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HOW TO BUILD A BETTER CHILD

Intensive therapy is a marathon, not a sprint. There is no express lane to clarity. Making sense of the anxiety I’d dealt with since childhood was like scattering a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle on the floor and getting down on my hands and knees to put it back together, piece by tiny piece. With every fragment I slotted into place, the picture began to take shape. But it was painstaking work. In my sessions with Veronica, whenever I’d worry I wasn’t making progress quickly enough, she’d remind me it had taken nearly 40 years to develop the problematic thought patterns that caused so much of my discomfort. I couldn’t expect to turn it around in a few months.

I began to wonder how different things could have been if I had learned to understand my emotions from an early age. What if we didn’t have to wait until we reached breaking point as adults before we unlocked the unconscious drivers of our reactions and destructive habits? Could we reduce the burden of mental distress on young people and build more resilient generations if we helped children lift the veil on their inner lives?

After every session with Veronica, more layers were revealed. I still experienced doubt and anxiety, but by beginning to understand some of what was driving it, I started to feel a comfort I had never before known. Whenever I freaked out about the future, catastrophised over friendships, or found myself furious about an inconsequential infraction, I learned to pause, breathe, and connect to what the fear was really about. Over time it became an automatic response, and instead of rushing straight to the worst possible conclusion, I was able to offer calm, rational reassurance to the part of me that felt she was somehow defective or not deserving of love.

The more I learned about myself, the more I also started to understand the foibles of those around me. When people behaved in ways that were emotionally disproportionate to the situation before them, I remembered what Veronica had said — it’s almost never about what’s going on in that moment. It helped me to view those who had caused me pain with a little more empathy. The girls who bullied me were most likely suffering themselves. Many came from disadvantaged backgrounds and fractured families, and our teachers struggled to deal with their complex needs and behavioural problems. How much of the aggression was misdirected frustration or a desire to be heard?

My school wasn’t short of compassionate teachers, but leaving aside their lack of time and resources, they worked in an institutional culture that saw problematic behaviour as something to be punished, not explored. When announcing a new ‘tough on crime’ approach to juvenile offenders, UK prime minister John Major said in 1993, ‘Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less.’ As a 16-year-old with a fledgling social conscience, the statement outraged me so much I cut it out of the newspaper and stuck it on my wall next to my Kurt Cobain pictures and Jack Kerouac quotes. Yet I still didn’t have the emotional insight to join the dots between the behaviour of the girls who tormented me daily and the baggage they might be carrying. I just thought they hated me and that I deserved it.

It is heartening to see things are starting to change. Emotional intelligence teaching is now being taken more seriously in classrooms, helping to equip kids with the skills they need to understand their feelings and articulate them. In the past few years, there has been exponential growth in social and emotional learning in Australian schools. Children are being taught how to be mindful and resilient — lessons previously learnt, or not, through the hard knocks of life. What has been a major educational trend in the United States for more than a decade is starting to take off here as emerging research shows that aggression, anxiety, and stress can be reduced through emotional-literacy programs. In part, the push is in response to the concerns voiced by Michael Carr-Gregg and others about alarming rates of mental-health problems, bullying, and youth suicide. But there is also evidence that children who are in touch with their feelings perform better academically. By learning to be aware of their emotional triggers and how these affect their day-to-day existence, their inner landscapes are becoming a little less opaque to them.

In a teaching environment, it makes sense that a calm, well-supported child is better equipped to learn than one who feels agitated or socially isolated and is unable to express it. Calming exercises, such as deep breathing, taking a six-second pause, or even laughing, trigger physiological changes in the body that help alter mood. Stress hormones dissipate, the heart rate slows, and the blood is oxygenated. When a child is asked to verbalise their emotion, they immediately access the brain’s prefrontal cortex (the part used for language and processing). It takes them out of their amygdala — the lower region of the brain, which is responsible for strong emotional reactions — helping them to calm down and control their impulses. Practised regularly, these exercises cause changes in the brain, establishing new neural pathways that can boost traits such as patience, optimism, and even empathy. They’re the skills I’ve only recently learned from Veronica to combat problems I’ve experienced since I was a child.

The hope is that with this teaching, the children of today will go on to be the calmer, more resilient, and more compassionate adults of tomorrow. But it’s not about coddling kids. Emotional intelligence is the antithesis of the self-esteem juggernaut — a movement that hands out medals for taking part, and encourages parents to shower their children with praise regardless of talent. When every child is taught they’re ‘special’ and that if they want it enough they can have anything, it’s no wonder so many people grow up to be profoundly disappointed with the real world. Pumping up children’s tyres to the point that they think they’re uniquely gifted, unbreakable miracles does not foster resilience. It creates emotionally fragile narcissists.

In a seminal 2011 Atlantic article entitled ‘How to Land Your Kid in Therapy’, US psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb shone a spotlight on this phenomenon, reporting that many of the young adults she saw — largely from stable, loving, advantaged homes — were feeling confused, anxious, and empty due to overprotective parenting that focused too much on feeling happy and shielded children from adversity. When these kids were thrust into the real world, even minor obstacles became catastrophic. It was a trend being witnessed by others in the mental-health field. Clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel, an adviser to schools all over America, told Gottlieb that college deans were reporting growing numbers of freshmen they dubbed ‘teacups’ because ‘they’re so fragile that they break … anytime things don’t go their way’.

This tallied with what I heard a few years ago when talking to experts at a Melbourne conference called Happiness and Its Causes. Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University, told me: ‘More and more, parents are unwilling to let their children struggle. They want them to feel good at all times so they’re telling them how smart they are, they’re really showering with what we call “person praise” — “You’re talented, you’re smart, you’re special.” My research shows it backfires. It makes kids worried and tells them that the name of the game is to be smart.’ This leads to kids lying about their performance when they’re given more difficult problems because their identity and sense of worth get wrapped up in doing well. Dweck urged parents to talk to their children about their struggles as much as their victories, and to give them ‘process praise’, focusing on the effort and strategies they employed. Teaching them to accept setbacks and shortcomings rather than blocking them out was, she said, the key to resilience.

Looking back, these were the messages I received as a child: You can be anything you want. Just be happy. Follow your dreams. You are special. The only limitation is your imagination. It was hard to reconcile these ideals with my growing disdain for the person I was becoming. As a desperately self-conscious adolescent, the opinions of others meant everything to me. With every year the worrying grew worse, until it evolved into a desperate, visceral need to be liked.

When I told Mum about my worries, her response was always the same: ‘People are far more interested in themselves than they are in you. Don’t be so big-headed.’ Technically, she was correct. But as a child who felt as far from conceited as it was possible to be, what I took from that was that my anxieties were frivolous, self-indulgent, and inconsequential.

In the months prior to my 2014 breakdown, I got a glimpse into how different things could have been. I visited Girton Grammar in Bendigo, a regional town 150 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, for a feature on the rise of emotional-intelligence teaching in Australian classrooms.

I arrived on a hot, dry Tuesday afternoon, sitting down on a small grey plastic chair, my knees uncomfortably close to my chest. The teacher asked the class to greet their guest, Miss Stark, and the children of 4D stood up as one and addressed me in a sing-song chant. It had the simultaneous effect of making me feel welcome and 100 years old.

As they did every day, the students began to talk about their feelings. Nine-year-old Evie was feeling confident and enthusiastic. Her teacher, Paul Flanagan, ‘Mr F’ — a tall, engaging man in a tailored suit who wouldn’t look out of place in a bank or a real-estate office — asked her to plot where she was on her ‘mood meter’. She tugged the ends of a raggedy blonde ponytail, pulled high over to one side by a red-baubled band, and gauged she was a +3 for energy and a +2 for feelings. On the chart, divided into red, yellow, blue, and green quadrants, she placed a small 3D figure of herself in the yellow. But not every day was like today. If school had been tough or someone was mean to her, she might find herself in the blue. If she was feeling particularly chilled out, she could be in the green. Sometimes, she was in the land of the red. ‘On the weekend, I was in the red because my sister was trying to fight with me and I had to stop and go to my room and think about my best self. Then I came out and I said sorry, to be the bigger person, even though she’s bigger than me,’ she said with a giggle.

When classmate Isabelle felt a tingling in the fingers or a twisting in the tummy that put her in the red, she explained how she had learnt to take a ‘meta moment’: a short pause of emotional recognition. Visualising how she would react if she was her ‘best self’ — a concept defined by a collection of words, such as patient, kind, caring, sincere, and considerate, that she feels describe her at her best — helped her calm down. And then she would take action. ‘I just breathe and try to think of a suggestion to get me into the yellow or the green. My main strategies are to drink more water or have something to eat, because I can get angry when I’m hungry.’

I sat down with Evie after the class finished. I wanted to know if she had times when she felt difficult emotions. Surely it was okay to be in the red sometimes? Evie smiled knowingly, like a tiny, golden-haired Buddha, and said: ‘You’ve got a right to feel angry, but you shouldn’t react to it. You should apply some strategies.’

I looked at her, open-mouthed. It’s hard to imagine nine-year-old Jill being able to articulate her feelings, much less regulate them when things weren’t going well. When I started school, kids were still getting the belt for acting up in class. The cause of behavioural problems was rarely explored. But Evie and Isabelle, like their Year Four classmates, were at an advantage. They were being taught that understanding their emotions has a profound effect on their behaviour and that of those around them. They’re among a new wave of children with arguably a greater grasp of the full human experience than their parents. They’re the early adopters in what will hopefully become an emotionally literate generation. One that won’t be sucked in by the happiness fairytale or beaten down by the demands of modern life. This is the start of a movement to build a better child.

During my time in the Girton classroom, it was clear that this was not a box-ticking exercise. The children were not simply reeling off a list of feelings like they would their times tables. They were able to identify and articulate complex emotions — what it feels like to be ‘overwhelmed’ or ‘unacknowledged’ — and were learning the nuanced differences between assertiveness and aggression, between envy and jealousy, between sadness and depression. Importantly, they understood that everyone has an inner critic, and while negative thoughts are unpleasant, they are not facts. Ball-breaking Regina George-Ratchett might make an appearance inside the heads of these kids, but in the face of their emotional insight her power would be greatly diminished.

What I found so impressive about Girton’s program was the emphasis on there being no wrong emotions. Unlike my generation — who grew up believing that happiness and success were the ultimate goals, while mental-health problems were stigmatised to the point of virtual silence — these students were being taught that feeling sad or frustrated or disappointed is normal. They learned that a bad day may be just that, and dark moods do not define you. It’s what they do with those emotions that counts. It means that when life knocks them down, they’ll be better equipped to get back up.

Mr F told me that in his 18 years of teaching, nothing has had such a positive effect on classroom management and student wellbeing as emotional-intelligence teaching. ‘A lot of us grew up in a society where you didn’t talk about your emotions; they weren’t important. I can’t remember someone ever asking me how I felt or if I’d had a good morning and what might have affected my mood on a particular day,’ he said. ‘What we’re actually giving these students, with the skills, the vocabulary, the social and emotional training — we’re equipping them for when they head out into society. It just sets them up for a world that at times can be ruthless. If we can develop students who are socially and emotionally aware of themselves and others, then they’re set for big things.’

Girton, an independent school, is the first in Australia to use a program designed at Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence — a world leader in the field. Headmaster Matthew Maruff, a passionate advocate who maintains that ‘emotions are the gatekeepers to the intellect’, sent three teachers to the United States in 2011 to be trained in the RULER program, which teaches how to recognise, understand, label, express, and regulate feelings. As we walked around the Girton campus, its red-brick buildings sprawling over two blocks in downtown Bendigo, he told me how the program is now the foundation for every part of school life. All teachers and staff have been RULER trained.

Chatting with him, I was struck by how he was unlike any teacher I’ve ever known. In an education system obsessed with tests and academic performance, it’s rare to hear a school leader put ‘feelings’ at the top of their list of teaching priorities. But during our stroll through the blistering heat from the senior campus to the junior school, Mr Maruff, with a smile as wide as the brim of his floppy sunhat, greeted every student by name and told me that, ‘When you ask the kids, they say they just want to be listened to and valued.’

He was remarkably open with his own feelings and said he encouraged his staff members to check in with a mood meter daily, for their students and themselves. He told me that the greatest challenges for his pupils when they leave school will be emotional, not cognitive. In the future, he said, the traditional pillars of learning, the three Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic), will be replaced with the four Cs: creativity, collaboration, communication, and intellectual curiosity. He acknowledged that success in these areas is hard to measure, but noted that they’ve seen a marked reduction in bullying and a modest improvement in academic performance since introducing the RULER program.

The experiences at Girton are being replicated in the public system. The federal health department’s Kids Matter program, which started in 2006, is now being taught in more than 2,600 urban, rural, and regional primary schools across Australia. Designed primarily as a mental-health and wellbeing program, it’s a flexible teaching framework that can be tailored to an individual school’s needs and focuses on social and emotional learning, respectful relationships, and fostering belonging and inclusion. Similar programs, Response Ability and Mind Matters, are among the emotional-learning programs being taught in secondary schools.

Mr F said that behavioural problems in class had also improved. ‘We had an incident with a child who was displaying a lot of anger and aggression, but we did some work with them and identified that what they were actually feeling was left out in their peer group. We were able to give them skills to manage those emotions, and that child has moved on to be a great success. If they didn’t have those skills, they could easily have taken the wrong path,’ he said.

But was it possible to see these types of results in schools where the children’s needs are complex? What could emotional intelligence teaching achieve in a school more like the one I attended? And so I visited Coolaroo South Primary School in Melbourne’s northern suburbs — a low socio-economic area with a large migrant and refugee population — and discovered that at this school, at least, there is evidence that emotional learning can have benefits for children from all backgrounds.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, and Year One students were learning about resilience — or, as they know it, bouncing back.

‘Do bad feelings last forever?’ teacher Stephanie Clarke asked the five-year-olds sitting in a circle on the floor.

‘Nooooooooooooo,’ they hollered, grinning. Taking turns to bounce ‘Bruce’ the bouncy ball, they were reminded that, ‘We may go all the way to the ground and feel really, really sad, but very shortly we will bounce back.’

In Jenny Bartlett’s Year Five classroom, the walls were papered with life advice: Keep things in perspective. It’s only part of your life, and Catastrophising exaggerates your worries. Don’t believe the worst possible picture. Another read, Everybody experiences sadness, hurt, failure, rejection and setbacks sometimes, not just you. They are a normal part of life.

I was so impressed with this wisdom I took pictures on my phone, partly to prove to myself that what I was seeing was actually real. I wondered about the impact it might have had on my developing, over-analysing brain as a child to discover that what I was experiencing was normal and that life wasn’t meant to be all sunshine and rainbows and baskets full of puppies. For these students, growing up in a digital age where social media airbrushes out life’s tough times, the lessons are a critical reality check. They’re an inoculation against the happiness fairytale’s most dangerous pitfalls.

The kids were discussing body language and how the way you hold yourself can change your mood and demeanour, which in turn changes the way others respond to you. I got the sense that just by giving them permission to voice their feelings, it diminished the power of their darker thoughts and provided a sense of autonomy. Ms Bartlett asked them what happened to their bodies when they went into the ‘red zone’. Slumped shoulders, clenched fists, and a furrowed brow were among the replies. ‘When your body is tense it takes a long time for your mood to change. So if you can relax your body, put a smile on your face, and do the self-talk and go to your happy place, that will help your mood to change,’ she told them. For some, their happy place was imagining a day out at the beach with the family. Others said it was on the footy field, or floating on a pink fluffy cloud with Katy Perry.

She then asked the students how they coped with anger or sadness or loneliness. Dilara said that playing guitar or singing a song made her feel better. Raven liked to take a moment and relax her shoulders and face. ‘I just tell myself that there’s no point being angry at this person and I take a deep breath,’ she explained. For Erkam, it was about counting to ten: ‘Then I say to myself that bad things never last.’

Since introducing Kids Matter in 2010, principal Karen Nicholls said that playground conflicts have dropped, attendance and behavioural issues have improved, and children are generally more caring and compassionate. She also noted a ‘small but definite improvement’ in academic performance, which she put down to the children being more engaged in school and therefore happier to attend. ‘We’re not psychologists, but as teachers we need to be aware of the issues children are grappling with outside of school. One child may have experienced significant trauma, but for another child it may be that they’ve got a new baby brother in the household who’s getting all the attention, and for that child that’s really significant.’

It’s these little things that in an adult world defined by hectic work schedules, financial pressures, and family demands can seem trivial. But to a child, feeling like they’re going unnoticed can seem like the end of the world. Left unaddressed, it can lead to significant emotional problems. All it might take to turn that around is for someone to listen.

At the end of the school day, the kids in Bartlett’s classroom filed out. I asked her if this level of emotional engagement with students is a burden on her time. She laughed and shook her head. ‘These lessons are a gift,’ she said. ‘It’s about knowing that they can offload their negative emotions here in a safe space. A lot of them think that it’s bad or wrong to be crying or sad, and so I say to them it’s okay to be down low as long as you can work towards getting back up. It’s a proactive way for them to deal with all the issues that are increasing in our world, and the challenges they have to deal with. Some of these children come from very stressful, heartbreaking backgrounds. They need these skills to survive. What do they do with that anger if they can’t learn to regulate their emotions?’

The answer is not an easy one to confront. Child protection experts warn that children exposed to prolonged trauma, violence, and hardship may face a lifetime of problems. They have flagged an emerging phenomenon of ‘toxic stress’ — a state of constant alert in which the child’s fight-or-flight response goes into overdrive, causing physiological changes to the architecture of the brain. The results can have a catastrophic effect on their ability to regulate emotions, impairing cell growth and disrupting the formation of healthy neural circuits. These changes in the hippocampus — the part of the brain responsible for memory and emotional control — cause shrinkage, which in turn can trigger learning and behavioural problems, difficulty with impulse control, and a heightened sense of rage and self-loathing. Long-term, the concern is that kids who grow up experiencing issues such as family violence, sexual abuse, neglect, economic hardship, and parental mental illness or drug and alcohol dependency become trapped in an emotional spin cycle that impairs their social skills, makes it difficult for them to form relationships, and can lead them down a path of aggression and anti-social behaviour.

Stress in itself is not damaging. The increase in heart rate or hormone levels a child might experience on the first day of school or when getting an immunisation can be a healthy and essential part of childhood development that will promote resilience. Even traumatic events, such as the death of a close relative, parental divorce, or a natural disaster can be overcome if the stress activation is time-limited and the effects are buffered by loving, supportive relationships. But the evidence suggests that stress turns toxic when the trauma is prolonged and when both parents are emotionally unavailable.

The mother’s psychological state during pregnancy can also significantly impact on the baby’s brain development in the womb, leading to an increased risk of physical and emotional problems, including anxiety. As our society becomes increasingly strung out with the pressures of twenty-first-century life, children can quite literally be stressed before they’re even born. Viewed through this lens, it’s hard to dismiss social and emotional learning as a trendy feel-good fad. Some educators believe it’s so important to child development and the future cohesiveness of our communities that they’re pushing for an educational and parental paradigm shift from teaching ‘a life of tests’ to ‘the tests of life’.

Linda Lantieri is at the forefront of that movement. After meeting her at the Happiness and Its Causes conference in Melbourne, I became convinced that this diminutive native New Yorker with the style of Nana Mouskouri and the accent of Barbra Streisand might well be able to change the world. A Fulbright scholar and an international expert in social and emotional learning and conflict resolution, she has worked as an educator for 40 years, both as a teacher and as a director of a middle school in Harlem. Her vision is for schools that ‘educate the heart along with the mind’. But it was her work after the September 11 terrorist attacks that fascinated me most. She was commissioned by New York authorities to help counsel 8,000 traumatised children who had been forced to evacuate schools when the planes hit the World Trade Center’s twin towers. She told me that through the inner-resilience program she set up in the aftermath of the attacks, she learned that children can recover from even the most unimaginable trauma if given the skills to make sense of their experiences.

Lantieri said that helping these young people to feel their emotions rather than encouraging them to forget or block out the traumatic event is key to how they respond:

If we help them reframe what happened to them, if we help them to interpret those events, to give them meaning, then that becomes more powerful than what actually happened. It’s giving kids the ability and the openness of communication to be able to talk about their fears. [The September 11 attacks] taught us that we can’t protect kids from an uncertain world any more. We can’t say bad things won’t happen, but we can say they could get better, and we can learn from those things and we can teach kids that talking about it is helpful, that knowing how to calm yourself is helpful. It’s about giving kids skills, not false optimism.

Meditation, mindfulness, and breathing skills were among the tools taught in the resilience program, as well as encouraging teachers and parents to set up ‘peace corners’ at home and in schools to give children safe spaces to centre themselves. These calm areas, decorated by the students, were cooling-off places where kids could listen to music, engage in artwork, or just sit quietly with their emotions. Lantieri believes that with increasing pressure on children at home and at school, it’s crucial that emotional and social wellbeing skills are given as much priority as English or maths, to protect children from the risk of toxic stress.

The idea of teaching kids to get in touch with their emotions might not gain much support from the shock jocks and conservative commentators who dominate Australia’s media and believe that violent youth offending is fuelled by bleeding-heart lefties taking a ‘softly-softly’ approach to education and parenting. But the evidence doesn’t lie. A Flinders University evaluation of Kids Matter found that it not only significantly improved mental health and behavioural problems in schools but also boosted NAPLAN results. Children who had taken part in the program were up to six months ahead in academic achievement. These schools are seeing firsthand the change that can come from letting children make room for their feelings. It’s the same shift that is prompting schools around the world to introduce meditation practice for students, with a growing body of research suggesting it can play a role in calming children, boosting learning, and managing behavioural issues. A randomised clinical trial with 300 fifth- to eighth-graders in two disadvantaged Baltimore city schools found that students who received mindfulness meditation instruction for 12 weeks saw improvement in mood, anxiety levels, self-hostility, coping ability, and post-traumatic symptoms.

Teaching children to block out their feelings and ‘just be happy’ has clearly not worked. In a time when kids are dealing with pressures previous generations didn’t face, we need a fundamental shift in how we deliver teaching, and in the skills and abilities we value as a community. I’m pretty sure that in the real world I have never used the knowledge I gained (and then promptly forgot) about algebraic formulas or the structure and formation of cumulonimbus clouds. But a lesson on how to manage my temper, deal with isolation, or refrain from getting caught up in negative thought spirals would have been super-helpful for me in pretty much every aspect of my life to date. No doubt it would have helped the girls who bullied me, too.

It’s encouraging to see more schools recognise that we can’t keep doing what we’ve always done. But that change has to be sustained and widespread. Today’s kids are navigating an increasingly complex world, and if we want them to grow up to be functioning adults, they need to be equipped with the skills for life in the modern world. They need tools to make sense of their emotions and the permission to give those feelings a voice. In our age of anxiety, children deserve to be seen and heard.