How We Grow in Emotional Intelligence and Agility

Being a preschool teacher (or the parent of young children for that matter) is exhausting, largely because at any given moment, someone is experiencing a big emotion and letting the rest of us know about it. I doubt there is any less anger, sadness, fear, or frustration in a typical workplace, but there's an expectation that adults should have already learned the cultural "display rules," those unspoken rules by which we know what emotions a person may express in a given place and time. Adults who are regularly "out of control" emotionally are generally not tolerated for long, whereas with preschoolers, a great deal of the developmentally appropriate learning they are doing is focused on figuring out their culture's display rules, and that begins with expressing your emotions.

Our job is exhausting because it calls for us to support young children in this vital aspect of early learning, requiring the often heavy lift of what psychologists call "emotional labor" on everyone's part. We are with them as they feel their emotion, often empathetically feeling it right along with them; we help them name it; we join them as in trying to understand it; and remain shoulder-to-shoulder and heart-to-heart with them until they've emerged on the other side. 

This is the job and this is the way young children learn the emotional display rules that most of us take for granted. Too many of us mistakenly believe that we can simply "teach" these rules by shaming (e.g., "Don't be such a baby"), dismissing (e.g., "Oh, that's nothing to get angry about"), commanding (e.g., "Stop that nonsense at once!), scolding (e.g.,"You're driving me crazy!"), and punishing (e.g., "If you don't pull yourself together, you can forget about ice cream"). This behaviorist approach, may produce temporary results in terms of children who have been bullied into compliance, but what children wind up learning is to be ashamed or afraid of their big emotions. Instead of figuring out healthy ways to feel and express, they learn to replace that with obedience to authority figures. Indeed, the behaviorist approach seeks to exchange authority figures for self-regulation, which means that all bets are off when the authority figure isn't present.

Not only that, but the behaviorist approach requires the psychologically unhealthy practice of "stuffing" emotions on command. And everyone knows that you can only stuff emotions for so long before they force their way out, usually in destructive ways.

As an early childhood educator, I strive to avoid imposing emotional display rules on children, drawing the line at physical violence. That means there's going to be some bawling, screaming, and shouting, often a great deal of it, as the children do the difficult, exhausting work of figuring it out, with me there, not as their leader or teacher, but as their colleague and guide. Simply put, if the goal is self-regulation, then we must create safe environments in which young children are free to practice self-regulation.

In many ways, this is the core work of the early years because ultimately it doesn't matter how academically precocious a person is, if they aren't capable of getting along with others, their life, and life of people around them, will be miserable. A big part of this, is learning to understand and obey any given culture's emotional display rules. But equally important is coming to recognize when toxic display rules (i.e., the ones imposed by behaviorists) must be broken, because at the end of the day, that is how we grow in emotional intelligence and agility.

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