The social and emotional health of our youth – from children to teens to young and emerging adults – is a pressing topic right now in the U.S., and many parents wonder if social and emotional learning programs in elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools warrant the funding and time they take: in other words, do these programs really help children and teens?
According to the available evidence, the answer is an unequivocal yes.
We just gave away the punchline of this article, but that’s okay, since many people know on a fundamental level – without the need for peer-reviewed data in academic journals – that children who develop a high level of social and emotional awareness have an increased likelihood of becoming productive, well-adjusted adults – and by that we mean they increase their odds of living according to their personal definition of happiness and success.
However – whether you value SEL or not – there are at least two important questions to answer, within the affirmative yes we offer above, such as:
How exactly do SEL programs help children and teens?
What’s the evidence for the value/effectiveness of SEL in schools?
A paper published in 2023 called “Evidence for Social and Emotional Learning in Schools” answers these questions, based on a review of a dozen meta-analyses that examined data from over 800 studies on SEL in schools. It’s an excellent overview of the subject, which we recommend reading. We’ll discuss the information in this paper now.
What is Social and Emotional Learning for Children and Teens?
Educators find impetus to design SEL programs for schools in the concept of educating the whole child, rather than training a child to learn and repeat facts and core academic skills by rote. The concept is that a child with a solid understanding of how to navigate their emotional and social lives will have an increased chance of success and fulfillment across multiple life domains.
Whole child education helps children and teens:
- Develop positive, healthy, productive relationships
- Treat other people with respect and dignity
- Develop problem-solving and creative thinking skills
- Succeed in higher education and/or vocational pursuits
- Become an active participant in a democracy
Those goals are hard to argue against: those are things parents want for their kids, friends want for their friends, and societies want for their citizens. Although educating citizens to become active participants in a democracy is as old as ancient Greece, modern educators devised the programs we now call SEL beginning in the 1960s, with a formalized set of best-practice guidelines published in 1997 by the Collaborative to Advance Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL).
Here’s an up-to-date, comprehensive definition of SEL and its goals, published in 2021 in the journal The Future of Children:
“At its core, SEL involves children’s ability to learn about and manage their own emotions and interactions in ways that benefit themselves and others, and that help children and youth succeed in schooling, the workplace, relationships, and citizenship. To effectively manage emotions and social interactions requires a complex interplay of cognitive skills, such as attention and the ability to solve problems; beliefs about the self, such as perceptions of competence and autonomy; and social awareness, including empathy for others and the ability to resolve conflicts.”
Again, those goals are hard to argue against. The qualities described are those anyone would want to develop in themselves and see in others, whether family members, friends, coworkers, or public officials. Essentially, those are the qualities of good role models and generally reliable people.
The Five Areas of Social and Emotional Competency
When educators design SEL programs for schools, they focus on five skill areas, which work together to foster whole child education.
The five skill areas include:
Self-Awareness:
Self-awareness means the ability to:
- Understand and identify personal emotions, goals, and values
- Recognize how emotions, goals, and values impact personal behavior
- Assessing personal strengths and limitations
- Recognize personal biases
- Develop a sense of self-agency and optimism
Self-Management:
Self-management refers to the ability to:
- Regulate thought, emotion, and behavior across various situations
- Define and achieve goals
- Delay gratification
- Effectively manage stress
- Control impulses
- Persevere in the face of challenge/difficulty
Social Awareness:
Social awareness means the ability to:
- Understand, relate to, and empathize with others
- Extend this understanding and empathy to people from different cultural backgrounds and life experiences
- Feel compassion for others
- Understand the origin of traditional social norms
- Identify sources of support at school, home, and in the community
Relationship Skills:
Relationship skills refer to abilities that help children and teens:
- Create and manage healthy, supportive relationships
- Create positive relationships with a wide range of individuals and/or groups
- Communicate their ideas effectively
- Listen actively
- Collaborate with others to solve problems
- Manage conflict productively
- Develop leadership skills
- Learn to ask for help for themselves
- Learn to offer help to others
Responsible Decision-Making
Responsible decision-making means the ability to:
- Make life-affirming choices related to personal behavior
- Engage in constructive social interactions in various situations
- Evaluate ethical factors related to personal behavior
- Accurately evaluate possible behaviors with regard to their:
- Safety
- Risk
- Consequences to self
- Consequence to others
In addition, educators identify the specific short-term and long-term goals/outcomes for students in SEL programs. Short-term goals/outcomes include increased social and emotional skills, increased positive attitude toward self, others, and school tasks, increased positive behaviors/relationships, decreased conduct issues, decreased emotional problems, and increased academic achievement. Long-term goals/outcomes include increased likelihood of high school graduation, increased readiness of college/career, increase in healthy relationships, improved mental health, decreased criminal behavior, increased citizenship.
The Evidence for Social and Emotional Learning in Schools
We want to take a moment to clarify something. In our description of the goals, outcomes, and competencies associated with SEL, we use words like positive, constructive, and productive. This does not mean the goal of SEL is to create a generation of students with the same personality, but rather a generation of students who can define positive, constructive, and productive for themselves, and live a life based on their personal goals and vision of success and happiness.
Now let’s look at the evidence for how social and emotional learning programs can help children and teens.
The paper we introduce at the beginning of this article – a review of a dozen meta-analyses with data from several hundred studies – shows that SEL programs:
- Improve social skills
- Improve emotional fluency
- Increase positive behavior
- Increase positive relationships
- Reduce conduct problems
- Decrease emotional distress
- Increase engagement in academic process
- Improve academic outcomes
Here’s how the study author describes the results of this review of the available meta-analyses on the impact of social and emotional learning for children and teens:
“It is clear from the 12 meta-analyses that examined hundreds of studies that there is a consistent, reliable effect of tested, evidence-based SEL programs on students’ social, emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes across all grade levels from PreK to 12th grade and across gender, ethnicity and race, income, and other demographic variables.”
Implications of This Study
Parents, teachers, and treatment providers who work with children and adolescents understand what the Surgeon General of the U.S. describes in the public health advisory Protecting Youth Mental Health published in 2021:
Our youth face significant emotional and psychological challenges, and we have the opportunity to establish new programs and create innovative approaches to education and youth mental health support that help our youth develop the resiliency to meet and overcome any challenge they face.
We outline the latest facts and figures around youth mental health in these articles on our blog:
The Youth Risk Behavior Survey: Mental Health Among High School Students (2023)
What Affects the Mental Health of Children?
How Does the Loneliness Epidemic Affect Teens?
The evidence we share in this article forms a compelling argument for the value of social and emotional programs for children and teens in schools. As we consider ways to help our youth during this time – which some label a youth mental health crisis – we encourage all relevant parties, from parents, to educators, to policymakers, to evaluate this data and recognize that SEL programs are a viable, evidence-based approach to equipping children and teens the tools they need to thrive.
