Nata Schepy

I’d like you to take a moment and imagine you’re four years old.

You’re building a tower, and you’re really proud of it. But then the next minute another child comes running along and kicks over your tower. You are outraged, and you feel all these feelings bubble up inside — hurt, panic, frustration and helplessness. Just then, an adult comes by.

They get close, get down to your level, and ask: “Honey, what happened?”

In their eyes, there’s compassion and you feel that their body is calm and regulated. And then all those feelings come bubbling out of you — frustration, anger, helplessness.

This adult says: “Tell me all about it.” They don’t try and fix it, and they don’t say to you: “Don’t worry, you can build another one.” They just let you feel all that you’re feeling. Then they open their arms and you snuggle, take another deep breath, feel better and go back to building your tower.

If you were lucky, the adults in your life gave you lots of space to express how you feel without trying to fix what was going on.

Now I’d like you to try and remember being four years old and a time when you felt angry or sad or scared or you didn’t understand what was going on.

How did the adults in your life respond to you? If you were lucky, they gave you lots of space to express how you feel and listened to your worries and hurt without trying to fix what was going on.

But many of us probably had the opposite experience. Maybe we were told “Stop being so stupid” or “You don’t need to cry.” You might have been sent to your room or to the corner or even been hit for making a mistake.

We still value IQ far more than we value EQ.

Why am I talking about children and feelings? We’ve seen a steady increase in psychological distress among adults — in Australia and around the world. And I see this increase in distress as being rooted in part in the messages we received as children around how to express feelings and emotions.

Of course, it’s easy to blame our parents for what they did or didn’t do. But the real issue is the lack of emotional literacy in our culture. We don’t teach parents how to respond to children’s feelings and emotions with empathy and compassion. We also don’t teach it in our kindergartens; we don’t teach it in our schools. We still value IQ far more than we value EQ.

My work over the last 16 years with families around attachment, trauma and connection has shown me that there are usually three ways we learn as kids to deal with feelings and emotions.

You might have been labeled as “naughty”, “too much” or “trouble” when all you were doing was responding to your environment.

The first way is repression. Perhaps as a child, you learnt that it wasn’t safe to express your feelings. You might have gotten shut down and told to stop crying. Or you were given a look that made you draw everything inside and push them down deep. The impact of repression on a child is that those feelings stay there.

And then as adults, those feelings can turn up again when life throws us a curveball. Those same feelings come up, but this time, we respond by having another glass of wine or spending hours mindlessly scrolling through Facebook or making ourselves so busy at work that we don’t have time to feel .

The second way is aggression. As a child if we felt really powerless or scared and we grew up in an authoritarian environment where we didn’t have a voice and couldn’t say how we felt, then those feelings would again bubble up inside us. At the point where they would tip over when we felt most frightened or threatened, then they might come out in the form of aggression, rage, loud words. You might have been labeled as “naughty”, “too much” or “trouble” when all you were doing was responding to your environment.

And then as adults, those tendencies show up in bullying behavior. Or they can turn up in harsh critical thoughts about ourselves and others. Or it can show up as violence.

The third way is expression. If we grew up with an imprint that said “Feelings are welcome. I will accept all of you — the happy bits, the sad bits, the joyous bits, the bits that are angry. I’m not going to try and fix them; I’m just going to hold you,” then as adults when things feel hard, we reach for our journal and write down our thoughts. Or we call a friend and say: “Hey, can you listen to me?” Or we might go for a run, do some yoga, speak to our therapist and find a way to lean into the feelings, we feel them and let them go.

When I was a new parent, my game plan was “I’ll just keep them happy all the time.” But that’s a ridiculous thing to do.

I am a mother to three beautiful teenagers. When I first became a parent, like many of you, I had absolutely no clue about what I was doing. When it came to understanding their feelings and emotions, my game plan was “I’ll just keep them happy all the time.” But, as anyone who has kids realizes, that’s a ridiculous thing to do. It is impossible and incredibly exhausting to try to keep people happy all the time. So I learned that I needed to find a way to help my children thrive emotionally and also create harmony for them in our home.

I’m lucky enough to understand and study trauma, and I began to see that what we need as humans is a safe place to unpack all of who we are. We need boundaries and holding, but we also need empathy and compassion for those big feelings that rise within. Instead of trying to fix their problems and trying to make them happy all the time, I just got down low and said: “Tell me all about it.”

And I just listened. Sometimes there were tears; sometimes, rage or complaining. But every time my only job was to sit there and hold space for them.

What I began to see was emotional intelligence developing in my children.

How do we expect our children to have empathy and compassion for other people if we don’t show them how?

One evening, I realized just how powerful this was. I was making dinner but I also had to go teach a class so I was doing the hustle that most parents do.

I was just about to go out the door when my youngest daughter, who was five at the time, came into the kitchen. She looked unhappy, and I could see that she’s feeling some feelings. I actually turned to her and said: “Honey, do you think you could hold onto your feelings for a few hours?” Of course, she looked at me like, “Are you kidding?”

At that moment my middle daughter, who was then 10, walked into the room. She said, “I’ll listen to your feelings”, and I’m like “OK.” So my 10-year-old took the 5-year-old into the bedroom, and I thought, I’m going to be late for work because I need to see what happens here.

I stood outside their door, and I heard my 10-year-old say: “Tell me all about it.” And the five-year-old started crying and complaining about all the things that had happened at school.

The 10-year-old was going, “Oh that’s hard. What else?” And then there was more complaining and then more tears and giggles and laughter and they came out of the room.

I saw my 10-year-old and said to her, “Honey, how was that for you?” She looked at me and said, “Well, Mama, I just did to her what you do for me.”

At that moment, I realized that children can’t be what they can’t see. How do we expect them to have empathy and compassion for other people if we don’t show them how? How can we expect them to treat others with kindness and respect if they don’t know what that feels like in their own bodies?

I wonder:

— What would it be like if we actually supported parents with the tools and understanding to listen compassionately to their children?

— What would it be like if we actually helped parents unpack their own childhood, so they don’t have to carry that baggage and put it on their children’s shoulders?

— What would it be like if we supported and encouraged boys to cry and be vulnerable and girls to rage and find their voice and speak up for what they need?

— What if instead of harsh disciplines and punishments, we replaced them with compassionate listening and loving limits and boundaries?

— What would it look like if we took all of these ideas and placed them in our education system?

About 18 months ago, a colleague and I created Woodline Primary School. It’s set in the Geelong hinterlands on a beautiful farm with abundant nature. We have horses, chickens and veggie patches, and the philosophy of our school is to foster our students’ emotional well-being in a safe learning environment.

Sir Ken Robinson said the aims of education are to understand the world around us and the world within us. But what if we prioritized the world within?

Research shows that when children feel safe to learn — which means they feel free of judgment and criticism, they’re treated with kindness and respect, they have autonomy over their bodies and their learning, and they are given much love and celebrated for their unique differences — their neurological systems become fully operational and their capacity for growth and learning increases.

Our aim at Woodline is for children to learn about the world and also develop critical life skills such as emotional intelligence, growth mindset, critical thinking and a love of failure. Every time you fail, you realize, “Ah there are so many more options I haven’t yet explored!” More than anything, we want them to learn to be compassionate citizens of the Earth.

The late great Sir Ken Robinson said that the aims of education are to understand the world around us and the world within us. But what if we prioritized the world within? Surely, the world around us would make so much more sense.

Just think: How different could the world be if we placed connection, heart and compassionate listening at the center of every one of our relationships?

This post was adapted from a TEDxDocklands Talk. Watch it here:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lael Stone is an author, speaker, parenting educator and consultant that specializes in helping adults process their childhood trauma. She is the cofounder of Woodline Primary School, cohost of The Aware Parenting Podcast and a mum to 3 grown-up children.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Eugenia Mello

People who have greater levels of self-compassion tend to be more motivated, less lazy, and more successful over time. But just as important, they like themselves even when they fall short.

Psychologist Susan David explains how you can cultivate this quality.

One of the great myths of self-compassion is that it’s about lying to yourself. Or, that it’s about being weak or being lazy. Another myth is that it’s about pushing aside your difficult thoughts and saying, “Now I’m going to tell myself five positive things.”

That’s not self-compassion. When you are self-compassionate, you’re actually doing something very specific for yourself — you’re noticing difficult thoughts, showing up for them, and creating a sense of psychological safety for yourself.

You’re creating a space in which you feel able to take risks. If you beat yourself up whenever you fail or fall short, this naturally inhibits you from trying new things and taking chances. But when you’re self-compassionate, you know that even if you fail, you’ll still like yourself. In this way, self-compassion gives you the ability to experiment and explore, and to be courageous.

In research studies, people who have greater levels of self-compassion tend to be more motivated, less lazy, and more successful over time. They still recognize where they’ve gone wrong, but rather than getting caught up in blame and judgement, they can learn from the experience and adapt and change course for the next time.

So how can you cultivate self-compassion? Start by ending the tug-of-war inside yourself. In a research study that looked at more than 70,000 people, I found about one-third of the participants judged their normal experiences and emotions as being “good” or “bad”, “positive” or “negative”. When you evaluate your life in such a black-and-white way, you’re entering into an internal tug-of-war — you criticize yourself whenever you feel “bad” or “negative” emotions and whenever you don’t feel “good” or “positive” emotions.

To stop the tug-of-war, simply drop the rope. When we experience a challenging emotion like sadness or disappointment, many of us respond by telling ourselves: “This is bad; I shouldn’t be feeling this. Why can’t I be more positive?!?” And then we follow up this judgement with more judgement — we berate ourselves for not being self-compassionate. Next time that happens, try saying to yourself, “I’m feeling sad. What is this sadness a signpost of? What is it pointing to that’s important to me? What is it teaching me?”

Think of your difficult emotions and thoughts as data. They can provide you with valuable information about who you are and what really matters. Self-compassion allows you to acknowledge and accept all of your feelings, even when they’re negative. For instance, you might notice that you’re feeling really frustrated at work. So ask yourself: “What is that frustration a signpost of? What is it telling me about what’s important to me?”

For one person, frustration might be a signpost that their voice isn’t being heard. For another person, that frustration might be a signpost that they’re not growing in their job. By asking questions about your uncomfortable emotions, you’re gaining a greater level of perspective about yourself and engaging your curiosity about who you are as a human being.

When you can get curious about your experiences, you’re 50 percent of the way to being self-compassionate. Because at that moment, you’re not judging yourself and your emotions. Instead, you’re looking at them and learning from them. You can also use this process to figure out the wisest action to take. Follow up your observations by asking yourself: “What could I do in this situation that would best serve me, my values and my goals?”

If you find yourself having trouble being self-compassionate, don’t beat yourself up. When you’re having a lack-of-self-compassion day, it’s really important to not criticize yourself. One thing that can help is to look at yourself from a different angle. We’ve all got a child version of ourselves who lives inside us.

Imagine if a child came to you and said, “No one wants to be with me” or “I’m feeling sad” or “I tried to do well in this project but I wasn’t successful,” would you punish them? Of course not. You’d put your arms around them, you’d love them, you’d listen to them, and you’d see them. Sometimes, as an adult when we lack self-compassion, it can help to connect with the child in you and find out what they need. So when you’re struggling to access self-compassion, ask: “I notice that I’m feeling X emotion. What is it that the child in me needs right now?”

Ultimately, self compassion is about recognizing what it means to be human. Discomfort, stress, disappointment, loss and pain are all part of the human journey. If we are not able to enter into a space of kindness to ourselves, we’re putting ourselves at odds with the reality of life. Another hallmark of humanity is imperfection: To be human is to be imperfect and to make mistakes. Self-compassion is a necessary part of our journey; it’s about recognizing that you are doing the best you can — with who you are, with what you’ve got, and with the resources that you’ve been given.

Watch her TED Talk now: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan David is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, cofounder and codirector of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, and CEO of Evidence Based Psychology, a business consultancy.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

iStock

If kids don’t feel trusted — or if there isn’t anyone close to them whom they can rely on — they can really suffer. Esther Wojcicki, an educator and mother of three superstar daughters, explains why trust is essential and how to build it in the young people in our lives.

Esther Wojcicki has inspired thousands of kids through her 35-year-and-counting career as a journalism and English teacher at Palo Alto High School in California. She and her husband, Stanley, have also raised three exceptionally accomplished daughters: Susan (YouTube CEO), Janet, a Fulbright-winning anthropologist, pediatrics professor and researcher), and Anne (cofounder and CEO of 23andMe). So she knows quite a bit about helping young people grow into great grown-ups. Here, she writes about the critical importance of trust and how to cultivate it in children, starting at a very early age.

All you need is one person, just one person who trusts and believes in you, and then you feel you can do anything. Unfortunately, a lot of children — like Michael, a former student of mine — don’t have even one person. Michael was an editor-in-chief of the Campanile, Palo Alto High School’s newspaper, in 2013, and his struggles represent those of many other young people.

For Michael, the pressures started early. “I had very strict parents,” he says. “They would tell me if I didn’t do well in school, I’d be homeless.” His early teachers weren’t very supportive either, and people misinterpreting his behavior and motivations became a common theme in his life. “I would get admonished,” he says, “by peers and educators telling me if I followed the rules and paid attention, of course I’d do better. It was almost part of my core being, to be this thing that was trodden on; everything I did turned into some kind of moral shortcoming.”

By the time he made it to my class, Michael described himself as “completely burned out like a pile of ash.” The school newspaper was the only thing he derived any meaning from, and still he could barely muster the will to show up. But he did. I got to know him as a bright but disconnected kid. He’d come into class and have no idea what he wanted to do or write about.

“To hear outside confirmation that someone believed in me… helped me not to crumble.”

I’ve seen so many students like this — they’re afraid but they’re also rebellious. They’re not cooperative. They’re difficult, even aggressive, and it’s because every single one of them feels bad about themselves. They’re constantly trying to prove to themselves — and to others — that they’re better than everyone thinks, but they’re constantly scared they’ll fall short.

During one of our production nights, Michael was struggling with music theory homework. “I was exhausted, trying to figure out this assignment,” he says, “and I was half-assing it.” Other students teased him for struggling, and he thought to himself, as he often did, “That’s right, I can’t do it.” I saw what was happening, walked up to the kids, and said, “He’s taking longer because he’s smart.” I knew deep down that Michael wanted to get it right, not just rush through it.

This was the first time that Michael had heard an adult say his abilities and intelligence were seen and respected. “To hear outside confirmation that someone believed in me,” he says, “even in the presence of other students who didn’t — it was awesome. It helped me not to crumble.”

That day was a turning point for him. He started to trust himself and called on this newfound confidence during his undergraduate years whenever he encountered obstacles or someone told him he’d never make it. He went on to earn a degree in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, where he’s now a neuropsychiatric researcher. He’d found his one person to believe in him by accident, and it made all the difference.

Parents and teachers can sometimes forget how important we are in the lives of our children. We have so much control we have in shaping their confidence and self-image. And it all starts with trust, with believing a child is capable, even through setbacks, surprises and all the complications that come with growing up.

Trust empowers kids, whether it’s in the classroom or in the world at large, and the process of developing trust starts earlier than you think. Infants who are securely attached to their parents — who feel they can trust and depend on them — avoid many behavioral, social, and psychological problems that can arise later. A child’s fundamental sense of security in the world is based on their caregiver being someone they can rely upon.

Remember, trust is mutual. The degree to which your children can trust you will become reflected in their own ability to trust. Studies show that children rated as less trustworthy by their teachers exhibit higher levels of aggression and lower levels of “prosocial behavior” such as collaborating and sharing. Distrust in children has also been associated with their social withdrawal and loneliness.

“Many parents are operating from their own insecurities or doubts: Doesn’t their child need them?”

If we don’t feel trusted when we’re kids — or if there isn’t anyone close to us we can trust — we have difficulty getting over it. We grow up thinking we’re not trustworthy, and we accept it as a character trait. Like Michael, we become what we think we are, and we can suffer for it.

So how do we go about building trust in our children? We typically think of trust as handing our teenager the car keys and permitting them to drive on their own, or letting our 12-year-old stay home alone for the first time. But trust needs to start soon after kids are born.

Babies observe our every move as they learn how to get what they need from us. They know how to make us smile. They know how to make us cry. They may be dependent on us for everything, but they’re a lot more intelligent than we give them credit for. You need to respond to their needs, especially early on so they can feel you and their environment are trustworthy, but it’s also a fantastic time to start teaching your child some important lessons.

Many parents are operating from their own insecurities or doubts: Doesn’t their child need them? And if they don’t, what kind of parents are they? I firmly believe that you want your child to want to be with you, not to need to be with you.

This tension first arises with sleep. Your children can and will sleep on their own if you believe they can do it and if you teach them how. Kids learn to self-soothe, when given the opportunity, by sucking their thumbs, using pacifiers, or playing with toys. My daughters always had stuffed animals, and sometimes I’d wake up and find Susan talking to her teddy bear. Janet used to sing in bed. Because we’d built a relationship of trust, they learned they could entertain themselves and meet a lot of their own needs which meant that my husband and I got to sleep. A win-win.

As kids grow, they can be given more and more opportunities to build their own trustworthiness. The choices you make with your child will dictate the culture of your family. You always want to ask yourself whether you’re actively building trust in them or whether you’re shutting your child down. For young children, little achievements can build their trust and belief in themselves. They tie their own shoes, and it works! They put on their own clothes, and it works! They walk to school, and that works too! Through these small victories, they can see the tangible results of their efforts.

While you can’t always trust a small child to make intelligent choices, you can guide them in considering options and picking the best one. If I gave my nine-year-old grandson a lollipop and told him not to eat it, I know he still would. But if I explained why he shouldn’t eat it, that sugar isn’t healthy and might even give him cavities and that eating it before dinner will spoil his appetite, he could start to learn how to make better choices. OK, he might go ahead and eat the lollipop anyway, but as we work on these kinds of decisions over time, he would build the skills for living a healthy life and take care of himself.

“When we are fearful and hover over our children, they become afraid.”

Each age brings its own instances of trust. When my daughters were around 5, I’d ask them whether they were hungry and then I’d believe their answer. I did bring snacks with me in case they misjudged their hunger. If we were on a long car ride and they didn’t want to eat when we stopped for a meal, I’d explain we wouldn’t stop at another restaurant for several hours and I’d let them determine what to do. I trusted them with their eating decisions.

With teenagers, parents can cultivate trust in a series of steps. For instance, here is how I’d build trust with shopping, one of my favorite educational activities:

Step 1: The parent does everything, selecting and buying all items needed by a child.
Step 2: You trust your child to go with you to the store, and you allow them to make most of the purchasing decisions (giving kids a specific budget is a wonderful way to teach financial responsibility).
Step 3: You let your child gather the needed items on their own; the two of you meet at the registers at a set time and make the final purchases together.
Step 4: Once you’ve built a foundation of trust and taught your child how to be responsible with money, you can give them your credit card and let them shop on their own (many major credit cards allow you to add a minor as an authorized user). Of course, you’ll check the charges and teach them to verify the credit card statement with you at the end of the month.

Another way to gauge your teenager’s trustworthiness is by testing whether they make good on their word. They said they’d be home by 8 PM — were they? If they were late, did they call or text to tell you in advance? After they prove themselves trustworthy, increase their freedoms and responsibilities.

And if they still need to learn to come home on time, have a conversation about what went wrong and troubleshoot together for the next time. Some kids just have a hard time being on time, but don’t give up — give them more opportunities to learn. After all, time management is a skill that many adults lack, too.

If children aren’t empowered with trust and if they don’t feel trustworthy, they’ll have a very difficult time becoming independent. They won’t learn to trust and respect themselves. When we are fearful and hover over our children, they become afraid.

Excerpted from the new book How to Raise Successful People: Simple Lessons for Radical Results by Esther Wojcicki. Copyright © 2019 Esther Wojcicki. Used with permission from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Watch her TEDxBerkeley talk now: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Esther Wojcicki is an educator, journalist and mother of Anne (cofounder and CEO of 23andme), Susan (YouTube CEO), and Janet (Fulbright-winning anthropologist, pediatrics professor and researcher). A leader in blended learning and the integration of technology into education, she is the founder of the Media Arts programs at Palo Alto High School. Wojcicki serves as vice chair of Creative Commons and was instrumental in the launch of the Google Teachers Academy. She blogs regularly for Huffington Post and is coauthor of the book Moonshots in Education.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

Jenice Kim

Let’s celebrate boys for their abilities, values and passions, and show them that their character matters more than their height, says rapper and poet Meta Sarmiento.

I was born and raised on the island of Guam. An unincorporated territory of the US, Guam is located in Micronesia. One of the first things I learned in kindergarten was that you couldn’t find Guam on a globe without using a magnifying glass. Imagine a half-grown child, standing on shore, staring at the expansive horizon and realizing a single grain of sand is bigger than his home on a map.

Now I’m not that half-grown child anymore. I’m more like a half-grown adult — I’m 5’5” when I got my shoes on.

When you’re a tiny kid who grows up in a tiny house on a very small island, you naturally start to feel how big the rest of the world is. In a society that emphasizes the enormity of things, being little can be a huge hurdle. At school, the bigger kids roughed me up because they could.

It began innocently enough — can’t get on the roller coaster because I’m too short, can’t join my division in football because I’m too light, can’t date girls in heels. But, then, life got more complicated — can’t defend the people I love, can’t speak my mind because I’m too afraid, can’t compete with others in my field of work on a global scale.

Everything I learned taught me that size will always be the final measurement of strength. How could little old me ever be strong? I carried that question with me, and at every turn I heard the same answer — a voice saying, “You’re too weak.” Eventually, that voice started screaming, “You will never be good enough for anyone or anything,” and I believed it.

I felt hopelessly weak for a long time until my sister gave birth to Elijah, her first son and my eldest nephew. Everyone in my family says he reminds them of me. He’s musically inclined, he loves to read, he’s emotionally intelligent — and he’s also really small.

So when I started seeing myself in him, I grew worried. I didn’t want him to harbor the same self-doubts or feel hopelessly weak, but I knew it was inevitable. I wanted to be that super-awesome uncle who could help him through it all, but how could I do that if I was stuck in the same place?

Eli was my motivation to figure things out. One of the most important things I did was ask myself: “In what other ways am I strong?”

I realized that we need to stop portraying boys’ strength in such a limited way. We need to stop focusing on mass alone — the extent of one’s strength should not be determined solely by one’s size. Why? Because we are so much more than a push or a pull or a fist and a body.

If we can teach young boys at an early age to look beyond their physical attributes and to look inward to reflect on their abilities, their values, their passions and their knowledge, we might have a world full of boys and men who are less obsessed with proving strength through how much space they occupy, control or destroy.

I viewed myself as this tiny kid from this tiny island, when I should have been viewing myself as a young man from Micronesia, a region rich with culture, talent and perseverance.

And I should have seen that right next to Guam is the Marianas Trench, the deepest place on this planet. It’s a world so submerged and unexplored that we’re only just beginning to understand what’s inside of it. I think that’s how we should view strength — true strength is defined by the depths of our character and our potential.

This piece was adapted from his TEDxMileHigh talk. Watch it here:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Meta Sarmiento is a Filipino rapper and poet from Guam, and he is now based in Denver. Sarmiento was a finalist for the 2019 Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest, Top 12 Finisher at the 2018 WRLD UNDERGROUND MC TOURNAMENT, and a winner of 2015 Spoken Word for the World, where he was flown to Paris to perform during the UN Climate Negotiations. His work often explores themes of cultural identity, masculinity, family and love. Follow Meta on Instagram and Twitter @metasarmiento.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Who taught you how to identify and manage your emotions, how to recognize them when they arose, and how to navigate your way through them? For many adults, the answer is: No one. You hacked your way through those confusing thickets on your own. Although navigating our inner landscape was not something that was taught to us in school, it should be, contend a number of researchers. They believe emotional skills should rank as high in importance in children’s educations as math, reading, history and science.

Why do emotions matter? Research has found that people who are emotionally skilled perform better in school, have better relationships, and engage less frequently in unhealthy behaviors. Plus, as more and more jobs are becoming mechanized, so-called soft skills — which include persistence, stress management and communication — are seen as a way to make humans irreplaceable by machine. There has been a growing effort in American schools to teach social and emotional learning (SEL), but these tend to emphasize interpersonal skills like cooperation and communication.

Kids are often taught to ignore or cover over their emotions. Many Western societies view emotions as an indulgence or distraction, says University of California-Santa Barbara sociologist Thomas Scheff, a proponent of emotional education. Our emotions can give us valuable information about the world, but we’re often taught or socialized not to listen to them. Just as dangerous, Scheff says, is the practice of hiding one emotion behind another. He has found that men, in particular, tend to hide feelings of shame under anger, aggression and, far too often, violence.

How does one go about teaching emotions? One of the most prominent school programs for teaching about emotions is RULER, developed in 2005 by Marc Brackett, David Caruso and Robin Stern of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. The multiyear program is used in more than 1,000 schools, in the US and abroad, across grades K-8. The name, RULER, is an acronym for its five goals: recognizing emotions in oneself and others; understanding the causes and consequences of emotions; labeling emotional experiences with an accurate and diverse vocabulary; and expressing and regulating emotions in ways that promote growth.

As a strategy, children are taught to focus on the underlying theme of an emotion rather than getting lost in trying to define it. When an emotion grips you, explains Stern, understanding its thematic contours can help “name it to tame it.” Even though anger is experienced differently by different people, she explains, “the theme underlying anger is the same. It’s injustice or unfairness. The theme that underlies disappointment is an unmet expectation. The theme that underlies frustration is feeling blocked on your way to a goal. Pinning down the theme can “help a person be seen and understood and met where she is,” says Stern.

RULER’s lessons are woven into all classes and subjects. So, for example, if “elated’ is the emotional vocabulary word under discussion, a teacher would ask students in an American history class to link “elated” to the voyage of Lewis and Clark. Instruction reaches beyond the classroom, too; kids are prompted to talk with their parents or caregivers about when they last felt elated. Researchers at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence has found RULER schools tend to see less-frequent bullying, lower anxiety and depression, more student leadership and higher grades. So why isn’t emotional education the norm rather than the exception?

Surprising fact: While scientists and educators agree on the need to teach emotions, they don’t agree on how many there are and what they are. RULER’s curriculum consists of hundreds of “feeling words,” including curious, ecstatic, hopeless, frustrated, jealous, relieved and embarrassed. Other scholars’ lists of emotions have ranged in number from two to eleven. Scheff suggests starting students out with six: grief, fear, anger, pride, shame and excessive fatigue.

While psychology began to be studied as a science more than a century ago, up to now it has focused more on identifying and treating disorders. Scheff, who has spent years studying one taboo emotion — shame — and its destructive impact on human actions, admits, “We don’t know much about emotions, even though we think we do, and that goes for the public and for researchers.” Or, as Virginia Woolf so beautifully put it, “The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted.”

Parents can start to encourage their kids’ emotional awareness with a simple prompt “Tell me about some of your best moments,” a phrase Scheff has used to initiate discussions with his university students. But he and Stern agree that schools can’t wait until academics have sorted out the name and number of emotions before they act. “We know we have emotions all day long, whether we’re aware of them or not,” Stern points out. Let’s teach kids how to ride those moment-by-moment waves, instead of getting tossed around.

Art credit: TED-Ed. Author bio: Grace Rubenstein is a journalist, editor and multimedia producer in California. Note: The article above has been adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas.ted.com article. To read daily coverage of the world of ideas, check out Ideas.ted.com. To read more great articles about education, sign up for the free weekly TED-Ed newsletter here >>