when you think of things in hindsight, it's possible to process them with labels etc but when you're asked to do that with emotions in the moment, it's easy to get stuck with all the negative stuff, especially since therapy is focused on figuring out negative emotions. There's so much focus on negative emotions that we aren't as hyper aware of our positive emotions. And when we feel them, there's always some narrative telling us to temper them down lol.
That said, I'd be curious if the old guard folks were fine out of survivorship bias, like maybe the folks who were traumatized quit 25 years ago?
Another aspect of this - these programs in schools are probably not being administered by qualified psychologists as they would in a therapy setting. Teachers who are busy with a thousand other priorities teach them, and they are likely going through the motions based on whatever training/certification they received.
One thing about why labels are so limiting - they often feel like a 'brain is broken' diagnosis and it feels like there's no hope other than be on meds all your life. People stop trying to solve their mental health problems once a label is applied.
I had a rough late teens and 20s and finally got diagnosed with ADHD, for instance. I tried getting psychological help, but once you say you have an ADHD diagnosis, no one really tries to help you from first principles, they just go off the diagnosis and put you on meds. If the meds don't help, try another med. Therapy is all just trying to manage symptoms at the most superficial level and maybe some trauma digging. At this level it's just hard to do anything other than surrender to the label. But during the pandemic, I had a breakdown and worked on healing myself. I aggressively worked on my symptoms with whatever worked, and now I have very few symtpoms and they show up only when I'm extremely stressed out.
Once an expert puts a label on you though, it's really hard unless you're very motivated and have lots of time to figure a way out. Most parents of kids in school don't seem to have the bandwidth to help their kids in any way other than taking them to a therapist or getting them on meds, so yeah, things are going to be bad. And I'm willing to wager a lot of the mental health issues come from stress, and play-based learning could alleviate a lot of it.
What you said about ruminating hits home. I’ve tried to nip the ruminating in the bud with my kids, one in particular because of how it tends to weigh them down. This is probably why the Bible tells us to think on whatever is notable and good and praiseworthy
Thank you for writing about this. My children's primary school (K-6), in Australia, has recently run two programs that would probably fit under the SEL category.
One was a leadership program for the grade 5s. My child only attended a couple of lessons (they were doing reduced hours, and really hate zeroing in on emotions and such in a school setting especially, so I made sure they missed those hours) but as part of the program they were asked to fill in a very long and intrusive survey (that the parents were told nothing about). My child is highly anxious, and some of the questions had her worried that she had depression and wasn't enjoying her life.
The other is a friendship skills program used across the whole school. My kids hate it, and elsewhere I heard two kids from two different schools also grumbling about it (I think most of the schools in our network are using it). My kids don't feel at all equipped or inclined to use the skills they've been taught, and the child I mentioned earlier also started to feel worried that their friendships weren't "normal" because they never had fights with their friends!
I absolutely believe that these things wouldn't be needed if we'd just let kids do what kids do instead of controlling their lives. It's not to say that they won't need adult help sometimes (although I suspect that co-regulation often goes further than instruction) but I hate they way we've come to believe that teaching is the best and only way to support learning. It's the same with things like mindfulness. While I can see the supposed benefits, I also observe that children are naturally very good at being present in the moment. It's the stressful environments that we have them in that prevent them from being mindful to start with!
Very interesting text, and the discussion in the comments. A few years ago, when my older son started school, his teacher noted that sometimes his mind seems to be wandering in class, and she suggested we visit someone, a school employee, to see if this is ADHD or something. We went, no ADHD was diagnosed, but the school employee found his fine motoric skills to be lacking, and wanted us to start our son on some kind of a program. We decided not to do it. The best opinion I got was from my sister: give these people a chance to find a problem, they will find one. And then you start treating your child as a patient. And the worst is, the child will also think of himself as someone with a problem.
Ever more people are taking more kids out of school, and ever more kids who are enrolled aren't showing up. This may be the early steps to the end of schooling as we know it.
I have been teaching high school for 35 years and 10 of those are as a psychology teacher (I also have a Masters in Counseling) to 16&17 yr olds. I fully agree with the research that is cited on SEL. When I teach about wellness (Health and Stress Psychology), my focus is on the queries and questions that my students have and then using the research to empower them to live their best life. It’s vital that students learn that anxiety is a biological mechanism that is NORMAL and important, that keeps us safe and helps us to navigate our world. The focus must be on how to thrive in a dopamine addicted world. There are so many things kids can do to help them thrive like getting out in nature, exercising, maintaining a consistent sleep schedule to name just a very few. I have witnessed first hand what martial arts or even just a strong gym regimen can do to empower girls and boys. I recently discovered this movement in the UK. https://embodimentunlimited.com/crowdfunder/. As a parent of 2 young men, I have seen my son’s experience total empowerment over MH challenges through a regular exercise regimen.
I have recently been thinking about our classroom environments that support all children as a place of belonging. A place where everyone comes as they are and the environment supports them right where they are. This is different from inclusion as inclusion suggests that a person might not be included in some circumstances.
Did you know that in the mid 1700s into the 1800s that Americans were the most highly educated people in the history of the world? These people were taught by their parents and because it was ubiquitous the textbook was the Bible.
I was severely attacked as a School Board member for attempting to highlight the harmful effects of SEL being pushed by the superintendent, district lawyer, and three other complicit board members. Thank you for the succinct explanation of the harmful effects of SEL. I will definitely get the book “Bad Therapy” by Abigail Shirer, having familiarized myself with her book “Irreversible Damage.”
While I appreciate & agree with several of the sentiments of this letter, I feel that many of the drawbacks you mention about SEL programs are a result of poorly run SEL programs. When done correctly, SEL can break the cycles of the rumination, self-labeling and empower us to, "just go on with life" as you mention in this article.
However, I agree that our school system is the problem. You hit the nail on the head when you mentioned schools cutting back on homework, reintroducing recess, and eliminating high-stakes testing. I can acknowledge that our school system has missed the mark with the way SEL is implemented in the same way it has missed the mark on implementing many other things.
"Nothing taught in school sticks very well." Amen. And hopefully one day we will be able to reform this broken system. Because looking at the statistics surrounding teen suicide in this country, lives depend on it.
Thank you for providing this forum for thoughtful discourse and dialogue!
I'm curious what research has been done about social-emotional learning in early childhood. As a director, I have seen children's behavior change significantly for the better when the teachers are using a social-emotional teaching framework. Keep in mind, we are play-based, so the things that stress elementary school students don't really exist in our setting.
Unsurprisingly, it failed with the students probably for similar reasons to the ones you mention. (It did help the teachers manage their stress better). The idea that school itself is one of the main stressors didn’t seem to be considered at all.
I just checked - yes, that’s right. I was fascinated to hear some of the people involved in it talking about it. There was genuine surprise that children didn’t just learn this stuff then apply it. And I felt there was a lot of naivety about the school environment - the assumption was that it felt safe, which is just not the case for many children. My overriding takeaway was that it’s the teachers and facilitators who should be doing the training, so they can hold a ‘mindful’ space in which children do feel safer and more relaxed.
I have two early elementary aged children. The amount that adults around them talk to them about anxiety is alarming. Everyone is constantly talking about their kids fears and worries. It's collective rumination on a massive scale. The adults kids look to to model confidence and leadership are walking around talking about anxiety and mental health 24 hours a day. On my sons first day of Kindergarten he came home with a drawing he had done during an SEL lesson that asked them to draw one of their fears. It was a picture of him laying in bed in his dark room. Welcome to school, tell us what scares you so we can talk about it. How absurd. Look at the current popular kids movie in theaters right now. Inside Out 2. It is a movie about anxiety. SEL doesn't work because all the skills it is trying to teach are naturally learned through experiences children are denied at school and at home. And even worse, when children do see the natural consequences of behavior they are told to ignore what they see and understand to be true and given a clearly wrong alternate explanation or set of rules to respond with. Kindness and inclusion are weaponized.
Yes. If schools would all kids an hour a day of true free play, anxiety and depression would drop sharply.
I could not agree more! Your point about how “SEL doesn't work because all the skills it is trying to teach are naturally learned through experiences children are denied at school and at home” is especially insightful. Thank you for articulating this so beautifully.
While in a different setting, I realized a lot of my own anxiety and depression as a 911 Dispatcher came from being told I should feel traumatized. A group of colleagues would send out monthly newsletters giving ideas on how to be more resilient. They also put up pop-psychology posters in the bathrooms about staving off the effects of trauma. The effect? I started to think of myself as broken and vulnerable. Meanwhile, many of the “old guard” who had done the work for 30 years told me they were just fine.
Great example. Thank you for sharing it.
Yeah it feels like that was a whole wave, thinking that "awareness" would fix everything. But now, like with this post, we're realizing that awareness as it stands is part of the problem? I think some of it is when you think of things in hindsight, it's possible to process them with labels etc but when you're asked to do that with emotions in the moment, it's easy to get stuck with all the negative stuff, especially since therapy is focused on figuring out negative emotions. There's so much focus on negative emotions that we aren't as hyper aware of our positive emotions. And when we feel them, there's always some narrative telling us to temper them down lol.
That said, I'd be curious if the old guard folks were fine out of survivorship bias, like maybe the folks who were traumatized quit 25 years ago?
It's not the kind of job just everyone is cut out for. Only those who can empathize selectively would succeed.
Another aspect of this - these programs in schools are probably not being administered by qualified psychologists as they would in a therapy setting. Teachers who are busy with a thousand other priorities teach them, and they are likely going through the motions based on whatever training/certification they received.
One thing about why labels are so limiting - they often feel like a 'brain is broken' diagnosis and it feels like there's no hope other than be on meds all your life. People stop trying to solve their mental health problems once a label is applied.
I had a rough late teens and 20s and finally got diagnosed with ADHD, for instance. I tried getting psychological help, but once you say you have an ADHD diagnosis, no one really tries to help you from first principles, they just go off the diagnosis and put you on meds. If the meds don't help, try another med. Therapy is all just trying to manage symptoms at the most superficial level and maybe some trauma digging. At this level it's just hard to do anything other than surrender to the label. But during the pandemic, I had a breakdown and worked on healing myself. I aggressively worked on my symptoms with whatever worked, and now I have very few symtpoms and they show up only when I'm extremely stressed out.
Once an expert puts a label on you though, it's really hard unless you're very motivated and have lots of time to figure a way out. Most parents of kids in school don't seem to have the bandwidth to help their kids in any way other than taking them to a therapist or getting them on meds, so yeah, things are going to be bad. And I'm willing to wager a lot of the mental health issues come from stress, and play-based learning could alleviate a lot of it.
What you said about ruminating hits home. I’ve tried to nip the ruminating in the bud with my kids, one in particular because of how it tends to weigh them down. This is probably why the Bible tells us to think on whatever is notable and good and praiseworthy
There's a lot of folk wisdom about thinking positive and forgetting the negative if you can't do anything about it.
Thank you for writing about this. My children's primary school (K-6), in Australia, has recently run two programs that would probably fit under the SEL category.
One was a leadership program for the grade 5s. My child only attended a couple of lessons (they were doing reduced hours, and really hate zeroing in on emotions and such in a school setting especially, so I made sure they missed those hours) but as part of the program they were asked to fill in a very long and intrusive survey (that the parents were told nothing about). My child is highly anxious, and some of the questions had her worried that she had depression and wasn't enjoying her life.
The other is a friendship skills program used across the whole school. My kids hate it, and elsewhere I heard two kids from two different schools also grumbling about it (I think most of the schools in our network are using it). My kids don't feel at all equipped or inclined to use the skills they've been taught, and the child I mentioned earlier also started to feel worried that their friendships weren't "normal" because they never had fights with their friends!
I absolutely believe that these things wouldn't be needed if we'd just let kids do what kids do instead of controlling their lives. It's not to say that they won't need adult help sometimes (although I suspect that co-regulation often goes further than instruction) but I hate they way we've come to believe that teaching is the best and only way to support learning. It's the same with things like mindfulness. While I can see the supposed benefits, I also observe that children are naturally very good at being present in the moment. It's the stressful environments that we have them in that prevent them from being mindful to start with!
Very interesting text, and the discussion in the comments. A few years ago, when my older son started school, his teacher noted that sometimes his mind seems to be wandering in class, and she suggested we visit someone, a school employee, to see if this is ADHD or something. We went, no ADHD was diagnosed, but the school employee found his fine motoric skills to be lacking, and wanted us to start our son on some kind of a program. We decided not to do it. The best opinion I got was from my sister: give these people a chance to find a problem, they will find one. And then you start treating your child as a patient. And the worst is, the child will also think of himself as someone with a problem.
Peter,
Can we just get rid of public schools? SEL is an attempt to address behavioral issues caused by incentives and norms in public schools.
Ever more people are taking more kids out of school, and ever more kids who are enrolled aren't showing up. This may be the early steps to the end of schooling as we know it.
I have been teaching high school for 35 years and 10 of those are as a psychology teacher (I also have a Masters in Counseling) to 16&17 yr olds. I fully agree with the research that is cited on SEL. When I teach about wellness (Health and Stress Psychology), my focus is on the queries and questions that my students have and then using the research to empower them to live their best life. It’s vital that students learn that anxiety is a biological mechanism that is NORMAL and important, that keeps us safe and helps us to navigate our world. The focus must be on how to thrive in a dopamine addicted world. There are so many things kids can do to help them thrive like getting out in nature, exercising, maintaining a consistent sleep schedule to name just a very few. I have witnessed first hand what martial arts or even just a strong gym regimen can do to empower girls and boys. I recently discovered this movement in the UK. https://embodimentunlimited.com/crowdfunder/. As a parent of 2 young men, I have seen my son’s experience total empowerment over MH challenges through a regular exercise regimen.
I have recently been thinking about our classroom environments that support all children as a place of belonging. A place where everyone comes as they are and the environment supports them right where they are. This is different from inclusion as inclusion suggests that a person might not be included in some circumstances.
Did you know that in the mid 1700s into the 1800s that Americans were the most highly educated people in the history of the world? These people were taught by their parents and because it was ubiquitous the textbook was the Bible.
I was severely attacked as a School Board member for attempting to highlight the harmful effects of SEL being pushed by the superintendent, district lawyer, and three other complicit board members. Thank you for the succinct explanation of the harmful effects of SEL. I will definitely get the book “Bad Therapy” by Abigail Shirer, having familiarized myself with her book “Irreversible Damage.”
While I appreciate & agree with several of the sentiments of this letter, I feel that many of the drawbacks you mention about SEL programs are a result of poorly run SEL programs. When done correctly, SEL can break the cycles of the rumination, self-labeling and empower us to, "just go on with life" as you mention in this article.
However, I agree that our school system is the problem. You hit the nail on the head when you mentioned schools cutting back on homework, reintroducing recess, and eliminating high-stakes testing. I can acknowledge that our school system has missed the mark with the way SEL is implemented in the same way it has missed the mark on implementing many other things.
"Nothing taught in school sticks very well." Amen. And hopefully one day we will be able to reform this broken system. Because looking at the statistics surrounding teen suicide in this country, lives depend on it.
Thank you for providing this forum for thoughtful discourse and dialogue!
I explain learning versus education in my podcast here:
https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/3kj1AtElhMb
I'm curious what research has been done about social-emotional learning in early childhood. As a director, I have seen children's behavior change significantly for the better when the teachers are using a social-emotional teaching framework. Keep in mind, we are play-based, so the things that stress elementary school students don't really exist in our setting.
Thanks Peter. I was reminded of a mindfulness conference I went to about a year ago where they were reporting on a huge ‘mindfulness in schools’ study that was conducted here in the UK in 2022. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-07-13-how-effective-school-based-mindfulness-training
Unsurprisingly, it failed with the students probably for similar reasons to the ones you mention. (It did help the teachers manage their stress better). The idea that school itself is one of the main stressors didn’t seem to be considered at all.
Esther, the study you are referring too is probably the same mindfulness study mentioined in the letter--by Montero-Marin.
I just checked - yes, that’s right. I was fascinated to hear some of the people involved in it talking about it. There was genuine surprise that children didn’t just learn this stuff then apply it. And I felt there was a lot of naivety about the school environment - the assumption was that it felt safe, which is just not the case for many children. My overriding takeaway was that it’s the teachers and facilitators who should be doing the training, so they can hold a ‘mindful’ space in which children do feel safer and more relaxed.