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Schools across the country are adopting social-emotional learning (SEL) standards as an approach to creating school communities that are safe and positive climates for learning, as well as a foundation to set students up for success in school and in life. In theory, this is a step in the right direction - we want schooling spaces where students, families, educators, school staff, and all those who come into contact with the school building feel safe, affirmed, and supported. We want schools that foster emotional support between students, staff, and communities, where there's a trust-building approach rather than school hardening, and we want restorative justice, rather than the policing, punishment, and criminalization of Black and Brown students.

However, these SEL conversations, practices, and curricula are too often based on white, cisgender, patriarchal norms and values which further enact emotional and psychological violence onto Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ youth of color, in particular. The current narrative around SEL is that students must manage and regulate themselves and their emotions, conform and constrict their identities, and not express their fullest, most authentic selves. As school districts begin to devise plans for back-to-school, we must re-examine how we talk about and teach SEL.

While visiting classrooms in a middle school this year, I perused how every classroom had the same print-out displayed on the wall. The poster detailed the five core competencies of SEL, as defined by CASEL - self awareness, self management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. As an example of social awareness, the signs read, "Keep your hands to yourself and don't take other people's property." While social awareness should be about unpacking bias, having critical dialogue about social issues, and collectively crafting justice-oriented solutions, this white-washed version, as Dr. Dena Simmons reminds us, made me wonder: whose social norms are we abiding by and adhering to?

In Dr. Monique Morris's newest book, Sing a Rhythm, Dance A Blues: Education for the Liberation of Black and Brown Girls, Morris tells the story of Esperanza, who as part of the EMERGE program in Oakland, California, was scheduled to speak at a national conference on Chicana/Latina girls in the...

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When SEL is Used as Another Form of Policing

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Schools across the country are adopting social-emotional learning (SEL) standards as an approach to creating school communities that are safe and positive climates for learning, as well as a...

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MindsetWorks | Growth Mindset | Growth Mindset Programs

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Brainology is an online interactive program in which middle school students learn about how the brain works, how to strengthen their own brains, and how to better approach their own learning. In the process they develop a growth mindset whereby they think of their intelligence as something they can develop through study and learning rather than as something fixed, as explained by our co-founder Dr. Carol Dweck.

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Scott Zimmerman is the Director of Social and Emotional Learning at St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Austin, Texas. He has been recording Choose Love lessons led by students and is offering them for all to use during this time. Please use these videos at home to ensure your kids are keeping up with their Social and Emotional Learning needs and keep practicing the Choose Love Formula!

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Scott Zimmerman is the Director of Social and Emotional Learning at St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Austin, Texas. He has been recording Choose Love lessons led by students and is offering them for all to use during this time.

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subscribe to Coronavirus Daily podcast

Nightmares. Tantrums. Regressions. Grief. Violent outbursts. Exaggerated fear of strangers. Even suicidal thoughts. In response to a call on social media, parents across the country shared with NPR that the mental health of their young children appears to be suffering as the weeks of lockdown drag on.

Most U.S. states have canceled in-person classes for the rest of the academic year. This week in Senate testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, sounded a cautionary note on the prospect of reopening school buildings nationwide, even in the fall.

He pointed to the emergence of serious inflammatory illness in a handful of children. "We don't know everything about this virus, and we really better be very careful, particularly when it comes to children," Fauci said. He was responding to this comment by Sen. Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky: "I think it's a huge mistake not sending our kids back to school."

Dr. Dimitri Christakis, one of the nation's most prominent pediatricians, agrees with Paul, who is a physician by training. Christakis, who directs the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children's Hospital, is the editor-in-chief of the journal JAMA Pediatrics. And in a new piece published in the journal, he argues that the risks to children's learning, social-emotional development and mental health need to be better balanced with the risks of spreading the coronavirus.
"I don't care if I die"
Sarah, a mom in Northern California, is one of many parents who responded to our query about how their children are handling the shutdown. She and her husband work in the tech industry and have two daughters. Their older daughter, Phoebe, turned 5 just as their area's stay-at-home orders went into effect. Her birthday party had to be postponed.

"She has happy moments and laughs about things and plays and gets excited," says Sarah (we're not using her last name to protect her daughter's privacy). But, she adds, Phoebe has also "started saying some things that were really freaking me out."

One day, Sarah says, she asked her daughter to be more careful on the stairs in their house. "And she got indignant and she was like, 'Why? It's my choice if I fall and kill myself.' "

Another day, Phoebe asked to join her mother on a trip to the post office. "I told her no. And she's like, 'Why? I don't care if I die.' "

Sarah asked, " 'Can you tell me more about that, please?' And she's like, 'Well, you have an extra kid [her baby sister] and [she]'s a good kid and I'm a bad kid.' "

Sarah says she's lucky that she has been able to take administrative leave from her job to be with her daughters full time during the lockdown and that they have mental health coverage. But it has been difficult finding a therapist who can treat a young child over video chat.
"An imperative"
Christakis says the serious effects of this crisis on children like Phoebe have been overlooked.

"The decision to close schools initially, and now to potentially keep them closed, isn't, I think, taking the full measure of the impact this is going to have on children," he told NPR. "Not just the short term, but the long term."

The problem, Christakis says, isn't just learning loss, which is expected to fall particularly hard on low-income children with unequal access to distance learning. Recent research from a large testing association on the " COVID-19 slide" suggests children may return in the fall having made almost a third less progress in reading, and half as much progress in math, compared with what they would have in a typical school year.

Mental health and social-emotional development, Christakis argues, have been less discussed: "The social-emotional needs of children to connect with other children in real time and space, whether it's for physical activity, unstructured play or structured play, this is immensely important for young children in particular." A new study in JAMA Pediatrics, he says, documents elevated depression and anxiety among children under lockdown in China.

A third major risk, says Christakis, is child abuse. With schools closed and activities canceled, adults who are mandatory reporters, such as teachers, are less likely to catch wind of abuse or neglect. Hospitals around the country are reporting a rise in admissions for severe child abuse injuries and even deaths - a rise that coincides with lockdown orders. And a sex-abuse hotline operated by the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network reported that half its calls in March came from minors, for the first time in its history.

In his editorial, Christakis calls for a panel made up of interdisciplinary experts to make school reopening a priority in the United States. "I think we should sort of reason backwards from the expectation that children do start school, that that's an imperative. And then how do we make that happen safely?"

Safety, of course, is the reason schools closed around the world in the first place. It's still considered very rare for children to become seriously ill from the coronavirus, but recently a handful of children have died from an inflammatory illness related to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

The science on children's role in spreading the virus is also a moving target. A new analysis of Chinese contact-tracing data in the journal Science, co-authored by Maria Litvinova, suggests that children are in fact less susceptible to coronavirus infections. But because they have so much close contact at school, canceling in-person classes plays a key role in flattening the curve of an outbreak.

Litvinova says she is doubtful that schools, especially in big cities, can reliably enforce social distancing to reduce the number of contacts. "It's very difficult to explain to children that they shouldn't stay with their friends or talk with them or be close to each other."

Christakis is himself an epidemiologist by training. But he says these concerns are exactly why experts from different backgrounds need to be consulted, so that the risks of reopening schools can be properly balanced with the risks of keeping them closed. "If we declared the meat supply a national emergency, we should do the same with the brain supply."

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With School Buildings Closed, Children's Mental Health Is Suffering

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subscribe to Coronavirus Daily podcast Nightmares. Tantrums. Regressions. Grief. Violent outbursts. Exaggerated fear of strangers. Even suicidal thoughts. In response to a call on social media, parents across the country shared with NPR that the mental health of their young children appears to be suffering as the weeks of lockdown drag on.

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Parenting During Coronavirus: You Are Enough | Parenting Tips & Advice

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I’ve never parented during a pandemic before. The best thing we can do right now is remind ourselves that for our kids, we are enough.

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May 14th, 2020

Right now we are all doing our part to flatten the curve by following social distancing requirements. And since you've been home for quite some time now, you might be getting a little stir crazy! Fortunately, there are several simple, no-cost activities that you can do to boost your mood and help you feel less isolated. We've created a list of six happiness-inducing activities below. Plus these ideas are just plain fun!

Six Mood Boosters

1. Hold a Video Call with Your Best Friend. Text messages and phone calls can help you feel less alone, but there is something more comforting about seeing a loved one's smiling face. Ten-times the fun of your video call by turning your one-on-one conversation into a virtual happy hour with your whole crew. Tools like Skype help groups of friends video chat together.

2. Laugh Out Loud with TikTok. TikTok is a social media platform for the sharing of short-form mobile videos. Its mission is "to capture and present the world's creativity, knowledge, and precious life moments." It is filled with creative videos that will make you laugh-out-loud for hours, including many from your favorite celebrities. It may just inspire you to start creating and sharing new hilarious content.

3. Take a Virtual Yoga Class. To help ensure we are all relieving stress and still being active, many yoga studios, gyms, and personal fitness instructors are offering classes online through video streaming tools like Facebook Live, YouTube, or Instagram. Stretch out and relax with a virtual course of like-minded new friends. Namaste.

4. De-Clutter Your Living Space. Use this time to clean up and clean out your house or apartment. Living in a clean, uncluttered space will help reduce anxiety, and donating clothes or furniture to a worthy cause will give you the satisfaction of knowing you are doing something good for others. Donate books you've already read to your local Little Free Library. While you're at it, donate excess canned goods to your local Little Free Pantry.

5. Go for a Walk. Not only will time in the fresh air and sunshine revive your spirit, but a little exercise will boost your feel-good endorphins. For extra feel-good vibes, smile at everyone you pass-even though you're six feet apart.

6. Throw a Dance Party for One. Turn on your favorite music and dance in your living room. With no one watching, you can be as wild, free, or uncoordinated as you'd like. Sing out loud too and fully let loose.

Know someone who could use a pick me up?

Please feel free to share this post with your fellow teachers, students, and parents.

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Six Instant Mood Boosters During School Closures and Social Distancing

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May 14th, 2020 Right now we are all doing our part to flatten the curve by following social distancing requirements. And since you've been home for quite some time now, you might be getting a little stir crazy! Fortunately, there are several simple, no-cost activities that you can do to boost your mood and help you feel less isolated.

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Executive Function Skills from Infancy to Adolescence

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Executive Function Skills from Infancy to Adolescence

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Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University

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Executive function and self-regulation (EF/SR) skills provide critical supports for learning and development, and while we aren't born with these skills, we are born with the potential to develop them through interactions and practice.

This 16-page guide (available for download, below), describes a variety of activities and games that represent age-appropriate ways for adults to support and strengthen various components of EF/SR in children.

Each chapter of this guide contains activities suitable for a different age group, from infants to teenagers. The guide may be read in its entirety (which includes the introduction and references) or in discrete sections geared to specific age groups.

Suggested citation: Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University (2014). Enhancing and Practicing Executive Function Skills with Children from Infancy to Adolescence. Retrieved from www.developingchild.harvard.edu.

Download PDF

Enhancing and Practicing Executive Function Skills with Children from Infancy to Adolescence

An activities guide for building executive function

Download PDF

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Activities Guide: Enhancing & Practicing Executive Function Skills

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Download free guides of executive functioning activities to support and strengthen skills, available for children ages six months through adolescence.

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Helping Siblings Get Along when You Have to Stay Home

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Helping Siblings Get Along when You Have to Stay Home

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Helping Siblings Get Along When You Have to Stay Home | Parenting Tips & Advice | PBS KIDS for Parents

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Are your kids driving each other nuts while staying at home during coronavirus? Here are some tips to help everyone stay sane and get along.

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Answering Your Child's Questions

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Why Are People Wearing Masks? Answering Your Child's Questions | Parenting Tips & Advice | PBS KIDS for Parents

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Sometimes our kids ask us questions that are hard to answer. If children ask about people wearing masks during the coronavirus pandemic, here's how parents can explain.

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Supporting Children with Autism who Have Strong Special Interests

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Supporting Children with Autism who Have Strong Special Interests

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How to Support Children With Autism Who Have Special Interests | Parenting Tips & Advice | PBS KIDS for Parents

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Strong special interests and passions are a part of autism spectrum disorder. Here are ways to support your child with autism by leaning into their interests.

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From the COURAGE Workout, to the GRIT Workout, to the FRUSTRATED Workout, we have covered a full spectrum of emotions.

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How to Look for the Helpers (And Be One!) During Coronavirus | Parenting Tips & Advice | PBS KIDS for Parents

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When trying to explain COVID-19 to my children, wisdom from Mister Rogers came to mind: "Look for the helpers." Here's how we all can be helpers in this time.

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Kids Regressing? Help Them Cope With Stress During Coronavirus | Parenting Tips & Advice | PBS KIDS for Parents

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What can stress look like in kids? Here are ways to understand and support your children's feelings of stress and anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Jennifer Miller's Top 10 Books for Parents

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How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish This book provides specific language and numerous examples of parent interactions to enhance parents' communication and listening skills in a variety of challenging situations.

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SEL Strategies for Parents

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Social and Emotional Learning: Strategies for Parents

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There are many ways parents can encourage emotionally intelligent behavior in their children. Check out this guide to resources for learning more about character development.

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"kids yoga" "yoga for kids" "yoga for children yoga story for kids" "children's yoga" "yoga adventure for kids" "kindergarten yoga" "preschool yoga" "kids me...

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YOGA | MINDFULNESS | RELAXATION FOR KIDS! Screentime that gives kids SUPERPOWERS! ⬇️ D O W N L O A D T H E C O S M I C K I D S A P P ⬇️ 🍏Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cosmic-kids/ 🛍️Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cosmickids 🖥️ Desktop (great for teachers!): https://app.cosmickids.com/ 📺 Roku: https://rb.gy/44r8d -------------------------------------------------------------------- Why watch on the App?

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‘7 Strengths’ Supports Emotional and Social Learning

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We all have a critical role to play in helping our children grow into engaged, empathic, and caring citizens. Reading and self-expression are key tools.

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Newton formulated his theory of gravity and Shakespeare wrote King Lear while quarantined during the plague. But would they have been able to homeschool their children? Like you have to? How can you allow your children to be creative when they are stuck at home?

Daily routines are disrupted and entertainment is disrupted. We are not going to the movies or museums, we are not going to restaurants, afterschool activities are canceled, there are no playdates, library or playground time. Many institutions have made educational resources freely available online; IBM made their design courses free, NASA offers many lessons and activities, and many museums offer virtual tours. Here, I share research-based suggestions for nurturing creativity.

People most readily associate creativity with the arts, but one does not have to be artistic to be creative. When researchers have asked what symbols come to mind for creativity, most common responses are art-related (e.g., paintbrush and colors, musical notes).

Similarly, people talk about their own creativity in terms of artistic experiences and interests. (Chances are you have heard people comment, "Oh, I am not very creative. I don't know how to draw well.") The arts certainly are creative, but so are the sciences, design, engineering, sports, cooking.

Creativity exists in most domains of work. There are creative scientists and creative engineers (think Nikola Tesla with his many inventions), creative athletes (Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan made basketball, well, magic), creative home cooks, and creative professional chefs (David Chang!). Creativity across all these domains of work has some things in common. The following tips are based on these general attributes of creativity.
1. Start with interests
More than 30 years of research shows that intrinsic motivation fuels creativity. Intrinsic motivation means doing something for its own sake - not because of the grades that can be received or rewards to be obtained but because of the enjoyment of the activity and the challenge of it. Maybe your child is intrinsically motivated to play video games - they think Minecraft is fun and they are figuring out the challenge of staying alive and building a world. Or they are intrinsically motivated to learn about science, make comic books, or tell jokes. Start with these intrinsic interests to build creativity.

Interests can be a starting point in developing expertise; for example, a child who likes comic books working tirelessly to make their own comic books, and steadily becoming better. They may become a comic book artist.

But interests can be a starting point for other learning. A comic book lover can learn to write persuasive essays on why school reading should include comic books and graphic novels. They can learn to structure dramatic narratives through comic books and develop characters in stories through comic books. They could learn how to do research by examining the history of comic books and the emergence of graphic novels. Or they can learn social studies and history lessons by studying the 1950s comic book scare. In each case, a student is learning important curricular content but is able to be creative and learn more deeply because of the personally meaningful content.
2. Be open-ended
Creativity arises from ill-defined or open-ended problems. If a task poses a question with a specific set of steps required to answer it, there is no space for creativity. Not all tasks or learning goals are equally well suited for learning about creativity and developing creativity. There is certainly a place to keep children busy, especially if you are working from home and need to create times of uninterrupted work. Kits and mail in boxes of activities can be helpful. Children might learn important skills from them: how to follow directions, how to organize their materials, and systematically work on a project from beginning to end. However, these kits will not contribute to developing children's creativity, even when they sound like they could.

The good news is that students work hard and persist longer on creative tasks. In a study of high school students, we compared how they work on academic and creative problems. Students were working equally hard on the two kinds of challenges (even though academic challenges had grades that depended on the work), but they were willing to stick with creative challenges.
3. Be flexible, allow exploration, and play
Creativity requires flexibility. Daily schedules that are school-like with half an hour or an hour blocks for different activities might be helpful for accomplishing specific tasks (e.g., completing sheets of math problem sets), but they are not likely to allow creativity.

Psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi studied different groups of people, from adolescents to eminent creators. Across all groups, he found that working on something that is challenging but can be addressed by one's skills, people enter a state he called flow. In this state, people are fully absorbed in and focused on the activity, and as a result, they lose track of time. Interrupting the flow because of fixed timed schedules can impede and demotivate creativity.

Of course, creativity does not mean absolute freedom and it does not happen by winging it. Planning is important, but plans should be flexible because creativity does not happen in a straight line. Rather, it is common that creative work stalls and restarts. Students might tear a paper of their painting or delete their computer code in frustration. The key is to return to it and reengage. The original idea for the Pixar movie Up was to feature a floating city on an alien planet where two brothers contend to inherit their father's throne. As we now know, the only similarity with the final movie is that a floating city became a floating house.

Creativity emerges from exploration and play. Adolescents and adults play with and explore ideas. For young children, play takes a form of imagining and enacting events, interactions, and worlds. Imagination in children's pretend play predicts their creative thinking in their adolescent years. Like much else, the ability to imagine a wooden block being a ward of an animal hospital or an outpost on Mars can be flexed and built like a muscle. Preschools and kindergarten classrooms face increasing requirements to teach academic skills, reducing the amount of time for pretend play and implicitly or explicitly seeing it as a waste of time. This plague can provide young children with the crucial opportunity for pretend play.

The nature of modern parenting and educational systems alike is to be compelled to help students, both by structuring their time and steps towards success. Psychologist and philosopher Allison Gopnik has described this tendency using an analogy of a carpenter and a gardener. Carpenters work toward a specific build and know a specific list of steps to follow to get there. Gardeners create the conditions for plants to flourish, they prepare the ground and weed as necessary. But they realize that the garden will not look in every detail how they planned or what they originally imagined.

The analogy of the carpenter and gardener is especially apt if we aim to nurture creativity in children. We can provide conditions - open-ended projects based on their interests, flexible time, and plans. In the world that tends to program every waking moment of time, this challenge to allow children opportunities for exploration requires much courage. Just like social distancing where were accomplish a lot (prevention) by not doing much (actively), we will help creativity by not scheduling and closely planning students' time.

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Creativity at Home in the Time of Pandemic

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Newton formulated his theory of gravity and Shakespeare wrote King Lear while quarantined during the plague. But would they have been able to homeschool their children? Like you have to? How can you allow your children to be creative when they are stuck at home? Daily routines are disrupted and entertainment is disrupted.