Social-Emotional Learning & Development: Why it is Essential Education Today | How to SEL Out of School
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Vanguard Gifted Academy’s education channel. This is the first blog in our series on Social-Emotional Learning & Development: Why SEL is an essential part of education today. I’m Dr. Matt Zakreski. I’m a clinical psychologist from New Jersey, and I specialize in working with gifted, twice-exceptional and neurodiverse teens and youth to help them understand education, navigating their place in the world and living their best lives. Today, we’ll be talking about how to take SEL principles out of school.
Social-Emotional Learning Beyond the Classroom
One of the things that we do when we talk about social-emotional learning, or SEL, is to think about it as an essential piece of curriculum. Now, when we think about how education used to be, it really used to be the three Rs — (R)eading, W(R)iting, and A(R)ithmetic. The idea here, though, is just like kids start at different places with the academic content we teach in schools, they start at different places with social and emotional skills. Our neurodiverse youth are a great example of that. One of the things we know about how the neurodiverse brain comes online and develops is that oftentimes social-emotional skills lag behind the high-level cognitive skills that we see in our gifted youth.
So, when we think about how it shows up in the real world, oftentimes that’s asynchrony. You might have a kid who’s cognitively 14, chronologically 10, and has the social and emotional skills of a seven-year-old. How do you meet the needs of a kid like that? Schools struggle with this — how do you put that kid in a meaningful peer group? How do you give this kid peers and group work and clubs and all the things that give that extra something to school? Increasingly, parents are asking me, as a clinical psychologist, how do we take those lessons and those structures and bring them outside of the school to our homes, to our soccer teams, to our scout meetings, to our religious education?
So, today, we’re going to try and tackle some of the core principles behind that and give parents and educators and mental health professionals, anyone who’s out there reading this, some extra tools to manage these aspects of raising gifted kids.
How to Identify and Manage Emotions with Gifted Children
The first thing we’re going to do when we talk about extending social and emotional learning outside of school is to give us the language we’re going to use to navigate it. All kids have feelings — this will not come as a surprise to you if you’re a parent of a gifted kid. One of the things, though, that makes gifted kids different from neurotypical kids is what we call, in psychology, the big three — frequency, intensity and duration. Gifted kids have more feelings more often that are more intense for longer periods of time. Once again, if you have gifted kids, this will not be a surprise to you. But as parents and community leaders and mental health professionals, this often gets in the way of us serving our kids because the big feelings make our jobs harder.
How many times have you sat there and said, “Johnny, get in the car, we’re going to soccer.” And Johnny gives you a 47-minute dissertation on how soccer has racist undertones in the colonial system, and your eyes glaze over, and now you’re late for practice. And you end up getting frustrated with Johnny because you wonder, “Why is Johnny acting like this?”
We’re going to start with using language around identifying and managing emotions. One of the things that gifted kids are particularly good at is using what we call replacement language. Replacement language is using words that are not emotion words to communicate emotions. If you talk for 47 minutes about not wanting to do something, instead of just doing the thing, that would indicate to me, as a psychologist, that you’re anxious about it.
So, if you think about your kids and when they have big outbursts, what are they trying to communicate to you? What is the emotional impact of those words? Because those words are going to give us, the adults who are trying to listen to them, a lot of data on how to meet their needs. When we’re interacting with our kids, that’s an opportunity to say, “So, I heard what you said, and that makes me feel like you’re really angry. What’s making you angry right now?”
By asking those questions, we have moved ourselves from an adversarial position (against our kid) — don’t feel that way! — to a collaborative position — I want to understand what’s making you feel that way. Because when we understand what’s making ourselves feel that way, then we’re in a position to help problem-solve. You can’t yell a kid out of feeling a certain way. It doesn’t work that way. We can’t negotiate out of it. We can’t reason out of it. Because emotions are not reasonable or rational things. All we can do is join our kids in what they’re feeling and help them guide their way out.
One of the ways that we help our kids identify their emotions and then navigate them is by using a simple trick. Our brains and our bodies don’t like to be upset. Our brains and bodies want desperately to return to homeostasis. The idea here is that we have two systems in our body: the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is fight or flight — you have a big feeling, you have a big reaction, and you need to do something with it. The parasympathetic nervous system calms us down and brings us back to baseline. When our kids have something that makes them upset — you gave them an odd number of pancakes, how dare you? Or I’m really upset about the migrant situation in Darfur. Or I got a 93 on my spelling test. Once again, we don’t get to argue with the feeling, we just accept it. Once our kids have expressed that feeling to us, then we move into helping them name what they’re feeling. Because when we name what we’re feeling, our brains hear that, respond to it and start that return to homeostasis.
Remember, our brains don’t want to be upset. Think about a time when you were really mad at something. You’re sitting in traffic, trying to drive through downtown Chicago, and you’ve moved 17 feet in 45 minutes — you’re mad. So, if you say out loud that you’re mad — you express that feeling — your body hears that word and activates a calm-down protocol that’s related to that feeling. So, if you’re mad, say you’re mad, and your body will start to calm down. If you’re angry, if you’re sad, if you’re scared, if you’re nervous, if you’re nauseous — articulating that thing helps our bodies return back to normal. Now, it isn’t like snapping a finger. But it begins the process so you get there sooner.
What we tend to do is only use these skills when our kids are agitated — when they’re at a 10. Sobbing because of the end of Harry Potter or furious because they lost at Risk. It’s hard to learn a skill when we’re activated and agitated, right? That’s just any human being. So, practice it in areas of calm or areas of joy. If your child is watching their favorite YouTube channel, and they’re laughing and tears are rolling down their cheeks, ask them, “How are you feeling right now?”
“I feel great!”
“That’s awesome!”
That models this — I’m aware of my emotions. I’m aware how my emotions feel in my body, and when I name them, I’m laying those cognitive tracks so it’s easier to do it when I’m having emotions that are less comfortable.
The idea of comfortable emotions is part of the language I’d like you to start using in supporting your kids. It is very easy to fall into the trap of — emotions are good or bad. If I asked you, “Is anger a good or bad emotion?” most of you would say bad, but there are times anger is justified. If somebody comes up to you and shoves you to the ground, being angry would be a reasonable response to that. It’s not about good or bad. It’s about comfortable and uncomfortable. Anger, regardless of its justification, is an uncomfortable emotion, right? Think about it, your jaw clenches, you clench your fist, your brow furrows, you get growly, you sort of sound like Christian Bale in the first Batman movie, and that’s not a comfortable feeling.
Benefit of Naming Emotions for Gifted Children
Our kids are going to use language like, “I’m bad, because I’m mad.” No, you’re just mad right now. We accept that, we acknowledge it, we see it, we’re here for it. We’re not trying to justify it or explain it away. We are simply noting the thing we see. Moving us out of that judgment place of our own emotions is another great tool in our toolbox to help our kids regulate. Because what ends up happening, when we see emotions as good or bad, we activate something called the struggle switch.
Russ Harris has this great idea that, when we don’t radically accept our emotions, what ends up happening is we judge ourselves for having emotions. So, I’m mad that I lost the game. Now, I’m sad that I’m mad. Now, I’m stressed that I’m sad that I’m mad. Now, I’m angry at myself for being stressed that I’m sad that I’m mad. Emotions pile on top of each other, and it turns a relatively small thing into a total meltdown.
Instead of judging our emotions, we simply acknowledge them and name them for what they are. We don’t have to like them. What this is, is a simple idea of radical acceptance. I see what I’m feeling and I acknowledge it. Obviously, we can’t cover everything about social-emotional learning in a blog post, but by giving you some of the psychology and physiology behind emotions, I’m hoping to give you a bit of a context to see your kids’ behaviors in a different way and help you manage them.
When it comes to managing behaviors, we’ve discussed the idea of naming our feelings. Now, we’re going to move into two vital and related topics. The first thing is that when it comes to managing our kids’ behavior, what we do before the thing and what we do after the thing are the single most important things. Before the thing, setting expectations — Where are we going? How long are we going to be there? What is the purpose of our trip? Who might we expect to see? — allows our kids time to acclimate, and it helps set their expectations. It’s easy to fall victim to the idea that our kids should just be able to handle this. But, oftentimes our kids can’t. If your kid has trouble in Home Depot, then maybe we shouldn’t go to Home Depot on this trip, or we’re going to spend a lot of time setting expectations for what we’re doing there. This is the idea of being proactive around emotional regulation, which is something you get used to as a parent, and trust me, I’m a parent myself, I know you have way too much on your plate as it is. But, spend five minutes before you go into the store, before you get into the car, and just say, “Here’s where we’re going; here’s what we’re going to do; I expect to be there for this amount of time,” and you’re going to see that a lot of things get easier. Because you’re not expecting your kid, and therefore you, to make it up as you go along, you’re actually setting a plan so you can follow it.
Now, the really cool thing about what we know about social-emotional learning is kids benefit from life experiences. From a dose response perspective, we do a certain amount of stuff, we benefit from that experience, as our kids would say in video games, we get XP from it, right? But the idea is, we turn that XP into something more powerful, something more concrete, when we intentionally name it. So, when the thing is done, take another five minutes and talk about what happened. Talk about what worked; talk about what didn’t work. Talk about what skills you saw your kids use.
If your kid has trouble in Home Depot, but you got in and out of the store without a meltdown, say, “You did amazing in there! I saw you working on your deep breathing, and I saw you asking for help when you needed it, when you started to get upset.” What that does is positively reinforce what your kids are doing, which we always want to do, and crystallize the skills they use. It makes neural connections: I had a feeling, I did a thing, and that feeling became manageable. So, the key piece of social-emotional learning outside of school is to take five minutes when you’re done and talk about the things that happened. It’s going to help our kids understand what skills they use, give them the credit for using them, and help their brains use it a little bit faster and better next time.
I hope that this was an interesting and informative blog. This is an area of working with gifted kids that I really enjoy, and I hope that I’ve made your lives just a little bit easier and a little bit better. So, once again, my name is Dr. Matt Zakreski. I’m a clinical psychologist. You can find me online at www.drmattzakreski.com. I’m also on Facebook at www.facebook.com/drmattzakreski.
Thank you for reading our blog on social-emotional learning. We hope that the Vanguard Gifted Academy’s education channel will continue to be a valuable resource for you. If you have any comments or questions about the topics we shared today, please visit Vanguard’s website at vanguardgiftedacademy.org, or call us at (224) 213-0087.