The Secret Lives of Children
Fear, Fantasy, and the Emotional Appetite
My fantasy about the kind of teacher I was, and who my students were, evaporated one winter day when my pre-K class at Lincoln Nursery School came upon a snowman that had been constructed hours earlier by a class of younger children. That class was taught by my colleague, Wendy Klix. In the blink of an eye, the sweet little children in my charge threw themselves upon the snowman. Before I could say a word, they’d gone completely berserk, screaming and flinging chunks of its snowy body in the air, gobbling the snowman’s misshapen nose, stamping on its felt hat, snapping its twig arms into pieces. “I’m going to eat you!” I heard one of the children cry out. I tried feebly to stop the shark frenzy, but, really, it couldn’t be stopped: the children looked like cannibals, as a dumbstruck parent volunteer who witnessed the event nervously observed.
Looking for a teachable moment—and dimly trying to salvage something from the fiasco—I asked the children what had happened. Normally, I could expect some real insights from this crowd; they were smart and loved to talk. But they stared in silence. Finally, one little boy spoke up: “We were really hungry,” he explained.
I still don’t know what accounted for that display of naked aggression. And perhaps it’s best—as Mark Twain advised in Tom Sawyer—to draw the “curtain of charity” around the event. I suspect the outburst had to do with a lot of stirred-up feelings: the awareness that the “babies” of the school had made something interesting; that their own teacher was perhaps a little too enamored with her fantasy of a perfect nature walk and needed to be taught a lesson; or perhaps just that something in their developing frontal lobes had sprung loose at the perfect moment. Adult mobs form all the time; this didn’t feel any different.
But I highlight this story as an illustration of the raw, undiluted emotional appetite raging within children. It is a kind of hunger, literal and figurative, as my little student tried to explain. These are powerful impulses, but we generally do such a good job keeping a lid on children’s emotions in group settings that we can mostly pretend those appetites aren’t really there. I’m not sure why, since it’s not as if we don’t have them ourselves. “I love you so much I could eat you up,” we tease our children, our love wrapped in a threat.
Virtually every setting in which early learning takes place offers opportunities to engage children’s deepest emotional experiences and metaphysical questions, and to reflect on how best to address them. My colleague Nancy Close, a developmental psychologist at Yale with decades of wisdom about young children, explains that anger is not only a natural by-product of learning (as we see when children become frustrated by difficult tasks) but, more important, an “essential energy for learning” that helps children acquire mastery of skills such as curiosity and persistence. Given how much learning occurs in the preschool years, she says, “it’s not surprising that there is a normal upsurge in aggressive energy during this stage of development.”1 These opportunities to understand and guide children’s natural emotions shouldn’t be squandered, even the challenging ones. They are crucial for healthy cognitive, and social and emotional, growth.
In Lincoln, I had the special good fortune of being in a semirural community with miles of woodland trails, and, every Thursday, I would take the children for a nature walk, come rain or shine. We’d find fairies and trolls hiding in stone walls, examine bugs with magnifying glasses, observe dappled light on the leaves, or feel the rain on our faces. Nature walks were my favorite part of the week, even though I had a Greek chorus of complainers who fervently believed that they hated nature walks. Every week these little naysayers would kick up a huge fuss with their negative proclamations, sometimes netting a convert or two, and every week these same children would later remember how much they adored nature walks, a phenomenon renowned psychologist Daniel Gilbert describes as typical of the mental tricks our brains play on us.2 We could always count on something magical or unexpected happening—one time we found a full-sized cardboard moose behind a tree—and, by the end of the year, the children’s stamina had grown such that they could walk (to their parents’ disbelief) several miles at a time. In this kind of utopian setting, it was easy to get romantic about the innocence of childhood.
It’s shocking to realize, then, that behind this idyllic facade, these same tree-hugging small children were capable of snowman homicide. But our fear of this potential doesn’t justify the hypocrisy surrounding children’s strong emotions. Instead, they must be engaged and even encouraged. The million-dollar question is how best to do that: through the everyday experience of being a human in the world, or by training preschool children in what is popularly known as social-emotional regulation?
Few things are more shaming (to parents) than a child having a tantrum in a public space. Adults often express disgust for young children who can’t manage themselves properly. I remember a stranger yelling out to me from his car to get my “big girl” out of her stroller. My three-year-old daughter was indeed a big girl—much taller than her peers—and I frequently walked five or six miles at a time. She had every right to hitch a ride and, honestly, whose business was it, anyway? I was terribly galled by this busybody’s opprobrium. Many years later, I felt a smug satisfaction on a trip to Disney World when I saw several able-bodied but apparently exhausted adult women lounging in giant strollers while they watched the late-night fireworks.
Adults have great sympathy for their own vulnerabilities and use all kinds of tricks to get through the day without blowing a gasket: alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, sex, prescription drugs, and illegal substances, not to mention yoga classes and massage therapy and a little harmless fibbing and flirting here and there. In the nineteenth century, children were fed copious amounts of alcohol and were even given morphine and toothache drops containing cocaine (“instantaneous cure”),3 but it’s been many years since kids had such easy fixes. In fact, children have very demanding emotional lives, and we can be downright punishing about their needs. We may recoil from a four-year-old seeking comfort from his mother’s breast, but we have no such problem with a grownup seen “nursing” his drink.
One of the reasons we ignore important emotional signals from children has to do with a problem of interpretation. We often assume that preschoolers’ emotions are less powerful or less valid than our own grownup ones. Think of how often we dismiss a child’s cares with a smarmy aside about how nice it would be to have such minuscule worries for a change. “Just wait until life gets really hard, kid!” we say to ourselves when he’s hit a rough patch at the playground, and we might even say it out loud. But life has an uncanny way of generating age-appropriate suffering. A child’s experience of forgetting her brand-new Elsa doll at the doctor’s office is—in dog years—the equivalent of an adult’s hearing that his fiancée wants a break from the relationship. The only response to either circumstance is a good long howl.
What adult hasn’t had to stifle a laugh at the depths of anguish behind a child’s (but not her own) howling? Even very nice people find it hard to take little children’s emotions seriously. (“Okay, just to be clear, sweetie: you broke your McDonald’s Happy Meal toy, not your tibia, right?”) The problem of minimizing young emotions is compounded by the frequent temptation to imagine that young children’s cognitive states are somehow identical to our adult ones, when, in my experience, the reverse is more likely to be the case: young children’s concrete and often magical thinking really is decidedly different from grownups’, but the range and intensity of their feelings—pride, joy, jealousy, fear, and all the rest—are strikingly similar.
When children’s emotions don’t seem quite as legitimate as our own, it’s that much easier to justify whitewashing them away. The following classic exchange captures a lot of what’s wrong with the adult response to children’s inner lives. Here we find a teacher named Ms. Walker trying unsuccessfully to reason with young children who, in a fraught moment, are operating at a very basic, even reptilian, neurological level.
Henry and Maddox are playing with animal puppets. There are plenty to go around, but Maddox has his eye on the highly coveted dragon puppet with iridescent scales that Henry is closely guarding at his feet. Henry likes to put his stuffed animals to sleep at home as part of his bedtime ritual, and this play has recently extended to preschool. The animals are napping and can’t be awakened, even when other children politely ask to play with them. Since most of the children accept Henry’s quiet intransigence, Ms. Walker has mostly ignored his possessive behavior. But Maddox likes the dragon’s shiny scales. He has a book of dragon poems at home and a little glass dragon sitting on his windowsill, from his mother’s trip to China. He reaches for the puppet.
“Shh . . . you can’t have it. He’s sleeping,” Henry informs him.
“Can I have it?” Maddox asks, lunging for the dragon without waiting for an answer.
“Hey!” Henry shouts. “Give it back! They’re sleeping.”
“It’s not yours,” Maddox replies angrily.
“Yeah, it’s mine! Give it!” Henry argues, “They’re sleeping.”
“But they’re not yours. Like, they don’t belong to you,” Maddox insists, holding tight to the dragon.
Henry tries to grab the puppet but Maddox digs in.
“You’re waking them,” Henry cries. “Stop it!”
“You can’t have all the puppets,” Maddox sputters, his eyes beginning to tear up. “It’s not fair.”
“You stole him!”
“They’re not yours. You’re not even doing anything with him!” Maddox shouts, enraged.
The children’s loud voices attract Ms. Walker, who reminds them to speak in an “inside” voice.
But the boys continue to struggle. Henry wrests the dragon from Maddox’s tight fist. Maddox lets out a high-pitched yelp and pushes Henry hard in the chest, sending him flying. Both boys are now on the ground, wailing, each yanking hard on one end of the dragon until Henry gains control of it again.
Ms. Walker rushes over to manage the outburst.
“Okay, boys, let’s calm down now. Can someone tell me what’s going on here?” she asks with studied concern in her voice.
“He pushed me and he stole my puppet,” Henry cries.
“Is that true, Maddox?”
“Well, he was grabbing it from me and . . .”
“Maddox, we don’t push our friends in this classroom. I need you to say sorry to Henry.”
“You weren’t even using it!” Maddox protests, ignoring Ms. Walker.
“Yes, I was. He’s taking a nap. I was playing with him.”
“That’s what you do, you just keep all the puppets every day. It’s not fair.”
“Boys, boys. Let’s calm down now, please,” Ms. Walker pleads. “We don’t hurt our friends in this classroom. Maddox, I need you to tell Henry you’re sorry.”
“Sorry,” Maddox answers dully, not looking up.
Henry is still clutching the purloined puppet, shaking with rage.
“Henry, did you see that Maddox said sorry? What do we tell our friends when they’re sorry?”
“Okay, fine!” Henry huffs.
“Boys, let’s see if we can work this out. Henry, do you think we can find a way to share so Maddox can have a turn, too?” Ms. Walker asks unctuously.
No one answers.
“Maddox, I know you want the dragon puppet. But we can take turns with our friends when we want to play with something special. Maybe you could try one of the other puppets.”
“I hate them!” Maddox shouts.
“Who can help me problem-solve here?” she breezily continues.
“I don’t care! He’s not fair. I wanna go play somewhere else,” Maddox says, defeated.
“Okay!” Ms. Walker brightens. “That’s one solution. Sometimes when we have a hard time sharing with our friends, we can go look for another spot in the room to play. Henry, do you have any ideas?”
Henry looks up earnestly.
“I know! I have an idea!”
“That’s great, Henry. Can you tell us your suggestion?” the teacher encourages.
“Well, how about I can keep the puppet?!” he answers triumphantly.
Henry and Maddox are engaged in a primitive struggle to achieve a narrow goal: control of the dragon puppet. Nothing else matters. A more skilled teacher would realize this and find a way to get the focus off the dragon and back on the kids’ feelings, where it belongs. Unfortunately, Ms. Walker is following a shallow script involving perspective taking and problem solving that seems almost laughably unhelpful in this situation because, right now, Maddox and Henry couldn’t care less about their warm classroom culture or even about the availability of other puppets to play with. Her script is used all the time with young children and it fails just as often because Ms. Walker is ignoring the white elephant in the room: the boys’ genuine anger and desires.
In her attempt to restore order, Ms. Walker misses the depth of the children’s pain. It’s real. They are crying and thrashing right in front of her. They both have a particular attachment to the puppet. They both have a point of view worth valuing. But no one thought to help Henry get beyond his shtick with the napping animals. No one validated Maddox’s legitimate sense of outrage. Ms. Walker responds with smarmy platitudes instead. Note the way she frames the apology as something she needs, not Maddox; or how her assertion that children don’t push friends rings so false. What is Maddox to make of this confusing statement when he has exhibited the behavior she claims never occurs in her classroom? Later, she repeats it: “We don’t hurt our friends in this classroom.” Really? What a fantasy. Friends hurt each other all the time.
There is a relatively simple way out of this morass. Ms. Walker’s first misstep was not taking control of the dragon puppet at the outset of her intervention. By letting Henry continue to hold it while they went through the apology charade, the conversation could never really move from the thing to the feelings. The problem was her unwillingness to tolerate the children’s raw feelings. This reluctance often comes from a teaching culture that flinches from honest, messy emotion.
Emotional outbursts are disruptive, of course, but, in my experience, young children have a pretty high tolerance for other kids’ freak-outs. They are often egocentric enough to ignore them; and conflict is a natural part of life. But preschool meltdowns are feared because they are sometimes wrongly felt to reflect poorly on the teacher’s classroom management skills. I appreciate the embarrassment and anxiety teachers feel when children lose control. I sympathize with Ms. Walker quite a lot because, truth be told, “Ms. Walker” is a pseudonym.
That teacher was me.
Parents fall into this trap all the time, too. There’s a certain theater to adult reprimands designed mainly to soothe big people’s nerves. A parent who hasn’t applied the “say sorry” drill to her child is going to be a lonely parent at the playgroup. Part of this is driven by a kind of supercilious surveillance culture endemic to some parenting circles. But some of the anxiety is driven simply by bad habit.
There’s a long literary and historic tradition of anxiety about children’s unrestrained emotional desires. Think of Lord of the Flies, The Bad Seed, or The Children’s Hour, to name a few stories, let alone the Salem witch trials or Mao’s Red Brigades. But just because we expect adults to be able to regulate desires (mostly), it doesn’t follow that we should hold children to the same standards and then resort to doomsday decrees when they fail to meet them.
Suppressing a young child’s inner life is exactly the wrong approach, because, as we’ve seen, emotional states are powerfully connected to learning. Yet preschools often seem organized around the principle of First Allow No Emotion. Conversations about topics likely to draw out emotional responses are tightly controlled to avoid going off script. A child who asks a metaphysical question about God, or who queries why there is evil in the world, or who even expresses fear of monsters under the bed, is often deflected with pat answers or a change of subject.
Teachers often gloss over young children’s drive to talk about death with metaphors about seasonal changes, but the kids know better. The same thing happens with discussions about children’s differences, which are often restricted to superficial inanities like making a graph of which parents wear uniforms to work or drive a car versus taking public transportation.
Just recently, I was in a classroom where preschoolers were asked to make a list of S words having to do with vegetables and gardening. One child confusingly suggested the word “soul,” to which the teacher asked, “Do you mean ‘sow,’ like when we sow the seeds?” “No,” he repeated, “soul.” The teacher tried to figure out what he was saying. “Do you mean ‘soil’?” she continued. “No, soul,” he insisted. “Like a person.” It was hard to know what to do with this comment. The teacher explained kindly, but inflexibly, that the word “soul” didn’t fit on the whiteboard with all the sunflowers and spinach, but she would come over and help him write it down later. A little girl next to him whispered knowingly, “That’s a different kind of soul word you’re talking about.”
Indeed. Perhaps this child was unwittingly expressing a connection between the human soul and a garden that philosophers have pondered for millennia. Plato moved his school outdoors to teach students in his personal garden, and Voltaire, the French philosopher, used the metaphor of “cultivating one’s garden” in his own metaphysical inquiries. And, of course, there’s soul food. Perhaps the teacher shouldn’t have presupposed what did and didn’t belong on the word list. And anyway, it hardly matters if a rogue word finds its way to the wrong category, does it? These are preschoolers, not copy editors! I would have liked to see that word “soul” up there with all the rest of the children’s ideas.
Meanwhile, in one popular preschool curriculum I’ve studied, conversation topics are so artificially stage-managed that, on a Monday, a teacher is instructed to ask the question of the day: “Have you ever been happy?” and on the next day, to ask, “Have you ever been sad?” It’s unclear from the teacher’s guide what to do when sad feelings leak accidentally into the conversation on a designated happy day.
Yet children have unhappy days and emotional troubles all the time, and we can be sure they leak into their learning environments regardless of the day of the week. Perhaps they’re lonely or scared or frustrated. They might have serious emotional problems and not merely routine worries. A shocking percentage of young children are also in pain from medical issues, including serious untreated tooth decay.4 Abuse and trauma are a common reality for many children, including the ten million exposed to domestic violence. As many as 4 percent of American children experience a parental death each year; eight hundred thousand children end up in foster care.5
Most experts agree that approximately 10 percent of preschool-aged children have a serious emotional disorder and another 5 to 15 percent meet the criteria for a less pronounced mental health diagnosis that negatively affects their daily functioning and development.6 This is a lot of young children in distress, and, in fact, these percentages are not very different from those of adults. Why should they be? Children are no less human than we are. Compounding the toxic stress, some children exposed to such trauma end up with diagnostic labels such as oppositional defiance disorder that doubly victimize them when, as psychiatrist Bruce Perry points out, their “defiance” may be an entirely logical adaptation to being victimized in the first place.7
One study found that 10 percent of children attending a Boston City Hospital pediatric clinic had personally witnessed a shooting or stabbing before age six.8 Outside of a war zone, this kind of collateral trauma is almost unimaginable. After 9/11, young children who were thought too young to understand what had happened nonetheless expressed unusually specific feelings through their play: they built tall block towers that came crashing down when hit by an imaginary plane; they drew fiery orange lines through a neat row of rectangular windows; they pretended to be bloody or dead.9
The adults who care for young children can of course cause or compound children’s emotional distress. A 2009 Institute of Medicine report estimated that fifteen million children live in households with a parent suffering “major” or “severe” depression, which places them at risk for innumerable health and learning problems.10 In a 2012 study by Professor Megan Smith at Yale, a third of low-income mothers in New Haven reported serious depression.11 In another study, close to 40 percent of two-year-olds in “early care” settings (such as Early Head Start) were found to have an “insecure attachment” to their mothers, with potentially disastrous consequences for later life.12
And childcare workers themselves have higher-than-average rates of depression and other mental health symptoms compared to the general population, which is probably not surprising given that they often face the same financial and personal stressors faced by the at-risk children in their charge. The image of early childhood teachers as preternaturally unflappable may require some revision.13
Why is it so hard to respect children’s inner lives? Part of the problem is that, as with play (as we saw in Chapter Six), young children lack an infrastructure upon which to express emotion. And parents and teachers lack the ability to respond. What we don’t see, we don’t value; and what we don’t value, we don’t see. It can be discomfiting to explore children’s thoughts about a subject like death, especially when a child’s home life contributes to their concerns, but it’s often a necessity.
Anyone who doubts this isn’t familiar with the traditional Inuit way of child rearing, a key feature of which is the concept of isummaksaiyuq, “to cause thought.” Anthropologist Jean Briggs described children as young as two or three being asked disturbing questions in a “playful” and “benign” manner in order to stimulate “emotionally powerful thinking-problems the children could not ignore.” The questions included provocations like, “Why don’t you die so I can have your nice new shirt?” or “Why don’t you kill your baby brother?”14
Few Americans would consider this line of inquiry appropriate, but there are other ways to dig deeply into childhood fears and fantasies, as preschoolers at Lincoln Nursery School discovered.
One day, these children came upon a dead squirrel, which prompted a flurry of concern and reflection: Why were the eyes open if it was dead? Did it fall from a tree or freeze to death? Could it come back to life? They were prepared for this discussion because earlier in the year, the children who discovered the dead squirrel had been building pet cemeteries out of blocks. Later, they moved on to building ghoulish-sounding “blood suckers,” self-styled medical devices that “take and give new blood,” according to one of the child inventors. Far from being squeamish, the children readily plunged into the topic of death. And, around the same time that the children had begun to talk about what happens when living things die, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum opened a sculpture installation called Armour Boys, by the artist Laura Ford.
Ford’s sculptures took the form of child-sized fallen medieval knights. Echoing both heroic images of masculine power and the tragedy of child soldiers, the subject matter seemed, at first glance, wildly unsuited to a preschool curriculum. In reality, of course, young children do fancy themselves warriors, and a library could be filled with books on the meaning of children’s fighter play and what to do about it. However, most teachers try hard to tamp down the pretend aggression, with the aim of reserving the sword fights and saber rattling for home.
But the Lincoln Nursery School teachers are both more fearless and more skilled than most. While no one anticipated it fully at the time, the children’s own discovery of the fallen knights on the ground, and the teachers’ sensitive embrace of their responses, enabled a profound understanding of something ordinarily quite taboo.
“How do you think the knights got there?” the teachers, Lauri Bounty and Wendy Klix, asked the children. “What was their story?” Of course, the teachers were probing to hear the children’s own story. “We came to this project with the goal of making our learning visible, and by that I mean the goal of revealing the child’s thinking,” Lauri explained. “By making the children’s thoughts visible, we can change our view of the young child from a passive recipient of knowledge to a creative, powerful person.” The children were full of ideas, some based on familiar cultural tropes of knighthood and damsels in distress:
“The bad knight tried to get the lady.”
What happened to the knight?
“It got dead. Someone shooted it.”
Is the knight dead or alive?
“He was walking to find a new castle. He fell asleep.”
“It’s just a sculpture!”
Okay, what do you think happened to the knight?
“It died. He was fighting and got killed by the enemy soldier.”
What’s the difference between a knight and a soldier?
“A knight has a shield and a sword, and a soldier has a gun and a sword.”
“Whoever comes in that castle, they have to take the helmet off to see if they are good or bad.”
How can you tell if the knight is a good guy or a bad guy?
“They have crosses on their helmets when they are good guys. And Xs if they are bad guys.”
Initially, the children were more intrigued by the weapons than the people wielding them. Lauri used a projector to superimpose a full suit of armor on life-sized photos of the children’s bodies. “Look at me in all that armor!” one child exclaimed. “Nobody can destroy me! Nobody can kill me in a war. I’m really protected all the time. Am I protected or what?!” he marveled.
After a few weeks, the teachers helped the children imagine what lay beneath the helmets by demonstrating how to peel back layers of vegetables—onions and carrots—to reveal the rings inside. They also showed them how to make marks on black scratch paper that revealed a silvery underlayer when scraped with a tool. From this manual labor came a sense of actual people under the armor, and, with this realization, came new existential questions of good versus evil, and why people die.
The children made other unexpected connections related to the sculpture discovery, too. They examined archival photos of the museum’s gothic turrets from the building’s nineteenth-century incarnation and were riveted by the discovery that they were actually walking in their own castle.
Nancy Fincke, the school’s director, explained that children can access their deep feelings, such as power and fear, “when they have a sense of genuine connection to their teachers and to their physical environment.” That emotional connection, she noted, “comes from a rootedness in the child’s everyday life that makes sense and doesn’t feel randomly imposed on them,” as often happens when teachers adhere fussily to externally imposed rhythms of seasonal or holiday themes. Educator David Sobel has pioneered the notion of site-specific, “place-based” education,15 but too often preschoolers are denied this rich curriculum because teachers falsely associate it with expensive and logistically complex field trips (which most preschool teachers dread, and for good reason!).
This daring exercise challenged the widely held belief that preschoolers can’t make leaps of abstraction. It’s true that most preschoolers think very concretely at a level that Jean Piaget called the “preoperational” stage of cognition. My preschoolers who couldn’t overcome their resistance to nature walks by drawing on their happy memories of prior experiences with them were thinking in a classically preoperational manner. But since Piaget’s day, many researchers have found that young children can indeed exhibit higher levels of thinking—not consistently, but under the right conditions.
Preschool learning at this level of subtlety and intensity calls into question much of the received wisdom of early childhood education. The fact that children can engage in such sophisticated inquiry raises the question of why we don’t encourage it more often. Children of all ages and abilities are curious about the world and deserve an emotionally responsive teacher who can channel their innate enthusiasm into real learning.
The Armour Boys investigation provided a welcome antidote to the popular commercialized knights and princess culture with its rigid gender divisions and prefabricated story lines. “It’s incredibly powerful,” Lauri explained, “to step back from the consumerism of children’s play . . . and see their own raw emotions without the Disney-style amplification.”
Educators are slowly beginning to take the emotional health of children much more seriously, in keeping with a more general popular and academic focus on well-being and the secrets of a good life. Walter Gilliam has been at the forefront of policy solutions to improve preschoolers’ mental health. A study he conducted in Connecticut found that classroom-based consultation for preschool teachers who were overwhelmed by challenging children could reduce the oppositional behaviors that typically led to preschool expulsion.16 Unfortunately, only one in five preschool teachers has regular access to this kind of hands-on behavioral consultation for troubled children. Instead, teachers rely on their own classroom management techniques or on skills-building programs that are often poorly integrated into the life and mission of the school, and might involve stand-alone lessons offered to the whole class for twenty or thirty minutes per week on a particular topic, such as learning to defuse anger with the turtle technique (turning into your shell instead of flipping out).17
Some of these skills-based programs have been found to have positive effects, especially for children at greatest risk of behavioral problems. But there are a lot of unanswered questions about the dosage and type of program most likely to create positive results; the way success is measured; the extent to which positive outcomes are transferrable to other settings; and over what time period they might be sustained. Few randomized controlled trials are done in educational settings, and most of those that have been done on social-emotional curricula have some limitations that make it hard to draw robust conclusions. For example, the studies are sometimes unblinded, resulting in potentially significant evaluator bias, where the teacher delivering the intervention is also conducting the assessment of whether a child’s behavior has improved as a result of the intervention, a methodological “fatal flaw,” according to Walter Gilliam and other researchers.18
But I don’t want to quibble too much. The increased attention to the social and emotional lives of children is obviously a very good thing. Arguing against efforts to improve young children’s emotional competence (which is of course related to academic and other outcomes) is a bit like arguing against reducing unintended pregnancy or bullying. It sounds stupid.
But the application of discrete social-emotional curriculum modules to early childhood settings may be another example of the reflexive pushdown to preschool of programming from the older grades that might be better suited to elementary or even middle school children. The delivery of self-contained lessons can inadvertently fuel the impression that emotions are an extracurricular activity for young children, luxuries detached from everyday experience. We might conceivably accept this quasi-Cartesian division of heart and mind at the high school level, but in early childhood, where emotions are the curriculum, it’s a real problem. Segregating emotions—like arithmetic or vocabulary—overlooks the fact that, for young children, emotional expression is a learning modality, not a topic.
A more basic concern involves our problem of mismatched expectations discussed in Chapter Two. Consider some of the language that describes these programs for three- and four-year-olds. Children’s “competencies” are boosted with “strategies” and “tool kits” and “skills.” The corporate-speak fits better in a boardroom (where its value is dubious enough) than a preschool classroom. There’s a decidedly adult vibe underpinning these programs that seems predicated on the belief that the locus of responsibility for emotional regulation resides primarily within the young child.
I think that emphasis lets schools and policy makers off the hook too easily for failing to create the right habitat. Individual and collective responsibility aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but by prioritizing the identification of individual moods and self-regulation skills, we might be placing too much responsibility on young children themselves to manage their emotional lives. This is a little like telling a trauma victim, “Heal thyself.” It may be an appropriate goal for older children, and it’s clearly an essential goal for adults. But I believe it’s the teacher’s job, not a three-year-old’s, to create the conditions for emotional health in the classroom.
To return to our phrase: the young child’s environment is the curriculum, and it can provide rich opportunities for emotional growth whether or not a preschool purchases a new social-emotional curriculum. We can’t lose sight of this fact because, as with any new add-on to a classroom, introducing a social-emotional curriculum that’s not well connected to the overall culture or temperature of the classroom is not a cost-neutral decision. Put more bluntly, it can be a waste of time. Adopting any new curriculum demands time and resources, and its implementation means the nonimplementation of something else. That something else might be the chance for children to engage more naturally in social-emotional skill building, or—to use an old-fashioned phrase—to play and make friends. Thirty minutes of social-emotional classroom skills per week may not sound like a lot, but in an era where, in one study, 25 percent of Los Angeles kindergartners were given no time at all for free play, every minute counts.19
How do these programs work exactly? One of the most common tools in social-emotional regulation programs is the development of a shared vocabulary to express feelings so that everyone recognizes the signs of emotional distress and has the same tools to prevent, or, in the event, respond to it. The well-respected RULER program, developed by renowned psychologist Marc Brackett, director of Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, uses a visual tool called the “mood meter” for children to identify their mood somewhere along the dual axes of “pleasantness” and “energy.”20 Mood meters are nothing fancy: a laminated poster with four quadrants of red, yellow, green, and blue on which children place their name magnet (or a Velcro photo card) to identify their mood. Some preschools have children do check-ins at specified times in the day; others use the tool more episodically. But Brackett, an ebullient, empathic man with an uncanny capacity to lift the mood of the most dour academic gatherings, believes mood meters are an essential tool to shift the emotional culture of American schooling.
Just as you wouldn’t rush over to snuggle a dog with its teeth bared, the thinking goes, the mood meter helps students not only to assess their own feelings but to modulate their behavior in response to the moods of others. Originally designed for middle school and then high school students, the mood meter has now been adapted for use in the early childhood classroom. Coupled with this shared vocabulary and a heightened attention to children’s emotional states, RULER teachers also incorporate social-emotional learning into their story time, classroom transitions, and other key moments in the day.
One of Brackett’s most important contributions to the science of social-emotional learning (SEL) is his recognition that classroom climate, including the teacher’s comfort level with children’s emotions, plays a critical role in learning. RULER-based classrooms focus extensively on developing teachers’ skills in reading not only the emotions of their students but, more fundamentally, reading their own emotions, which, when ignored, can too often lead to misunderstanding, bias, or harsh treatment. In my view, this focus on adult emotional climate may turn out to be RULER’s greatest contribution to classroom environment, especially in settings where the teacher herself may be depressed or stressed, and especially with classrooms of very young children.
RULER was subjected to the gold standard of evaluation in an educational setting: an expensive, logistically complex, randomized controlled trial of middle school students. The study found modest but significant results (though, oddly, not from the student assessors themselves).21 But we can’t forget that early childhood is not middle school, or high school, or even early elementary school: it is its own distinct stage, and we call it preschool for a reason. Is it entirely reasonable to expect three- and four-year-olds to use a shared emotional vocabulary effectively? Labeling your emotions assumes that you know them, and—as Brackett notes—that’s a skill that eludes many adults, including, perhaps, some of the teachers of these young children. It also requires a young child’s mood to remain stable enough for its identification to be useful.
But preschoolers are notoriously labile, crying and laughing in almost the same breath. The emotional instability is part of what it means, developmentally, to be a three- or four-year-old. Is it reasonable to hold them to account for accurate assessments of their emotions? That’s a lot of metacognition for such young brains. I shared my concern with Marc Brackett that three- and four-year-olds might not have the developmental maturity to regulate and express their emotions in a stable fashion, even in the face of a high degree of coaching, but he was more concerned about missing a preschooler in psychic distress if such a formal social-emotional learning infrastructure weren’t in place. He told me that he couldn’t justify not using such a tool kit with young children who are learning to cope with strong emotions, especially, he said, with children who have a history of trauma and come to preschool each day with a heavy burden of emotional stress.
I wouldn’t want to argue against legitimate efforts to give any children a shared language for coping with their emotions, whether they are designed for children with everyday sorts of stressors or more painful difficulties such as family trauma, divorce, incarceration, and poverty. Brackett also pointed out that the children themselves have worked spontaneously to train their own families in using the mood meter, without any coaching from the RULER staff, which suggests something powerful (and even cost-effective) is surely going on.
But I’m going to speculate here and suggest that we still don’t really know what the mechanism of improved outcomes might be. My hunch is that it may not be the RULER tool kit per se that’s helping young children do better. It might be that the mood meter and the shared vocabulary that make up the program don’t have the direct effects we imagine they do but, rather, indirect ones.
When I was a young parent, I was briefly obsessed with reward charts and stickers and saw them as the answer to what I perceived to be my lazy and uncooperative children. I concocted elaborate job charts and other parenting strategies to bring some order to the chaos in my family life. Did I see results from the stickers? I think I did for a time, until I myself grew bored with the activity. In reality, I suspect the sticker chart allowed me to take a little pause to acknowledge that, hell yes, I was a good and effective parent. And this sense of control seemed to shift the ground and make me less frustrated with my children, which in turn, I believe, made them more cooperative.
Perhaps teachers in a RULER school start feeling better about themselves, and their enhanced feelings of efficacy elevate the classroom climate. In fact, in a RULER preschool I visited, the teachers had completely embraced the mood meter and designed it to better fit their own needs, with a vivid list of personalized mood words to choose from; it became a huge focal point for the adults in the school; even visitors were encouraged to sign in by placing their current mood on the wall. The setup was clearly doing something important for them. Maybe teachers begin to feel more of a sense of control in the classroom when they have a novel tool kit, and they receive more validation because they’ve had weeks of coaching and attention from friendly, skilled experts.
This is the well-described effect seen in experimental conditions—such as those in the Perry Preschool/HighScope program—that is hard, though not impossible, to sustain once the researchers go away and the experiment ends. Maybe the school principal starts feeling better about the school with all this attention, too, and begins to make more frequent visits to the classroom or makes a little extra effort to obtain resources for these teachers. Perhaps the parents start feeling a little more engaged, too, which has important feedback implications for classroom harmony. Could we achieve those same effects with different tools? Maybe even more child-appropriate tools? I think it’s possible. This is not merely a semantic debate, but a question that gets to the heart of what young children need from school. With all due respect, too often, I think, we attach ourselves to the software of curriculum, and pay less attention to the hardware, which, I would argue, is the opportunity for loving warmth between teacher and young child.
Without warm connections, I worry that we are devising a kind of psychosocial Rube Goldberg machine to avoid a painful truth about the classroom setting itself: that with a more sensitive curriculum and developmentally appropriate expectations, preschoolers might not need to develop emotional competency at all. They could simply be little kids. Put another way: we may think that young children truly understand words like “respect” and “sharing” because they can bandy them about in the appropriate setting, with a lot of adult prodding, such as we find when they are forced to “say sorry.” But sometimes using our words can feel like a poor proxy for experience.
Brackett is especially critical of toxic classroom climates where children are exhorted to be stoic in the face of emotional stressors, such as test anxiety, rather than helped to cope with the emotions naturally generated by such anxiety. But why are young children experiencing test anxiety in the first place? Because they are subjected to increasingly inappropriate pedagogic expectations! And even the very best social-emotional learning programs can’t be expected to fix that challenge. We have to take the test away.
We can get our priorities mixed up in preschool settings where we constrain children’s emotional lives through foolish and overtaxing pedagogy, and then give them training to cope with the stunted emotions we have induced. Perhaps we need a different model to unlock children’s feelings, and I think it starts with unlocking children’s power to tell their own story about themselves.
One recent winter, I visited some public preschools celebrating “Imagination Month.” It’s not clear what they were celebrating the other eleven months; pretending is an essential language of childhood. An old friend of mine, Ophelia Dahl, once explained, “Imagination is, fundamentally, a kind of empathy, and when you step figuratively into someone else’s shoes, you learn to understand the other’s point of view.” Ophelia would know: her father was the beloved children’s book author Roald Dahl, and she has devoted her life to the care of the poor in countries like Haiti and Rwanda. I don’t think Ophelia was suggesting that highly imaginative children are necessarily destined to become international aid workers, like she was, but rather that an imagined life, like an examined one, can provide a reliable pathway to emotional enlightenment.
Unfortunately, rewards for imagination are in increasingly short supply. A 2014 study found that children who had heard a fictional story about animals were more likely, upon being questioned after the story, to describe humanlike attributes of the animal than children who had been given a strictly factual version. Apparently reading Go, Dog. Go! might make small children think that real dogs wear funny hats and drive cars. Doomsday headlines appeared in the media: “When Animals Act Like People in Stories, Kids Can’t Learn” (italics mine).22 The authors warned that biologically distorting stories “may not only lead to less learning but also influence children to adopt a human-centered view of the animal world.”
To which, if I may: So what?
This kind of research reflects an awfully limited view of learning and, more specifically, of how young children make meaning of the world. It also appears to suppose children stop learning about animals before they enter first grade, and rarely meet real animals. Does it really matter that a five-year-old thinks guinea pigs polish their toenails? I’m quite certain the world will disabuse him of that fantasy soon enough. But, in the meantime, what are children losing from this erasure of their fantasy life?
One of the things we are losing is the sense that children’s inner lives are worthy of safeguarding in their own right, and not because an early childhood experience is tied to an emotional competency or a proper understanding of animal ethology. Adults are often exhorted to live in the moment, but, increasingly, preschoolers are afforded no such luxury. Little children are beginning to resemble college interns busily padding their résumés with skills that will land them a well-paying job after graduation, but doing little to stretch their own range of interests or explore new possibilities.
In too many of today’s early childhood classrooms, fantasies have to pay off; they hold no intrinsic value unless they’re fostering something else—literacy, numeracy, self-regulation, even cultural representation. It’s as if fictional stories further educational goals in a strict one-to-one correspondence of x paragraphs of text to y units of knowledge. But the beauty of fantasy stories is the way they allow children to enter a world of enchantment with its own rules and rhythms—a world that often has enormous relevance to children’s actual emotional lives.
A fantasy story might inspire a child one day to seek out nature, and not only learn about it from a book. Isn’t it possible that a child could be captivated by a goofy anthropomorphic capybara story and then, one day, see a capybara on the Brazilian Pantanal and feel that zing! of recognition? But, of course, the fantasy might do nothing of the sort. It might merely enchant.
And what’s wrong with that? Today’s preschool children have so little magic in their lives! Walk into too many preschool classrooms and there’s no sense of wonder anymore, no sense of mystery. It’s almost impossible to imagine a troll or a fairy jumping out from under a plastic desk chair. Where would such a creature even find a place to hide? Today’s preschool classrooms have too few places to be cozy and private, experiences that are important fuel sources of an imaginative childhood.
One of the problems is that so many preschool classrooms are almost physical carbon copies of their elementary school cousins. For example, it’s rare to see multiple points of elevation in today’s preschools—a loft that can turn into a space ship or castle tower or other place from which a child can feel tall and powerful. Those were standard preschool features in the shabbiest, most tired church basement a generation ago, but they now seem like archaeological relics.
Boredom, imagination’s other good friend, has no place in the early childhood experience either. Children are moved throughout the day from one learning station to the next with such efficiency that they often can’t pause to figure out what activities they would like to try or, more important, how to get unbored.
Given all these constraints on fantasy life, can we blame a child for lacking a robust imagination? Curious children with iPads are lucky to have a limitless supply of Costa Rican tree frog facts at their fingertips, but computers have become the playpens of twenty-first-century parenting. Might these children be better off occasionally pretending to be a frog instead of Googling one? Small islands of imaginative childhood can still be found in the resurgent interest in Waldorf schools, for example, or in nature-based kindergartens. But those experiences are in danger of being seen as quaint affectations for the children of wealthy oddballs, not the normal, universal features of early childhood.
Are we willing as a society to outsource young children’s imagination to the affluent, like an offshore tax shelter? My heart breaks a tiny bit every time I see a front-page newspaper photo of a classroom of little inner-city kindergartners in jackets and ties, their eyes tracking their teacher’s every word in watchful lockstep. The children are never smiling in these photos. Yet the reader is supposed to feel comforted that even young children who come into the world behind can still learn and thrive. They are being taken seriously, we are assured, as learners. Forgive me, but I’m not buying. No one believes in the potential of young children more than I do, but I’m unwilling to accept the terms of this poky and unimaginative early childhood habitat, because ultimately—if we believe the research on child cognition, and I do—it’s a kind of fool’s errand leading to testing preparedness, not life preparedness.
Even the children who don’t know what they are missing can intuit the loss of imagination in their lives somehow. I’ve wondered for a long time about older children I see clinging to little vestiges of magic, like a belief in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, beyond the normal expiration date. Surely today’s sophisticated ten-year-olds can’t possibly believe in an obese elderly man nimble enough to break into billions of houses over the course of a single night. I think those children are trying to tell us something.
Our just-the-facts approach to young children makes me wonder if we’re actually afraid of their fantasies. We certainly seem eager to sanitize them. For example, a teacher’s guide to one of the country’s leading preschool curricula cautions teachers to “evaluate the (book) materials to be sure they relate directly to children’s experiences and do not depict stereotypes.” Let’s examine the first part of that sentence. Why, exactly, should children only hear stories that relate directly to their experiences? On its face, this may not sound unreasonable. We’ve seen that young children need a context for learning and they need to feel connected to their world. But with proper adult coaching, children can immerse themselves in any new world and feel connected to it. That’s what good fiction does for people; it carries them to a strange place where they feel they belong.
The topic of culturally appropriate children’s literature is a rabbit hole that could consume an entire book, and I don’t deny that it’s very important for children to see themselves well represented in the characters and stories they hear. But a reasonable desire for culturally rich literature shouldn’t mandate a litmus test for each and every book. Children’s literature authored by committee is soul crushing. Of course, in the huge universe of children’s picture books, it may seem foolish to defend classics that are riddled with outdated depictions or questionable values. Why not just read different stories? The problem is that a lot of contemporary preschool fiction is glorious to look at but narratively thin. Search the top one hundred picture books of all time and you will be surprised to see how many are old classics. Older picture books are long on plot and character in a way that is largely missing in today’s crop of beautiful picture books, some of which feature a graphic design credit, along with the author and illustrator.
In fact, some parents of preschoolers report turning to chapter books in order to find good storytelling, not—as reported breathlessly in the media—to push their children to become readers before they are ready. My students loved early chapter books and would sit at rapt attention, without the aid of a single illustration. In fact, some researchers argue that children form more powerful memories from oral stories than from illustrations or moving images, as older adults who grew up on radio stories (and children of contemporary illiterate populations of hunter-gatherers) can attest.
The sad irony of denying children classic stories solely on the grounds of bias or irrelevancy is that oftentimes those were precisely the stories that helped children of all backgrounds to find their place in the world. The poet Ogden Nash’s magnificent Tale of Custard the Dragon certainly wouldn’t get past the committee. It got me into hot water once with a parent for its ostensible violence. I felt the beautiful rhymes and sly humor—the pirate “fires two bullets but they didn’t hit. And Custard gobbled him, every bit”—justified my social transgression. It’s a terrific story, with a plucky heroine and poetic turns of phrase, and we even learn not to judge a book by its cover when the “realio, trulio cowardly dragon” turns out to be of fine mettle. The kids loved it and always asked for more. (And I do have to point out the enduring popularity of Roald Dahl’s incredibly gothic children’s books, in spite of, or because of, their dark features.)
There are outstanding contemporary narratives, too, of course. One of my favorite authors, Kevin Henkes, creates wonderfully complex animal characters who struggle with separation anxiety, sibling rivalry, and a variety of child-specific neuroses. My aim here is not to offer reading lists, however, but to suggest merely that we should allow young children to discover the world of books on their own terms, with scaffolding from adults, and only rarely prohibition.
Perhaps if we trusted and supported young children better, we might see that reading a book with animals in male jobs or featuring only white people can prompt an honest discussion about identity that can be just as meaningful as a book with children of greater diversity on each page. A teacher can coach children through a classic piece of children’s literature by noting, for example, how “silly” it is that there are no girls in the story. (Needless to say, the absence of female characters reflects a lot more than mere silliness, but let’s start somewhere familiar to the children.)
I would simply preface such a story by telling my preschoolers that people once thought that little girls shouldn’t run around on the playground like they do now, and that’s why the story I was reading didn’t have any girls in it. The children would laugh and exclaim indignantly as if they were in on a particularly dumb joke. It seemed no weirder to them than the possibility that giants once roamed the earth, lying in wait to eat mischievous children. This framing technique is arguably less stilted than some of the rigid templates teachers are already following when they exclude stories that haven’t been carefully vetted in advance. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t feel we have to constantly be on high alert, ready with facile adult commentary when an awkward moment arises. We can’t forget that the main goal is to allow young children access, without judgment, to all kinds of good stories, even the imperfect ones—which they then have the skills to judge for themselves.
I don’t mean to diminish legitimate concerns about the relative lack of diverse perspectives in children’s picture books. But the path to greater understanding of the human condition is through exposure to new perspectives and through the opening, not closing, of young imaginations. There’s often a simple reason children are still so powerfully drawn to classics, and it’s not necessarily because their parents are antediluvian oafs. Those books might feature a story worth hearing.
But the classics hold yet another trump card: they can really scare the pants off kids, which, in the right context, is an electrifying stimulus to the imagination. I know all too well because Baba Yaga, the Slavic hag whose house was perched on a pair of chicken feet, still stalks my childhood self. I spent a lot of intoxicating hours as a child curled in the window seat at the library, poring over the Brothers Grimm and similarly frightful and moralizing stories. The best authors are unafraid to make judgments, and their young readers, with their primitive sense of justice, thrill to characters who get their comeuppance. It’s a match made in heaven.
One of my preschoolers’ favorite stories, Big Bad Bruce by Bill Peet, offers a twisted spin on the usual road-to-redemption trajectory of the naughty protagonist. Big Bad Bruce is a thuggish bear who stands at the top of a hill, raining huge boulders down on his hapless neighbors and exploding in great belly laughs as the terrified rabbits and birds scatter from his mayhem. One day, a witch who’s taken stock of his obnoxious behavior entices him with a magic pie that turns Bruce into a miniature bear, no bigger than a small rodent. The tables are suddenly turned as Bruce’s animal victims, who recognize him even in his diminished state, chase him to exhaustion. The terrified Bruce narrowly escapes drowning in a creek and is just about to be picked off by a hungry owl when the witch finally takes pity on the frightened mini-bear and brings him home.
And this is the point in the story where the adult reader waits expectantly for Bruce to apologize for his selfish behavior. Surely the witch will return the chastened Bruce to his former hulk, leaving him happily ensconced in the woods, dispensing friendly rides on his back to the local chipmunks. But no! Bill Peet has other ideas. The witch, who is revealed to be a harmless character, decides she would quite like a miniature bear as a pet and decides to keep Bruce at home with her in his reduced state. Bruce learns to drink milk from a saucer, alongside her black cat, and the three live amiably together ever after.
Words cannot describe how much my preschoolers loved this story. I read it over and over again. Their eyes glittered with excitement as we approached the ending. They loved, loved the fact that Bruce remained little. He got his just deserts, yes, and was fully under the witch’s thumb—presumably for eternity—and yet at the same time, the bear remained small and cared for. The benign witch protected him from his worst self.
Young children are for the most part just and moral. They love preachy stories because they do in fact understand that actions have consequences. Yet they turn to adults for the mercy and subtlety that they themselves can’t yet summon. And who can blame them? They are still little and vulnerable, uncompromising to a fault. Like the tiny bear lapping at his saucer of milk, they want an adult’s protection from their own rough justice. This, I think, is the one true story of early childhood, the yin and yang of being a small person.
It’s confusing emotional terrain for children to inhabit, and we must guide them gently through it. Is it intimacy you want, or freedom? Protection or power? Childhood is a kind of enslavement, but it’s a liberation, too. Young children’s emotions are all about this basic conflict. Feed me. Hold me. Comfort me. Fix me. I hate you! I can do it myself.