I was having a conversation with a friend over coffee the other day when she told me a funny anecdote about a child she was watching at Dance Marathon a few weeks ago. The little boy was playing a game when he got knocked over pretty hard and immediately started crying. She rushed over to make sure he was okay; he was choking out sobs when all of the sudden, his face brightened into a smile. “I’m just” — sob — “I’m just so happy,” he cried. 

“You know, little kids,” she concluded the story. “He didn’t know how to process his emotions.” 

It’s true, children don’t understand or know how to process their emotions, which is part of what makes them so entertaining, and so difficult. But that got me thinking — why don’t we teach them? Why do we treat emotional intelligence like it’s something innate, rather than a skill that can be learned? If understanding and processing our emotions came naturally or easily to us, I doubt almost half of American households would have someone seeking mental health treatment. I doubt one in five Americans would be experiencing mental illness, as is the case now.

“We don’t know much about emotions, even though we think we do,” UCSB sociologist Thomas Scheff said in a 2017 TED article. “That goes for the public and for researchers.” Few people think about understanding your emotions in the context of a learning environment; from my fairly typical public education experience I can recall many awkward classroom discussions about puberty and what that meant for my body, but virtually nothing about my emotional growth. This is probably true for the vast majority of Americans, and this should change. 

“Improved emotional regulation leads to benefits in all areas of a child’s life,” child therapist Kenneth Barish writes in an article for the Huffington Post. “Emotional regulation means being able to think constructively about how to cope with feelings.” This skill — being able to think constructively about one’s emotions — could benefit people of all ages, but I think it would especially help people in Iowa State’s typical demographic: 18-22 year olds. 

This time of our life is so tumultuous — relationships beginning and ending, becoming a real person in the world, having true independence for the first time — there are a lot of new experiences and complicated emotions to grapple with, and not everyone can do that successfully. This is true for everyone, but especially so for men, who “are relegated to an impoverished emotional landscape” and learn to “reject feelings of weakness” as early as five years old, according to Peggy Orenstein in her article “The Miseducation of the American Boy.” Girls are given much more emotional leeway than boys growing up, and this allows them to process and cope with their emotions in a much more whole way, although there is room for improvement all around.

So what might that improvement look like? How CAN we teach emotional regulation? Schools should include emotional intelligence and regulation as a part of their curriculum, from the time students enter kindergarten and pre-k. One such program that does this is called RULER, developed by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. RULER, which is an acronym for the five goals of the program, focuses on teaching kids to process their emotions thematically and constructively, rather than getting swept away in the feeling. It is woven into all their subjects, and has shown demonstrable benefits in students who are taught this way. 

Emotional education should continue all the way through high school, where it could be interwoven with more serious and complex education about mental health (which should also be taught to children). This will require change not just on an individual or group basis, but also structurally. It will take structural change for “mental health days” to become acceptable and valid excuses for sitting a day out, for emotional regulation to become a part of school curriculum and for therapy to become a more regular and normal part of the average person’s life — all things that are crucial to developing good emotional health within a person. 

After all, our emotions are the primary and first way that we experience the world around us. Emotions define the human experience and color our existence in ways that we don’t even fully understand yet. Being able to understand them is absolutely something that can be learned, and therefore absolutely should be taught.